Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

Just as Lorca identified the Andalusian Gypsies (hereafter Roma) with deep song, so he equated New York African Americans with their spirituals, as defined in Carl Van Vechten’s 1925 article, “The Folksongs of the American Negro: The Importance of the Negro Spirituals in the Music of America.” Van Vechten notes that Black people felt ashamed of their spirituals for their slave origins, and Lorca surmised that African Americans were uneasy by nature. Yet Van Vechten regards spirituals as the most important contributions of America to music composition. Their sincerity makes them equal or superior to any folk music. Hence Lorca deems African Americans the most American minority of all, the most spiritual and delicate. From spirituals, writes Van Vechten, stem all popular American music. Therefore, Lorca finds Black people to be influential on all North American culture. Van Vechten contrasts what he calls “natural” Black music sung in its original dialect to artificial European operatic techniques for singing it. Accordingly, Lorca opposes African American naturalness in general to Caucasian artificiality. This antithesis permeates all of Lorca’s African American poems: “Norma y Paraíso de los negros,” “El rey de Harlem,” “Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la Gran Guerra),” and “Danza de la muerte.” After summarizing Van Vechten’s article, we use it to clarify that otherwise hermetic poetry.