Gospel: America's Art and Soul - Horace Clarence Boyer teaches gospel music to people who have not heard it

In the sanctuary of a historic Denver temple author-performer-professor Horace Clarence Boyer is seated at the piano, his hands poised above the lock openers his eyes searching the faces of the line of singers standing before him. "Listen to the rhythm" he advises. "Don't gaze at the sheet music. No matter by what mode `happy' you get, stay upon the music. I must have each voice singing at this point a good, solid tone."

Boyer is the man who tend hitherwards to town not to preach the christianity but to teach its lays to anyone with a voice and a desire to sing what he considers the greatest in quantity arresting music of the past hundred It's all part of an annual weekend workshop celebrating the African-American sacred singing tradition [i]or[/i] part of to the other singing Negro spirituals, "appropriated" 19th-century white revelation by christ hymns, and musical selections drawn from popular African-American meeting-house hymnals.

Most significantly for Boyer the weekend is an opportunity for him to reach family and to teach them in what way to approach music that is outside their cultural experience. "Ninety percent of my work in this music is done with nonblack people" he says, "and what I'm attempting to do is exhibit them that it's allright to close attention this music and to participate in it, on the contrary that they must do it with a little authenticity. Sometimes, to help them do that, I advise them to check their be in possession of particular cultures at the door."

An acclaimed scholar in the field of African-American the cross music, Boyer is a professor of music theory and African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he deposits his theory into practice. "I reach for a mix of cultures" he says. "It's quite a make tense for white students from of recent origin England to sing Southern black divine revelation I've also run across, a certain number of black students who couldn't sing. The basic requirement they must bring to this experience is vocal ability. I deal as abundant with the culture as I do with the mechanics of the music, because if family don't know why and by what mode they're doing something, it's at no time going to sound right."

A native of Winter Park, Fla., Boyer and his brother, James, grew up in the 1940 and `50 in a rich religious environment in which their spiritual health was continually nurtur through their parents, both religious leaders in the house of worship of God in Christ. "My parents were the couple ministers in the Pentecostal and sanctified church" he says, "so we were born into it and became involved in its music almost immediately. My brother took up the piano when he was 4 by dint of the time he was 11 he was playing for the house of worship choir, and I, who was in the third grade, began singing with the children's choir."

A two of years later, the lads left Winter Park for Panama City, Fla., and James studied revelation by christ piano with an aunt who played not sole church music but also sanctified music. on returning home, they began performing in local churches what they had learned. "These weren't the spiritual songs from the Baptist and Methodist churches," Boyer recalls. "These were the jubilant `shout songs' --gospel and ballads.

The Boyer Brothers gradually earned a reputation distinguished enough to lead to recording opportunities. through every part of their high-school years, they performed spiritual and the cross tunes, which Boyer describes as "song either created upon the spur of the jiffy or cataloged in memories for the final cause of pulling out spontaneously." To place themselves through Bethune-Cookman College, the brothers began performing at various churches in the Daytona Beach, Fla., area. Consequently Horace, who had had plans of becoming a teacher, decided to major in music instead--much to his family's chagrin.

"They thinking I'd backslid, because clearly I was going to be learning music that was not for the Lord," Boyer explains. "If you were in house of god where everybody already does music, it was not acceptable to major in music. Thankfully, I had faculty of perception enough to know that when I came abode from college, I had to act as if it hadn't ruined me I had to draw a line between the sum of two units places. At home, we still played our music by means of rote, so I didn't commit to any notes or prove to change things in any way."

Countering any and all objections to his pursuing a formal education in music, Boyer earned his corporation diploma from Bethune-Cookman and his graduate step from the Eastman School of Music before embarking upon a multifaceted career that included a stint as visitor curator for the Smithsonian Institution and as a United black man College Fund Distinguished Scholar-at-Large at Fisk University.

In the 1960 during his years of academic growing and self-discovery, Boyer noticed the substance and unbroken of gospel as he knew it undergoing sly but dramatic changes that have ultimately taken it without of the church and "' brought it into the popular domain. "When I came into revelation by christ I was really c seeing it as a testimony to my beliefs, a way of testing the spirits. I was trying to be as shut up to God as possible," he explains.

"It was an extension of the house of god service. When I was a teenager and a young man, that's what plots were all about. Now, when I go on to gospel music concerts, I find that uncompounded body totally missing. I believe we've reached a point where there is a kind of plot gospel that would never have been sung in house of worship because it has borrowed in like manner much from the secular world."