Roy Jennings talks culture, African American spiritual

Roy Jennings, a classical musician and composer from New York City, spoke about culture and linear time during a colloquium Wednesday at the University of Idaho titled “The Residue of History” alongside two faculty members.

Jennings is the founder and artistic director of Arch Angel Productions, a nonprofit organization performing 20th and 21st century arrangements of African American spirituals for consumers, students and educators alike.

The spiritual is a genre of music originating from the enslavement of African people and their exposure to Christianity on plantations in the American South.

Its associations with the horrors of transatlantic slave trade and later with the elitism of classical music have relegated the African American spiritual to an “outsider status” in popular culture, according to Jennings. But when the genre is presented in context with its original history, he says spirituals have the power to reflect the past and future of the Black experience.

“The African American spiritual and the way it developed are what most of us think of when we think of African American spiritual,” Jennings said. “It is what me, my wife and our organization, called Arch Angel Productions, have dedicated our efforts to, to making this a universal understanding of culture.”

He argued that the conception of time is a persistent illusion and the progress of human endeavor is not associated with linear progression.

“Our conception of time and history is mostly linear and it is pretty much established that universally, cosmically, time does not operate in this fashion,” he said. “What I wish to convey for your consideration is that human progress is historically cumulative, not linear. My ancestors included past, present and future in all their celebrations.”

UI history professor Dale Graden, who spoke during the discussion, said so many manifestations of African American music, including jazz, blues and rap, have roots in African American spirituals. Generations of Black Americans have used their experiences to form the culture as it stands now.

But culture comes at a great cost to the person contributing to it, according to Jennings. He noted Beethoven as a “poster boy” for artistic suffering.

“The great achievement in his music is his ability to understand that suffering to then turn it into some kind of expression,” he said. “We are the great beneficiaries of his suffering. The ‘Emperor Concerto’ and the ‘Ninth Symphony’ are all inherited lessons based on this single individual’s ability to coalesce his personal tragedy with his personality and create triumph over his tragedy and then organize it in music and express it to us so that we could be entertained.”

Zachary Kaylor, an assistant professor in the Department of Soil and Water Systems at UI, also contributed to the discussion.

Jennings is leading a master class voice studio today at 1:30 p.m. in the UI Administration Building Auditorium.

Later this evening, the Lionel Hampton School of Music is hosting a concert called “What’s God (Love) Got to Do with It?” at 7:30 p.m. in the same location, featuring performances by Jennings and UI faculty members Christopher Pfund and Lynette Pfund. Both events are open to the public.

According to Christopher Pfund, a student arts fees grant was used to bring Jennings on campus.

“He’s very, very famous in our classical world,” Pfund said. “To have a voice that brings so much expertise and information come to our campus — such an important cultural voice — is really exciting and unique. I highly recommend the evening concert.”

Palermo can be reached at apalermo@dnews.com or on Twitter @apalermotweets.