Rare will be the American listener who can hear Michael Tippett's Five Negro Spirituals without smiling at their regularized English and their utter distance from the music's original conception. The tunes are recognizable enough, but the rhythmic impulse is considerably damped down by the modern choral harmonies that surround and decorate the melody. The spirituals are heard here in their a cappella choral arrangements, but split up and interspersed among other material as they were in the form in which they originally ...
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Rare will be the American listener who can hear Michael Tippett's Five Negro Spirituals without smiling at their regularized English and their utter distance from the music's original conception. The tunes are recognizable enough, but the rhythmic impulse is considerably damped down by the modern choral harmonies that surround and decorate the melody. The spirituals are heard here in their a cappella choral arrangements, but split up and interspersed among other material as they were in the form in which they originally appeared, with orchestral accompaniment as part of the oratorio A Child of Our Time. Once you get past the shock, you may come to like them; they are neither arrangements of the spirituals in the usual American sense, nor completely new pieces that allude to these pillars of traditional African-American music. They occupy an unusual space in between. The rest of the music on this disc of a cappella choral selections comes from composers who have flourished since the spirituals' 1958...
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