The Case Against Moses Hogan

(Elijah Rock)

If you sang in a high school or collegiate group in the years after 1995, chances are that certain names popped up with undue and alarming frequency. You probably sang a lot of John Rutter, if you were slightly more adventurous you sang some Morton Lauridsen, and lately if your director thinks your group is really up for a challenge he'll assign you some Eric Whitacre. And along with that comes the obligatory old spirituals, usually done in arrangements by Moses Hogan. When Hogan did it with his own groups, it wasn't bad. Hogan's ensembles at least gave them character and passion. But hearing it with high school chorales is a totally different experience. You can easily see why they were popular: the arrangements are fairly easy to learn, they're lively, they have some interesting open harmonies, and they all sound EXACTLY THE SAME.


(My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord...or is it Elijah Rock?)

Let's start by stating the obvious: Black music in America is one of the world's greatest musical traditions: encompassing everything from Go Down Moses to Hey Ya! It is a culture so diverse that no one style can possibly do justice to all the great things within it. Imagine if an arranger took something as wonderful and important to our history as The Great American Songbook, and made arrangements in which every song was turned out in the exact same techniques and harmonic style. Nobody would perform it, it would be laughed out of any publishing company and nobody could make a dime on that kind of mediocrity. But Moses Hogan did that to spirituals, and he became an institution. In the span of only a decade and a half, Hogan turned out more than seventy of these arrangements. with assembly line efficiency and frequency, nearly every one of them interchangeable.


(Hold On...at least this one's in a different key)

But The Great American Songbook is a very white institution, regardless of who wrote and performed the songs. However important it is to our history, Black spirituals are still not white, white people don't think of them as particularly important, so white people don't really care if the performances and arrangements are any good. Few musicians would think of performing a jazz standard at a paid concert with anything but the highest level polish and ingenuity, but it's acceptable to hear any a capella group perform black spirituals on minimal rehearsal. This is some of the most beautiful, deeply felt, music ever written. But who would know it from these arrangements?


(and then there are the settings where it starts to get irritating...Many of these highschool choruses are technically fantastic. But they sound so white that they can't tell the difference between spirituals and salsa.)