SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2021
VOLUME TEN NUMBER ONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JEREMY PELT
(April 17-23)
WILLIAM GRANT STILL
(April 24-30)
AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS
(May 1-7)
KARRIEM RIGGINS
(May 8-14)
ETTA JONES
(May 15-21)
YUSEF LATEEF
(May 22-28)
CHRISTIAN SANDS
(May 29—June 4)
E. J. STRICKLAND
(June 5-11)
TAJ MAHAL
(June 12-18)
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON
(June 12-18)
DOM FLEMONS
(June 19-25)
HEROES ARE GANG LEADERS
(June 26-July 2)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/william-grant-still-mn0000361592/biography
William Grant Still
(1895-1978)
Artist Biography by Chris Morrison
"With humble thanks to God, the Source of Inspiration." Such is the inscription to be found on the scores of the works of William Grant Still, sometimes called "The Dean of African-American Composers" and one of America's most versatile musicians.
Still was but three months old when his father, the town bandmaster, died. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Little Rock, AK. Still has written movingly of the influence his mother and grandmother had in forming his character and instilling in him a love for the arts. In addition, his new stepfather was a big music fan, and encouraged his stepson's interest by taking him to operettas and buying him recordings. Still's education continued at Wilberforce University, which he entered at age sixteen, and at the Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied theory and composition. He also had studies with George W. Chadwick and Edgard Varèse, all the while supporting himself by playing in orchestras and bands.
After a stint in the U.S. Navy in 1918, Still did arrangements for W. C. Handy and Paul Whiteman, played oboe in the famous Noble Sissle-Eubie Blake revue Shuffle Along, and began a decades-long association with radio, arranging and producing programs for the Mutual and Columbia networks. His early compositions were fairly dissonant and complex (perhaps under Varèse's influence); he made a major breakthrough when he took Chadwick's advice and started incorporating elements of African American and popular musical styles into his works. His first big hit, and his best-known work to this day, is his first symphony, the "Afro-American," which was given its premiere in Rochester, NY, in 1931, and was soon performed all over the world.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1934, Still turned his attention to film, providing the scores for movies like Lost Horizon and the original Pennies from Heaven. Later he also scored a number of television shows, including Perry Mason and Gunsmoke. Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships allowed him to produce large-scale works like the ballet Lenox Avenue (1937) and the operas Blue Steel (1935) and Troubled Island (1938). The last-named work -- with a libretto by Langston Hughes and based on the life of Dessalines, the first Emperor of Haiti and one of the major figures in Haiti's independence -- was premiered by the New York City Opera in 1949 and was very well received.
Still continued to write politically and racially conscious works throughout his life, such as the narrated work And They Lynched Him On A Tree (1940) and In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died For Democracy (1944). In the 1950s, he turned to writing children's works, such as The American Scene (1957), a set of five suites for young people based on geographic regions of the United States.
In 1981, Still's opera A Bayou Legend was the first by an African-American composer to be performed on national television. He was also the first African American to conduct a major U.S. orchestra (when he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a Hollywood Bowl concert of his own music), and the first African-American composer to have his works performed by major American orchestras and opera companies.
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186213
Biographies William Grant Still, 1895-1978
William Grant Still New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.
Known as the "Dean of African-American Composers," William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother was a high school English teacher. He began to study the violin at age 14 and taught himself to play a number of other instruments, excelling at the cello and oboe. In 1911, Still entered Wilberforce University in Ohio where he gained valuable experience conducting the University band and producing his first attempts at composition and orchestration. Although his abilities as a performer and arranger led to many opportunities for him beyond the concert hall, he was inspired by the career of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to become a composer of concert music and opera. He left Wilberforce University in 1915 and began to work as a freelance performer and arranger for many of the top bands in the Ohio region, eventually developing an association with W.C. Handy for whom Still made his first published arrangement. His work in the world of commercial music lasted throughout his career including film scoring (largely uncredited) while living in Los Angeles during the 1930s and work as an arranger for theatre orchestras and early radio, most notably with Paul Whiteman, Sophie Tucker, Willard Robison and Artie Shaw.
Still's education continued off and on throughout the 1920s with a brief stint at Oberlin College, where he studied theory and counterpoint. He studied composition with George Chadwick at New England Conservatory and privately with experimental composer Edgard Varèse, who became Still's most influential teacher. Varèse was also an advocate for Still, programming his compositions on concerts of the International Composers' Guild, an organization which he helped found in 1921.
