It is Friday afternoon, and most of Tufts University is in a collective state of lazy content. In the Distler Performance Hall, however, something is just getting started. A crowd of students, representing a diverse cross section of Tufts, are gathering excitedly.
As the students find their seats and their chatter grows, a few piano notes rise above the din. The notes strengthen and form a tune, and a voice raises above all others. It is a man's voice, a voice of extensive range: loud, clear and simple. Lecturer of Music David Coleman is singing, and, not three lines into his song, all 170 students have fallen silent.
They listen as he sings and plays, sending gospel praises into the hall's soft echoes. He finishes to a hearty round of applause and, shrugging, says, "I just felt like singing."
As the lecturer teaching "Music 64: Gospel Choir," Coleman encourages nearly 200 students of all talent levels to feel like singing too and to act upon that urge as a part of Tufts' Third Day Gospel Choir.
Each Friday, Coleman offers his students a chance to sway and sing, all part of a holistic cultural experience that teaches them about gospel music through the history and the prayer that inspired it.
Coleman was born in Memphis, Tenn. He played piano from a young age, which won him a scholarship to a music camp affiliated with Boston University when he was 15. It was there that Coleman realized that he wanted music to be his career, leading him to attend the BU music program, where he graduated with degrees in both composition and piano.
Upon graduation, Coleman had a number of "odd jobs" that included piano performance, directing the BU Gospel Choir and directing his church choral. Choral direction appealed to Coleman not only for its perks - he notes health benefits and full-time pay as bonuses - but for the experience too.
"I really did want to be a teacher," he said. "Seeing firsthand the lack of arts in schools made me want to teach."
Coleman came to Tufts for a master's degree in composition, picking up the direction of Tufts' gospel choir by mere chance. When he graduated from Tufts, Coleman took up a full-time job directing the choir at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass. He now lives in Wellesley with his wife Fadie, a biology teacher at the Dana Hall School, and their three-year-old daughter, Aim?©e.
In 2006, Coleman received an e-mail "out of the blue" saying that Tufts was once again in need of a director for its gospel choir. Having left the Boston University Gospel Choir in 2003, and missing directing terribly, he returned to direct the Tufts Third Day Gospel Choir. By his second semester here, the choir appeared to have "grown overnight," Coleman said.
Coleman is reluctant to take all of the credit for this growth, but he said his directing style is marked by an urge to connect with both his choir and his audience that, when done effectively, sustains and brings growth.
"My thing as a performer was always to destroy the wall between a performer and an audience," Coleman said. He continues this approach as a director.
"I crack jokes and I tell stories," he said, in order to connect with his choir so that they, in turn, will connect with their audience.
Coleman also attributes his ensemble's strength to the sheer power of gospel music itself.
"You can't dismiss [gospel music's] attractiveness. It's infectious, and it just feels so good," Coleman said. "Look around the room. People are moving, singing, dancing and smiling. For that moment, it's like, 'Why can't the world be like this all the time?' And no matter who you are, you want that. And if you don't want to be in it, you want to watch it."
Coleman believes that gospel music's power comes from its historical roots.
"The essence of gospel music is victory through struggle, and it's a metaphor for life," he said.
Coleman makes a point in class to explore gospel's historical roots, giving miniature history lessons on slavery and how gospel music came out of it. Gospel music, to Coleman, began as "people making something beautiful out of pain."
But, he said, gospel music has had its own victory over history. '
"The art lives longer than the oppression [of slavery]," he said. "It transcends time, and the system itself, and that's why it has a life."
The spirituality inherent in gospel music is an important element of both Coleman's class and his life. He begins each class with prayer and often references God and Christianity.
In a class filled with students who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu, and of vastly diverse racial origin, Coleman exerts no pressure on his students to join him in prayer, or even to consider the songs as anything more to them than fun pieces of music, but he wants his students to understand the cultural significance that gospel music holds for so many people.
"True diversity is not only the acceptance of differences, but the understanding of them," he said. "I want there to be a meeting of the minds. This is the experience. If you want to know what it's like to be in a gospel choir, this is what it's like!"
Coleman is inspired by the power music has to bring people together despite their differences.
"Music is a universal language, and it binds people of all different faces and places together. For a brief amount of time, even if it's just a three-minute song, you feel at one with everyone who loves the music in the same way that you do," he said.
When Coleman looks toward the future, he sees few concrete plans, but rather the maintenance of the personal ideals with which he governs his life.
"I've never had serious career goals; I want to be happy, I want to watch my daughter grow, to have more children and to be healthy," he said. He does, however, wish to pursue a Ph.D. and would like to teach composition or ethnomusicology at the collegiate level.
The Third Day Gospel Choir will be touring through Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and other cities early next semester. As for the rest of the choir's future, Coleman hopes that "the Gospel Choir will continue to be an open door for people, inclusive, so that all can learn about a culture different from theirs, allowing many to come together as different people and be unified at a space in time."
