Keeping the music alive: American Spiritual Ensemble to give first concert in Worcester

When tenor singer, educator, conductor and music director Everett McCorvey was a child in Montgomery, Alabama, his father was a deacon at First Baptist Church, where civil rights activist Rev. Ralph Abernathy was the minister. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a neighbor.

The church was a meeting place during the civil rights movement. McCorvey also remembers something else. "At my dad's church I grew up hearing the spirituals. Martin Luther King loved spirituals. He would reference the spirituals in his sermons ... Choruses would come and sing spirituals in my dad's church — sounds I've never forgotten,"McCorvey said during a recent telephone interview.

Years later, "I wanted to recreate these sounds and and make sure their story was not forgotten," he said of the beautiful songs and melodies dating back 400 years. True to his intent, McCorvey founded the American Spiritual Ensemble in 1995 with the mission "to keep the American negro spiritual alive," he said.

The American Spiritual Ensemble will bring the mission, and the sounds, to Worcester for the first time at 8 p.m. on April 6 in a concert at the Curtis Performance Hall at Assumption University, presented by Music Worcester.

'It's just the beauty of the pure singers'

About 23 to 24 singers from a roster of about 150 of some of the finest professional singers in the classical music world who take time from their regular engagements to tour with the ensemble will perform mostly a cappella. "It's just the beauty of the pure singers," said McCorvey, who is also the ensemble's director.

The ensemble is in its 29th year of touring but has never come to Worcester before. "I'm really looking forward to it," McCorvey said. Indeed, "it's been quite a long time since we've been in the Northeast," he said. Other stops on the current tour will include Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Concord and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

As well as leading the ensemble in performing, McCorvey said he talks about the background of the spirituals. At some of its concerts the ensemble also sings selections of Broadway pieces that highlight the African-American experience as well as celebrate human perseverance through faith, and jazz music that was composed, arranged, or written by African-American artists.

"The Black experience is so wide and varied," McCorvey said. "The palate of music for singers of color was really wide. It had to be in order for them to find work."

'They’re about giving hope to the soul'

American spiritual music is over 400 years old, McCorvey said. "It is the folk songs of the enslaved people." When the first enslaved people forcibly came to these shores in 1619, they were "not allowed to bring their instruments, speak their language, but they were allowed to attend church. They created these stories learned about in the Bible. They made these melodies up," he said.

The mood of the music can be poignant , haunting, jubilant and a form of protest. But most of all, McCorvey has said, "They’re about love, they’re about sharing love, and they’re about looking for a better tomorrow. They’re about giving hope to the soul and hope to a person."

McCorvey calls spirituals "the mother music" from which jazz, blues and gospel have flowed in different ways. But he said he formed American Spiritual Ensemble out of concerns the music was in danger of being marginalized or forgotten.

In particular, "I don't want the spirituals placed in the category of gospel music." he said. While gospel is "an important form of music," it is a different kind of music compared to the music of spirituals, he noted.

The melodies of spirituals have been passed down through generations, whereas "gospel music is more contemporary music that didn't really start until the 1920s and '30s," McCorvey said. Black musicians in jazz clubs often also worked in churches and took some contemporary chords and added them to standard hymns playing at the church. "Ministers liked it because they noticed young people came," he said.

With that, "I didn't want the spirituals to be lost and their importance to our country to be lost."

'We should be very proud'

After McCorvey started talking with like-minded people in 1994, the American Spiritual Ensemble went on the road in 1995 putting spirituals in a concert setting. The ensemble has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, Boston Opera and the Atlanta Civic Opera ,and has also performed around the world.

There is something universal about the appeal of the music, McCorvey said. "It doesn't matter the country, these spirituals are popular everywhere in the world. We go to places where we don't speak the language, but there's something in the melody that touches people. People respond to it."

And it is American music, he noted. "We should be very proud."

The reviews are consistently ecstatic. The American Spiritual Ensemble “produces a sound of such sumptuous power, energy and commitment that one is hard put to find words worthy of the effect they make on an audience,” said the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Under the direction of Everett McCorvey, they presented a varied and demanding program of music that frequently left this listener and most of the audience in happy tears," the review said.

"We are beyond excited to welcome the American Spiritual Ensemble to Worcester as part of their tour around New England,” said Adrien C. Finlay, executive director of Music Worcester. “Especially since we have had choir directors in the region, including Worcester Chorus director Dr. Chris Shepard, tell us for several years that they are simply one of the best ensembles we could think about engaging. Their program will surely inspire, prove thought-provoking, and encourage reflection for all who attend.”

McCorvey is also an acclaimed tenor and holds an Endowed Chair in Opera Studies/Director of Opera and Professor of Voice at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, and is artistic director of the National Chorale of New York City.

The American Spiritual Ensemble holds auditions in New York City every November. "People fly in to get on the roster. Members live all over the country," McCorvey said.

The group is mixed. "I did that by design because this is American music," he said.

Rehearsals are in New York City before the ensemble goes on the road.

"Are spirituals still important?" McCorvey asked rhetorically. "If you think about it, people are still enslaved — abuse, drugs, you name it. For a very brief moment it (the music) lifts people out of that place and that's what this music did for 400 years. No other country can claim this music. Now it is music that is for everyone."

American Spiritual Ensemble, presented by Music Worcester

When: 8 p.m. April 6

Where: Curtis Performance Hall, Assumption University, Worcester

How much: $55; Student, $17.50; youth (18 and under) $7.50. musicworcester.org

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: American Spiritual Ensemble to give first concert in Worcester