Spiritual (music)

Spirituals (or Negro spirituals) are generally Christian songs that were created by African slaves in the United States. Spirituals were originally an oral tradition that imparted Christian values while also describing the hardships of slavery. Although spirituals were originally unaccompanied monophonic (unison) songs, they are best known today in harmonized choral arrangements. This historic group of uniquely American songs is now recognized as a distinct genre of music.

Terminology and origin

The term spiritual is derived from spiritual song, and derives from the King James Bible's translation of Ephesians 5:19 says: "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord."Slave Songs of the United States, the first major collection of Negro spirituals, was published in 1867.

Musicologist George Pullen Jackson extended the term spiritual to a wider range of folk hymnody, as in his 1938 book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but this does not appear to have been widespread usage previously. The term, however, has often been broadened to include subsequent arrangements into more standard European-American hymnodic styles, and to include post-emancipation songs with stylistic similarities to the original Negro spirituals.

Religious music

Religious music (also sacred music) is music performed or composed for religious use or through religious influence. Ritual music is music, sacred or not, performed or composed for or as ritual.

Christian music

It is generally held that the earliest music in the Christian Church came from Jewish worship music. It is believed that this music lay somewhere between singing and speaking, or speaking with an understood ritual cadence. However, there is another opinion that the roots of early Christian music come from the early ascetic monastic orders.

Hindu music

Hindu music is music created for or influenced by Hinduism.

Sikh music

Jewish music

The earliest synagogal music was based on the same system as that in the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Talmud, Joshua ben Hananiah, who had served in the sanctuary Levitical choir, told how the choristers went to the synagogue from the orchestra by the altar (Talmud, Suk. 53a), and so participated in both services.

Islamic music

Rastafarian music