Honoring Music of our Past: Arranging Traditional African-American Spirituals (poster)

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Author
Shaves, Olivia Claire
Subject
Washington and Lee University -- Summer Research Scholars Program
Spirituals (Songs)
United States
Arrangements (Music)
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This poster was created during the Summer Research Scholars Program. The music examined in the poster was to be performed at the Fall Concert in 2016. Poster; [FULL-TEXT FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE] Olivia Claire Shaves is a member of the Class of 2017 of Washington and Lee University. The process of arranging these spirituals began with researching recordings of former slaves singing spirituals and songs' histories through diaries within the Library of Congress. Because spirituals were sung throughout the South, any plantation or region might have had its own variation of a spiritual with a melody and verses slightly different to a neighboring area. Recordings and transcriptions were conducted across the South following the end of the Civil War by early musicologists whose desire to document and preserve this music has kept the genre alive. [From Introduction]