4/5/04

Mitch Emmons, 334/844-5964 (emmonmb@auburn.edu)

AUBURN'S POWELL KEEPS SPIRIT ALIVE THROUGH MUSIC, TEACHING

Rosephanye Dunn Powell

AUBURN -- With a deep passion for music, for teaching and for historical tradition and preservation, an associate professor of voice in Auburn University's Department of Music is blending this trio of interests into a multi-media package unlike others found in the classroom.

Rosephanye Dunn Powell calls the project "Spiritual Renaissance." Her objective is to foster an appreciation for the traditional African-American spiritual among the general public, especially among young African-Americans.

"I use the term renaissance as it relates to rebirth," Powell says, adding that the traditional spiritual is quickly becoming another casualty among the lost cultural arts and artifacts.

"I want to get this music back into the schools and churches to keep it alive," she says.

Powell's interest in the traditional spiritual was nurtured as a child, where the message of struggle and progress comprising this music was still commonly sung in the churches and practiced among the elders.

Powell says the spiritual, though shaped by slavery, is rooted in the African tradition of using song to communicate about significant social events.

Unlike European music which serves primarily as entertainment, African music, of which the spiritual is an outgrowth, functions in and accompanies every aspect of African society, Powell said.

Musical traditions are handed down from one generation to the next, and people simply know from tradition what to sing or play for daily activities and special events.

Spirituals and their secular counterpart, work songs, became the mechanism for expression during periods of struggle and difficulty, Powell added. Spirituals continued to prevail in importance through the civil rights movement, but began to lose their societal impact by the early 1970s. This, according to Powell, has prevented almost an entire generation from experiencing the spiritual.

"Many of today's African-American adults and young people simply have had no exposure to this music and the traditional history that it contains," Powell says. "They don't know about the journey that has brought them to the present, and that it is a duty for this history to be passed on to future generations."

To reach a youth culture, the message must be presented as a contemporary one, Powell says. To achieve that objective, she aligns traditional melodies with contemporary instrumentation and background. To listeners, her classically trained, but soulful soprano voice weaves the lyrics into a musical tapestry that is unmistakably influenced by traditional African modes and rhythms, jazz, rhythm and blues.

apr04:AU-spirituals

CONTACT: Powell, 334/844-3163.