Hello! My name is Jack Morin, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m a sophomore Vocal Performance and Choral Ed major here at SMTD. Art Song has been the most interesting classical format of singing for me since I arrived at UMich, and I’ve always wanted to make lesser known works more accessible. So with my CWPS Undergraduate funding, I worked with Professor Louise Toppin in a variety of ways surrounding African American and African Diasporic music.
On the performance side of things, I joined Singing Down the Barriers, a week-long summer intensive lead by Professor Toppin and others focused on demystifying spirituals and other songs from the African Diaspora. This intensive covered a wide variety of aspects on the topic that broadened my horizons in the field, such as history lessons on spirituals, masterclasses with masters in the field on performing spirituals (as well as regular vocal lessons), dialect lessons, and general talks about the spiritual’s place in society and the modern canon of music. I attended this intensive with many professors and students alike from all over the country, and it was so amazing to see so many people come together to understand and perform this beautiful repertoire. I also had three more vocal lessons with Professor Toppin after the intensive to practice a few of the songs I performed more in depth.
On the study side of things, I worked with Professor Toppin on her African Diaspora Music Project (or ADMP), an online database of African American art song. As a side note, I personally consider this work really important in the field of musicology because this work has been so ignored by the canon. Even with this rejuvenated focus on this repertoire, more people are still needed in rediscovering, cataloguing, and reintroducing this music to the world! Contacting archivists across the country was a really unique and new experience for me personally, and the results of knowing that I was helping make music more accessible to people by pulling it outside of just archives, was really gratifying. In addition, I also searched through the ADMP for songs that would be suitable for an anthology of spirituals and art songs by African American composers specifically for low voices. The list I came up with was used as a baseline for what practically could be featured in the anthology. Going through this process opened my eyes even further to how little this repertoire is known. As I researched and considered many songs in the database with suitable voice ranges for the anthology, I found that very few had any recording of them available online. This made the process rather complicated, considering that the most neglected songs couldn’t catch my ear because I couldn’t hear them. This is where Professor Toppin’s expertise in the field helped greatly, as she could recommend composers in the database and in general knew more about songs that piqued my interest.
I’m extremely grateful for being given this wonderful opportunity. I’ve grown vastly as a performer both in spirituals and African American art songs as well as in general through attending Singing Down the Barriers and the vocal lessons I was given. I also got to do some research that I consider really important and impactful in the grand scheme of things, and I haven’t had that kind of opportunity in this field ever before!