2.13.4. An Anglican Perspective

#### Alastair Cassels-Brown says that

The link between music and Anglican spirituality . . . is simple: Anglican spirituality is rooted in the Church's liturgical life. Liturgical music serves two purposes; it is an offering of praise in the context of the liturgy and it enhances the liturgy ([60], p. 121).

He points out that the music of the Anglican Church is varied and—in a concentrated way representative of the whole church, though he does not say that—moves from simple congregational settings for parishes to elaborate choral anthems for cathedrals ([60], p. 121).

While the link between Anglican spirituality and music may be simple in theory, it quickly becomes obvious that it is complex in practice as differences of opinion about how to point Anglican chant are discussed ([60], pp. 121–25), as four high and higher purposes of the music are defined: from keeping a congregation together to raising "people's spirits to a new level—poetical or mystical—because its wings carry us up into timelessness" ([60], p. 125), as hymnody is seen to be eclectic ([60], pp. 126–27), and as music that is "sensuous and pseudoromantic" is not regarded as "bringing devotion to the devout" or "satisfying an uplifting experience" ([60], p. 131).

#### 2.13.5. *Laudi Spirituali*

Popular non-liturgical Italian spiritual lauds in the Middle Ages and Renaissance are best characterized as devotional, stemming from the praise of Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of the Sun" in the early thirteenth century, and related to works of mercy, missionary endeavors, and penitence. Dean L. Root says that "profane songs were to be replaced by godly ones." Their themes were "the Virgin, the birth, Passion and Resurrection of Christ, the saints, including St. Francis, the Holy Spirit, The Divine Love and the approach of death." He describes them musically as "related to the Italian ballata, the French virelai and the English carol," with small range, conjunct motion, in major keys, monophonic, and syllabic ([61], p. 537). Deciding what their rhythm may have been is, as usual, "problematic" ([61], p. 540). They proceeded in semi-professional, professional, polyphonic, homophonic, and macaronic directions, sometimes with instruments and accompanying dance, and with influences on plays and the development of the oratorio [62].

#### 2.13.6. An Afro-American Perspective

The "American Dilemma" [63] of blacks in a white culture, with the underlying horrors of slavery and all the inequities and injustices of an evil system, paradoxically as perhaps with all oppression, created remarkable music, in this case the African American spiritual and the musical results like jazz that it spawned. Beginning as a congregational medium in praise houses away from the master's house, this music combined African and American syntaxes in "a wild, weird, plaintive, sad, and sorrowful" beauty ([64], p. 44) with double meanings that "expressed the faith of the people, but also provided signals for the time and place of the next 'underground railroad train' which could lead them out of bondage into freedom" ([64], p. 45). More than that, the music contained what Theophus H. Smith calls "style-switching," a term he borrows from the social linguist Morton Marks ([65], pp. 387–88). He calls this both black and white, European and African, and refers to W.E.B. Dubois' "double consciousness." "The change in style," he says, "is generating a ritual event, namely spirit possession," with "trance-associated features" and "signals of transcendence" ([65], p. 388).

Smith notes "two other aspects of black music that convey spiritual dynamics: call-and-response [which he also calls antiphony] and improvisation" ([65], p. 389). These, he says, in their participatory character, created "sustained drama and spiritual intensity" with a "state of high religious ecstasy" ([65], p. 389). And they in turn led to "matters of theory and practice" ([65], p. 390). That is, the great black musicians like Louis Armstrong and "Duke" Ellington in their playing by ear found the score "inadequate for their purposes . . . Crucial for black spirituality in its aesthetic manifestations is this 'will to transformation'" ([65], p. 391).
