Healing for the soul : Richard Smallwood, the vamp, and the gospel imagination / Braxton D. Shelley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shelley, Braxton D., author.

Series:

AMS studies in music

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Smallwood, Richard.

Gospel music--History and criticism.

Gospel music.

Church music--African American churches.

Church music.

Gospel music--Analysis, appreciation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xii, 338 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Summary:

"Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition? What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do? And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp's essential place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. In the following pages, the words and music of Richard Smallwood, a paradigmatic contemporary gospel composer, anchor my investigation of the convergence of sound and belief in the Gospel Imagination. Smallwood's expansive oeuvre is especially illustrative of the eclecticism and homiletic intention that characterize gospel music. Along the way, this study brings Smallwood's songs and the ideas that frame them into conversation with many of the tradition's exemplars: Edwin and Walter Hawkins, Twinkie Clark, Kurt Carr, Margaret Douroux, V. Michael McKay, and Judith McAllister, among others. Focusing on choral forms of gospel song, this book shows how the gospel vamp organizes expressive activity around a moment of transcendence, an instant when the song shifts to a heightened space of musical activity. This sonic escalation fuels traffic between the seen world and another, bringing believers into contact with a host of scenes from scripture, and with the divine, too"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Reimagining Gospel : An Introduction

"A Balm In Gilead" : "Tuning Up" and the Gospel Imagination

The Moment That Changed Everything : Gospel Music and the Incarnation of Time

"The Evidence of Things Not Seen" : Gospel Vamps and the Incarnation of Text

The Pursuit of Intensity : A Formal Theory of the Gospel Vamp.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Shelley, Braxton D., Healing for the soul

ISBN:

9780197566466

0197566464

OCLC:

1224584696

Publisher Number:

99988833009