Vocal Concert

“At Steinway Hall to-morrow (Friday) night a concert will be given by the Jubilee Singers, a band of colored vocalists of no ordinary merit, even when compared with musical celebrities of much greater pretensions. The entertainment is for the benefit of the Fisk University in Tennessee, an institution for freedmen, and the programme includes a curious variety of those songs of the freedmen which are so marked by vivid picturesqueness and rude yet forcible imagery. The band includes nine singers, and they will, beyond all doubt, present an entirely unique and highly interesting musical performance.”

 “The ‘Julilee Singers,’ a club of young colored persons from Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, will give one of their vocal concerts at Steinway Hall to-morrow evening. They have attracted much interest throughout New England, and the audience, beside the novel nature of the entertainment, will have the satisfaction of contributing to the cause of education for the colored race in the South.”

“A well-known distich about the fly in amber hints at the different estimates which may be made of an object according to its absolute value or its temporary and facitious relation. In strictly musical regards the Jubilee singers call for little attention. The merits of their vocalism are naturally slight, not equal to, or certainly not above, that of an ordinary village choir. While, in view of their peculiar position and antecedents, the enterprising young vocalists may claim to escape severe criticism, it would be equally impossible to accord them any very earnest praise as executants. The club comprises a double quartette of young colored people, students at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and from 16 to perhaps 23 or 25 years of age. The voices of the men are rough, feeble, and inharmonious. The sopranos, though strong and resonant, are not pure in quality. Of the contraltos, the only one heard in solo music—a young girl of 16 years—has a remarkably deep and well-developed voice for her age, which promises to reward cultivation. The part singing of the club is tolerable, but only in the simpler class of plantation melodies and camp-meeting hymns, and becomes weak and incorrect in anything more complicated or difficult, as in the ‘Hail America’ act to a chorus from ‘Elijah.’ 

But the audience of last evening at Steinway’s did not go in a critical humor or with the expectation of listening to refined or brilliant vocalism. They went, first, with the design of aiding the useful charity of Fisk University, and, secondly, to hear something like a specimen of real negro melody, a thing as different from the burnt cork article as well may be. They were not disappointed. In spite of all rudeness of music, voice or execution, there is something curiously fascinating about the plantation song or hymn, a wild plaintiveness in the airs, and a half rustic, half pathetic thrill in the voices which, to an imaginative ear, may well typify the suffering and the sadness of centuries of bondage. A space of quaint simplicity and sly humor, too, relieves what might otherwise be monotonous, and the blending in many of their melodies, of piety and fun, will delight the humorist, while it may scandalize the sobriety of conventional devotion. The choruses ‘Sooner in the Morning,’ and ‘Go down, Moses,’ illustrate our meaning, while the song by Miss Jennie Jackson, ‘I’ll hear the trumpet sound,’ with its wailing minor, and patient, monotonous return to the sad key-note of the close, had a pathos which many more pretentious songs and singers might envy. During the pause between the parts, Prof. White, who accompanies the club, stated in brief some points in the history of the College, and made an earnest appeal for sympathy and assistance from the friends of education for the freedmen.”