Black Voices

Wow. Where to begin? I've just got home from a performance in Lichfield Cathedral by a female vocal quintet called Black Voices. Together with the specially trained Lichfield Chorus, they have given us an inspiring evening of Gospel Music, which ended in a standing ovation.

The first half of the programme was basically performed by the Chorus - a choir especially trained for the occasion, consisting almost entirely of white middle class people, aged (I guess) 7 to 70. We were told how hard many of them (including some experienced choral singers) had found it to work in the Gospel style - without written music, committing words and harmonies to memory, or improvising instinctively. It was a tribute to them that it no longer looked like hard work. It looked and sounded like a way of singing that came quite naturally. As one of the Black Voices herself put it, 'They even looked like they were enjoying it'!

But for me, the second half of the programme was even more moving. The Black Voices themselves performed a suite of Slave Songs (which is what we are now rightly encouraged to call the kind of songs which in a previous era we knew as Negro Spirituals). The sequence told a story.

The first song had no words. It was a setting of moans and hums, symbolising the way that slaves from West Africa, first captured and taken away from their tribal origins, might find themselves among people with whom they didn't even share a language, but did share a musical tradition which enabled them to communicate. I confess, I'd never really thought about the way that a single slave-ship might easily contain multiple language groups, and that occasionally slaves must have been separated from their communities and have found themselves utterly alone.

The next few songs were songs of lament and of loss, of anguish and grief and desolation - the sort of song you can easily image a person might sing, if they were wrenched away from home and family, from familiar routines and found themselves captive. I was reminded how many of the Psalms in the Bible are songs of lament, and how rare it is to find such things in church hymn books or in the repertoire of contemporary worship songs. We're good at praise these days, but much less at protest and complaint and at pouring out our sorrow to God. By and large, even in a recession, we don't know what exile feels like.

Ultimately, however, the cycle did indeed culminate in songs of praise. And there is something extraordinary about the human capacity, and maybe especially the Christian capacity, to rise above present circumstances, however disastrous and agonising they may be, and to find grounds for hope in the love and mercy of God. So the programme ended with songs of deliverance, the last of which was inevitably 'Oh happy day'. That's a song you have to sing from the inside, I suspect. At least, I can imagine that even a musician of great empathy might not get the most out of the song, without some inkling of what it means to know the forgiveness which Christians find in Christ Jesus: 'Oh happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away'.

It occured to me last night that really, fully to sing 'Oh happy day' or 'The Deliverer' from the inside it must be necessary to sing 'Nobody but me one' or 'Motherless child, long way from home' from the inside too. Fully to pour out your heart in praise to God, perhaps it's necessary to know what it is like to pour out your heart in sorrow too. Maybe truly authentic praise has that depth to it.