What does it mean to sing freedom when you are not free? This three-week course invites participants to explore the Negro spirituals — one of America’s most profound and enduring sacred traditions — through the lenses of musicology and theology.
LeeLee Hunter, who holds a doctorate in musicology, will use her musical training to show the compositional sophistication of the spirituals: their modal harmonies, rhythmic complexity, and themes of lament and defiance. We will listen deeply, and we will listen differently.
The spirituals are living testimony that spoke “truth to power” long before that phrase existed. Alongside musical analysis, we will wrestle with the spirituals’ layers of meaning: their coded language, their vision of a God who sides with the oppressed, and their ongoing witness to the church today.