Topic: Learning Music
Boys choirs originally existed to create music for the church and court. Larry Cooper, who was discussed in the post for 29 September 2017, changed the goal from learning to sing to learning to perform and work as team. Walter Turnbull’s vision for the Boys Choir of Harlem wavered between the two.
He was raised in Greenville Mississippi [1] where he quickly figured he did not want to spend his life chopping cotton. [2]. The African American used his ability to sing to earn a scholarship to Tougaloo College [3] located near Jackson, Mississippi. During his junior year, he decided he would rather be an operatic tenor than a public school music teacher. [4]
His fellowship to the Manhattan School of Music covered his tuition but not his expenses. [5] The least expensive place in the fall of 1966 was the International House, which John D. Rockefeller and Cleveland Dodge’s family had built for 600 students in 1924. [6] He wandered the streets of Harlem looking for a congenial church: his mother had left Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church for the Seventh Day Adventists when he was five-years-old. [7]
To survive Turnbull took a job singing for Trinity Episcopal Church in Southport, Connecticut. [8] The white, upper-middle-class community [9] had a boys choir. [10] He began talking with friends about forming one at his Harlem Adventist church. In 1968, [11] Ephesus agreed to his plan and gave him rehearsal space. All the choir members belonged to the church. [12]
Once they began performing, other churches asked them to come. That led to more rehearsals, [13] and eventually a need to replace singers, especially the youngest trebles. Some church members objected when he accepted infidel singers, complained about his worldly music, and criticized the robes. [14]
After a fire gutted the church in January 1969, Turnbull had problems getting rehearsal space in the surviving parsonage. In 1974, he declared his independence by incorporating the choir. [15] After a brief stay at a community center, the renamed Boys Choir of Harlem moved to the Church of the Intercession. [16] Its first members were drawn from that Episcopalian church and Ephesus. [17]
The repertoire of the choir expanded beyond that of the traditional boys’ ensemble. He kept youth after their voices had changed, [18] and prepared works like Benjamin Britten’s Missa Brevis in D [19] and Mozart’s Coronation mass. [20] For its first major concert, Turnbull also included a "Xhosa folk song, a Swahili lullaby, and ‘Mister Bojangles’." [21]
He discovered his boys never sounded like the ideal boys choir, [22] a difference he attributed to the way the African-American voice developed. [23] Turnbull said, "The European sound was an acquired taste for me. I knew and felt more comfortable with a darker one that stirred my soul through high school and college." [24] He contrasted it with the sound of Saint Olaf College’s choir which was "very straight with little vibrato." [25]
After the choir incorporated and became known in the New York City area, Turnbull faced more problems recruiting choristers. Few young boys with decent voices knew how to read music, or had any self-discipline. He began augmenting rehearsals with intensive summer workshops in camp settings. [26]
His greater problem was retaining boys after they entered junior high school. Many came from one-parent households, where choir members were exposed to alcohol, drugs, and violence. He added a counselor in 1980 [27], and eventually a day school. The hours of concentration needed to stage 100 high-quality concerts a year led him to the same solution the church had found in the 1300s. [28]
He may have stumbled on the reason the church established schools in the first place. Many of the choristers in the fourteenth century may have been sons of agricultural workers whose labor could not be spared from the Medieval equivalent of chopping cotton. Boarding the boys shielded them from difficult home lives and provided an opportunity for the intensive drilling needed to teach singing to talented children who had not been exposed to church music as young children like the ones were in Steeple Ashton, England, and Moselle, Mississippi, mentioned in the posts for 21 September 2017 and 23 September 2017.
By the time the Boys Choir of Harlem released its version of "Kumbaya" in 2001, it had appeared in films and commercials. The variant was short–two verses in 57 seconds–too short to have been a stand-alone performance piece. It may have been prepared for some specific function or to please some patron who assumed all Blacks knew the song. The style was that of the traditional boys choir that featured young male voices.
