School of Church Music and Worship provides evening of African American spirituals for Southwestern community
The School of Church Music and Worship (SCMW) provided “Songs of Deliverance,” a spring choral concert, to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and surrounding community on April 10, performing works from the African American spiritual tradition sung by the Southwestern choral groups, including Southwestern Music Academy (SMA) Children’s Choir.
Joe Crider, dean of the SCMW, said he and other faculty were thrilled when Chloe Bonner, a Master of Theology in Worship student from Dallas, proposed the evening of African American spirituals for the spring concert.
“I think one of the incredible aspects of our choral program at Southwestern and Texas Baptist College is the significant variety of choral literature our students are exposed to throughout the year,” Crider said.
“African American folk songs arranged for the choral ensemble are a beautiful, harmonic, polyphonic, rhythmically stimulating, soulful, and soul-stirring account of African American history,” said Bonner, who helped organize the concert as well as arrange and direct some of the songs.
Choral groups such as Southwestern A Cappella led by Marc Brown performed African American spirituals in the spring concert.
Nelly Villegas, a Ph.D. in Church Music student from Costa Rica, said these spirituals that were first created by slaves more than a century ago, today still give believers a chance to sing of the hope found in Christ.
“Spirituals offer praise in suffering,” Villegas said. “We connect with the text of this music because it suggests imagining your deliverance before it comes. Spirituals invite us to wait on the Lord, Who has promised that He will one day wipe away every tear.”
The 80-member children’s choir, Texas Baptist College choir, Southwestern A Cappella, Southwestern Singers, and the men’s and women’s choruses sang a variety of spirituals, including “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” “Swing Low,” “There is a Balm in Gilead,” and “Let Me Fly.” Instrumentalists also performed on the piano and cello songs such as “Wade in the Water” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The adult choirs then combined into a 90-member choir for the final song, “Elijah Rock.”
Mariano Gongora performed a piece on the cello.
Timothy Edmond, a master of music in voice student from Oklahoma City, helped direct the children’s choir and said he was pleased by the growth the kindergarten-5th grade choir experienced this academic year.
“We are very fortunate to have the support of Dr. Crider and the entire School of Church Music and Worship faculty and staff to have the opportunity to instill a love of music to the next generation of singers,” Edmond said, adding the children’s choir was born from SMA Director Donna Hopson’s desire to involve children in music.
Edmond said he looks forward to the children’s choir starting again in the fall as they prepare to participate in “Prelude to Christmas,” and the possibility of adding more choral opportunities for young members of the community.
“It blessed us deeply to see audience members smiling and singing, no doubt traveling in their minds to another time they’d heard or sang these songs,” Bonner said, adding she hopes students and those in music ministries will use the songs they heard in their own devotional lives and in their music libraries, finding hope and encouragement through their words in times of suffering.
“And that is the message of the Negro spiritual–packaged in an imaginative, artistic, harmonic, rhythmic way,” Bonner said. “Trouble will not last, God will not forsake His people, and to quote Ride On, King Jesus!, one day our King will ride that milk-white horse and deliver His people to our eternal home with Him.”
