In the United States

Contemporary a cappella was produced in the United States.

 Peter Christian Lutkin is the musicology division manager of Northwestern University. From now on, let's follow the flow of the history of the music in the United States.

History of the music in the United States

Many Europeans immigrated to the U.S. continent after discovery of the new continent by them. Settlers built ancestral original culture, eliminating native culture. Naturally in the culture, music is also contained.

<A colony and the emancipation of slaves>

In South America, racial reconciliation took place so that it might be called a racial crucible. On the contrary, in North America, immigration are not mixed, though affected mutually. They inherited ancestral culture and have continued till the present age. The situation is described as a racial salad bowl or a racial mosaic.

Now, many races have emigrated to the United States of America from Europe. There were most Anglo-Saxon's people. They have crossed from Britain. Therefore, North America including Canada is compared with Latin America in South America, and is called Anglo-America.

People of the Anglo-Saxon who moved to the United States sang and inherited the ballade liked and sung in the homeland. This continues till the beginning of the 20th century.

Church music was also carried in from Europe.

Moreover, there are people who contributed to development of U.S. music rather than Anglo-Saxon. They were people compulsorily taken as a slave from African every place. In their culture in an African continent, music had permeated all the fields of the life. It was an indispensable thing in order to maintain a community. There is a talking drum as the direct example. They had conveyed the intention using the sound of a drum.

Euro American and others feared that slaves banded together. They forbade the song, the dance, and the drum that becomes a tool of communication especially. However, those who consider that they should make a community form under Christianity soon, and it should make Euro American society contribute begin to appear. In this way, Christianity permeates into an African-American.

<From the emancipation of slaves>

In 1862, Emancipation Proclamation was made by Union Army President Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War. As a result, African-American people became the independent free American. A spiritual song will not be sung as a song of the past of its slave days after release. Instead, the gospel which dances and praises God came to be sung.

However, release meant simultaneously that it had to live alone. The African-American was separated from the slave's community. They were pressed to be faced with society. They will be faced with a new formidable enemy called racial discrimination there. And they do not have a community where it should already return. While there were such insecurity, dissatisfaction or fear, and anger, the blues were produced in the Mississippi delta in the southern part.

Northern people noticed spiritual music existence after the emancipation of slaves. They come to introduce this positively. As a result, the Europe system American comes to perform a cappella as one of the choruses.

Barbershop style

Barbershop music is an original culture in the United States. I wrote this in the first week. In order to delight visitor, since staffs of the barber sang, this style was produced. In 1938, the first formal men’s barbershop organization was formed. It is known as the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). SPEBSQSA was renamed to BHS in 2004. BHS has 30,000 or more members in the United States. The barbershop style spread all over the world. This is not famous in Japan.

In 1945, the first formal woman’s barbershop organization, Sweet Adelines, was formed. This is birth of female a cappella. In 1953, Sweet Adelines became an international organization. A total of about the 25,000 is in about 50 countries. He founded the a cappella chorus of the northwestern in 1906. It helped the spread of American a cappella music.