Ravinia 2026 Issue 2

Centuries of Artistic Genius.” In 2015, the pres- tigious Indian Summer Music Festival awarded Davids its Lifetime Achievement Award. Indigenous American attitudes toward music are very different from those brought over by European settlers in the 1500s. Brent Michael Davids points out that “Indigenous cultures see music like giving birth, so that each new song event is a new creation. The song being sung might be a time-honored song, but when per- formed it is newly reborn; it is not considered the same song.” In contrast, a classical Europe- an perspective generally favors a written tradi- tion, with notated music preserving a melody and intent for each successive performance. Thus, we find the earliest evidence of European Renaissance and Baroque polyphony in the New World in manuscripts from colonial Spain. Choirbooks with Latin motets and Mass settings to accompany Catholic liturgies have been found in missions and cathedrals from Mexico to California. Although details of his life are scant, it is likely that the 17th-century composer Juan de Lienas was a Native Ameri- can who grew up in the Catholic church. His works survive in two manuscripts fromMexico City: the Newberry Choirbooks , which contain compositions in a florid, polychoral style, and the Codex del Convento del Carmen , in which we find the more reserved, stile antico , four- voice Lamentatio in coena Domini . Born in Málaga, Spain, Juan Gutiérrez de Pa- dilla moved to Puebla, Mexico, in the early 1620s, where he eventually became maestro de capilla at the Puebla Cathedral. The cathedral provided him with instrumentalists, choristers, and resources on par with any continental es- tablishment, and Padilla’s hundreds of extant works, like his polychoral motet Deus in adiu- toriummeum intende , demonstrate a talent and ambition that rival any of his contemporaries. One hundred years after Padilla and Lienas, the English colonies in North America began to develop their own distinct choral sound. Convento del Carmen, San Ángel, Mexico City (1935) Protestant colonists wanted little to do with Lat- in motets. In fact, Puritans banned choral mu- sic altogether from their church services. The surviving repertoire of the 13 original American colonies comes to us from New England hym- nals and songbooks written in the mid-to-late 1700s. The composers writing at this time, often referred to collectively as the First New England School, or Yankee Tunesmiths, were largely self-taught. William Billings , perhaps the most recognizable name from this tradition, was the first American to publish a book of entirely original compositions, The New England Psalm Singer , with a frontispiece engraved by none other than Paul Revere (1770). The part-writing in these early works, with titles derived from lo- cations or people, like Kittery , often disregards rules of formal counterpoint, featuring plenty of parallel perfect intervals and irregular dou- blings and spacings. This early American style came to be adopt- ed by other singing communities throughout the new nation. Because of their simplicity and pedagogical nature, many of those first New England tunes were adopted into the burgeon- ing shape-note singing tradition of the early 19th century. In an effort to spread music litera- cy, shape-note tunebooks like The Sacred Harp (1844) use distinct noteheads for each movable “do” solfège syllable. Thus, instead of memoriz- ing 12 different keys and all their nuances, an amateur singer using a shape-note tunebook needs only to memorize a handful of symbols in order to participate in choral singing. Alexan- der Johnson published his collection of shape note tunes, The Tennessee Harmony , which in- cludes the song Jefferson , in 1818. These early American shape-note songbooks are primarily the product of white publishers and composers, even though the tradition of African American shape-note singing dates back to at least the 1870s. It wasn’t until 1934 that Judge J. Jackson self-published The Colored Sacred Harp , a collection of 77 shape-note songs written by Black composers, including My Home Above . Another type of American early music was de- veloping in Black communities at the same time as shape-note singing and Protestant hymnody: the African American spiritual. The origins of the spiritual are hard to pinpoint; firsthand ac- counts from formerly enslaved people describe the spiritual as “the progeny of the Black col- lective rather than the individual composer” (Burnim, African American Music , 50). What is certain is that this art form coalesced at the end of the 18th century as a unique synthesis of African musical styles and Christian themes and traditions. It is clear from firsthand descriptions that there existed a distinct African musical repertory in the Americas, independent of white and Eu- ropean customs. This repertory, and its per- formance practices, shaped and changed the concurrently developing American Protestant hymn tradition. In 1801, for example, Richard Allen compiled a new hymn book for his inde- pendent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) congregation. While some tunes in this book came from the standard Methodist hymnal, Allen wrote and changed many texts, added choruses, and likely composed some of the melodies himself. His goal “was to generate congregational participation and assure free- dom of worship for his members” (Burnim, African American Music , 57). In Happy Shore , a new commission for Chanti- cleer’s 2025/26 season, Trevor Weston takes a fresh look at this early American musical land- scape. “My goal,” he writes, “was not to compose a new spiritual,” but instead to create “a choral work that imagines the transformation of a Western European Protestant hymn with tradi- tional African American vocal and choral Title page of Johnson’s Tennessee Harmony by Alexander Johnson RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 83