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- Morton Gould
Spirituals (1961)
- G&C Music Corporation (World)
- hp/str
- 20 min
- 17th August 2025, Park (Open Air), Evilard, Switzerland
Programme Note
Composer note:
Spirituals are spiritual. They are simple and profound, unique and recognizable. While national in origin, they echo man’s soul everywhere. Their appeal is universal. They were the start of our jazz, and have spiced and seasoned our creative musical scene, both popular and symphonic. Spirituals are derived from both Negro and white sources, and these influences combine, like all folk expressions, to make an indigenous musical language.
It is the touching and human spirituality of spirituals that communicates to both the most sophisticated and the naïve listener. They have been born of work and play, of suffering and joy, of oppression and liberation. Listening to spirituals is not passive; it is rather an act of participation — a sense of communal expression. The words are invariably basic, and the music mirrors their inflection. Perhaps it is due to this inflection, which is so characteristic, that when one hears the musical phrases alone the matching words are immediately evoked.
— Morton Gould
Media
Spirituals for Orchestra: I. Proclamation
Spirituals for Orchestra: II. Sermon
Spirituals for Orchestra: IV. Protest
Spirituals for Orchestra: V. Jubilee
Scores
Reviews
The music that leaped out at listeners was Gould's Spirituals in Five Movements and Ellington's Three Black Kings. Smart, concise, alternately soothing and shattering, always sincere: Gould's orchestral writing represents everything good and important in the American urban sensibility by hint of exceptional craftsmanship. Popular music is transformed. Ellington's piece reorganizes symphony orchestra sound. Strings are busy but largely subservient to winds and percussion. One was fascinated by the elegance of this music, the fastidious attention to every sonority, the love of delicacy even in emphatic moments.
