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Gospel music in church or on Broadway is an open call to everyone to join in that song of joyous affirmation

notic nuances, to American political oratory. Jesse Jackson shares the same incredible power of this style, which has the potential to become the great theatrical language in America because its roots are here."
While Breuer guided the oratorical view of the African American experience, Telson concentrated on the musical aspects. The composer says that the artificiality of conventional music theatre was easily resolved because "speech and song are interchangeable in the black church experience." Evangelists are expected to build their sermons toward a musical catharsis. A song never really ends but is musically carried from peak to peak. That's why gospel is so integrally suited to the stage." (It's a seamlessness also evident in the South African musical, Sarafina! at the Cort Theatre, which though not a gospel musical, features speech, music and dance well integrated within the African rhythms that are the source of gospel.)
Unlike the Negro spiritual, which came out of the brutality and alienation of slavery, gospel is a joyous affirmation of God liberating his people from bondage and leading them to the Promised land. "It's not about suffering," says Telson. "In fact, gospel had its roots in ragtime, and sometimes it was not allowed in the church. The music is used 
functionally to summon the spirit, as a form of uplift and jubilation. Follow the line emotionally: if you get excited, you gotta speak; if you get more excited, you gotta chant; if you get even more excited, you gotta dance."
Heyward describes it as "Being in the Spirit." "When the power of the Holy Ghost moves on you, you feel like you're lifting up," he says. "You leave all your problems, all the hard times of the day behind, and you just feel like jumping and moving with joy."
The objective is nothing less than an ecstatic experience. But, cautions Telson, "It's not a 'high'. It's ecstatic in a visionary sense in which you have a revelation, new knowledge and new insights. It's an epiphany in which you see the face of God."
"If you're playing at it, you're not going to get it," says Vy Higginson, whose musical Mama I Want to Sing! frequently ends with shouting, clapping and jumping on both sides of the footlights. "I've seen people leap out of their seats responding to the human voice. It's the music, coming from the heart, from the toes if you will, that touches our souls."
Central to the idea of gospel music, however, is the underlying belief that these emotional peaks cannot be scaled alone. The congregation must vocally support each other. The black American church experience has always been one of bringing the community together, and the cries of assent from the minister on down to the lowest communicant are part of the whole aesthetic. The invitation to respond, is the source of the "Amens" and "I hear yous" floating throughout the service-as well as those that greet the performer belting out a song on the Broadway stage. (Who can forget the responses that greeted Jennifer Holiday's songs in Dreamgirls.)
It is an invitation that is not culturally exclusive to blacks. Telson says that when he was musically adapting the scene in which Oedipus banishes his son Polyneices, he could not find in gospel music any style that expressed turning one's back on another or expelling one from the community. Finally, he had to couch the sentiment in Delta blues.
"There's an extraordinary openness and generosity in the black church community," says Telson. "And I think it's been there from the beginning. Perhaps the most moving sermon I've ever heard was by the Pastor Wyatt Tee Walker in which he said, 'Through 400 years of oppression, blacks have always had a song to sing in the midnight hour.'"
Gospel music, on Broadway or in Harlem, is an open call to people of all ethnic persuasions to join in that song of joyous affirmation.



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