Performers
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano
Rhythm Accompaniment: African-style drum
Credits
Albums:
(C) 2001 The Boys Choir of Harlem
(C) 2004 The Boys Choir of Harlem
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom-by-yah, with an accented "kum," staccato "by," and sustained "ya." You was pronounced "yah." They pronounced "you" as "ya" in "we need you Lord." This was a deliberate choice. Turnbull stressed correct diction, not only in English, but in all the languages they sang. [29]
Verses: kumbaya, we need you
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: we
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: 2 verses
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: anapest
Line Length: 7 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAAB. They changed the last line to conform with the structure of the other three lines.
Line Form: statement-refrain
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: variant of 1-3-5
Time Signature: some form of 3/4
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in harmony. They sang the first verse in unison and the second in chordal harmony.
Singing Style: One syllable to one note, with the higher voices dominant.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: the piano began after the drum by alternating between a low and high note; once the choir began it was so soft it was hard to tell it was playing. At the end, when the boys were holding the final note, it played arpeggios.
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamics: an African-style drum began playing two tones before the singing, and continued the same pattern throughout.
Notes on Movement
Like Cooper, Turnbull was very strict about posture. He began giving the youngest singers exercises in focusing on a point, then emphasize correct posture so they could stay on their feet during hours of rehearsals. [30]
In the early years, the choir stood in a semicircle around a piano in concerts. By 1987, Turnbull said "they were now able to move about the stage in carefully choreographed steps." [31]
Notes on Performers
"Come by Here" probably was not part of Turnbull’s adolescent or adult repertoire. All his Mississippi Adventist church required for his baptism was that he be twelve-years-old and willing to be immersed. [32] Its taste ran to "hymns and anthems," not gospel music. [33] He recalled members of the New York church he joined:
"were warm and familiar, and for the most part, acted like the congregations of every other black church that I had attended over the years. They were fundamentalists to the bone and, now that I think about it, bourgeois to the bone, too. Shirt and tie were required, and any demonstrative praise was almost frowned upon. It was not unlike other so-called middle-class churches in Harlem where the black folk though that it was low-class to praise God in any way that seemed African in spirit. Playing drums, shouting, and the throwing of hands was not encouraged." [34]
Availability
Album: We Shall Overcome. The Boys Choir of Harlem label. 30 November 2001.
Reissue: Precious Lord....Take My Hand. The Boys Choir of Harlem label. 15 February 2005.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby, 1 September 2015.
End Notes
1. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 1.
2. Turnbull. 31.
3. Turnbull. 47, 53.
4. Turnbull. 78.
5. Turnbull. 85.
6. Turnbull. 90.
7. Turnbull. 12, 22.
8. Turnbull. 92.
9. Wikipedia. "Southport, Connecticut." In 2000, the United States Census reported the village was 95% white and had more Native Americans than African Americans. The median, annual household income was over $140,000.
10. Turnbull. 92.
11. Wikipedia. "Boys Choir of Harlem."
12. Turnbull. 94.
13. Turnbull. 95.
14. Turnbull. 98.
15. Turnbull. 101.
16. Turnbull. 109.
17. Turnbull. 151.
18. Turnbull. 161.
19. Turnbull. 104.
20. Turnbull. 109.
21. Turnbull. 109.
22. Turnbull. 107.
23. Turnbull. 107. He noted some ascribed the distinct sound to "differences in head structure and nasal passages."
24. Turnbull. 106.
25. Turnbull. 107.
26. Turnbull. 152.
27. Turnbull. 139. The counselor was Frank Jones, Junior. In 2001, the same year the record with "Kumbaya" was released, one of the choir members accused Jones of sexually molesting him. When Turnbull did not immediately remove Jones, the choir lost most of its financial support. (Wikipedia, Boys Choir.)
28. Turnbull. 166.
29. Turnbull. 106, 183.
30. Turnbull. 162-163.
31. Turnbull. 203.
32. Turnbull. 26.
33. Turnbull. 38.
34. Turnbull. 91.
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