William Grant Still's career was comprised of many "firsts". He was the first African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a professional orchestra in the U.S., the Symphony no. 1 "Afro-American" (1930). It was premiered by Howard Hanson and the Rochester Philharmonic. The piece's New York premiere was given by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1935. He also became the first African-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States when he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1936. In the world of opera, his Troubled Island was the first by an African-American to be performed by a major opera company (New York City Opera, 1949) and that same opera was the first by an African-American to be nationally televised.
Although William Grant Still did not write a large quantity of works for solo voice and piano, the quality is very high. Still set many of the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. He also set poetry by his second wife, Verna Arvey, an accomplished writer and pianist who wrote the libretti for most of Still's operas. Perhaps his most ambitious work for voice and piano is the song cycle "Songs of Separation" which sets poetry by Dunbar, Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Haitian poet Philipps Thoby-Marcelin (in French). In the cycle, Still sets five poems of diverse authorship with a common literary theme and constructs a unified musical framework around the poems. As in his famous Symphony no. 1, Still utilizes the harmonic and rhythmic language of jazz and blues to portray the sense of "otherness" inherent in the poetry.
Further Reading
- Arvey, Verna. In One Lifetime. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1984.
- Spencer, J.M.. The William Grant Still Reader. A special issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology, 6 no. 2. (Fall 1992).
- Still, Judith Anne, Michael J. Dabrishus and Carolyn L. Quin. William Grant Still: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996.
- http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com/
https://americansymphony.org/concerts/online/william-grant-still/
Composer in Context: William Grant Still
Description
Ranked among the greatest American composers, William Grant Still was nicknamed the “Dean of African American Composers” for the many firsts he achieved during his substantial career. He was the first African American to have a symphony performed by a professional orchestra (Symphony No. 1 performed by the Rochester Philharmonic in 1931); conduct a major American orchestra in his own music (Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1936); and have an opera performed by a major opera company (Troubled Island performed by the New York City Opera in 1949) and nationally televised (Bayou Legend televised in 1981).
Though more well-known today as a symphonist, he embraced all of America’s music, composing and arranging a variety of works from film scores, art songs and popular music to symphonies, operas, concerti, and chamber music. Still flourished in his compositional career; during a time when Jazz was the epitome of Black artistic expression, he managed to forge a difficult path and claim his right of access to the world of classical music. Still utilized the expressive liberties claimed by White modernists while rejecting their elitism and conveyed the struggles of being a Black person in America through his music—an experience that was quite uncommon within the primarily White realm he was navigating.
Presently, while diversity in classical music has improved, the reality is still bleak especially for composers. A difficult hurdle to maneuver once a work is completed is getting a significant orchestra or ensemble to premiere it, granting the composer exposure and further access in an already exclusionary field. Additionally, many Black composers were historically confined to the Jazz or Blues genres—if not outright ignored—with the assumption that the Black experience and sound was monolithic. As a result, many Black composers—historically and contemporarily—have gone largely unnoticed and forgotten.
Listen today to hear our recordings of three landmarks from the great William Grant Still’s composing career that represent aspects of three of his self-described style periods…and if you can make it, join us on September 12 in Sewell, NJ to hear a chamber program curated by ASO’s Philip Payton to celebrate and explore the significant contributions Black composers have made to classical music, including mesmerizing works by contemporary composers Jessie Montgomery and Trevor Weston.
Text adapted from concert notes for Revisiting William Grant Still.
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Details
Program
Africa
“An American Negro has formed a concept of the land of his ancestors
based largely on its folklore, and influenced by his contact with
American civilization. He beholds in his mind’s eye not the Africa of
reality but an Africa mirrored in fancy, and radiantly ideal.”
In attempting to represent matters African—a compelling topic for artists in the 1920s—Still confronted the aesthetic gulf between the exploitative primitivism so prevalent among the (white) modernists and the character with which he, as a man of the Harlem Renaissance, wanted to represent the ancestral and cultural African connections of Black Americans. Even though he struggled for over a decade while writing Africa, Still’s distinctive aesthetic and artistic integrity manifests itself as compellingly as the overarching idealism of its purpose.
Symphony No. 2 in G minor, Song of a New Race
An extension of his first Symphony, Afro-American Symphony,
Still’s Symphony No. 2 (1937) served to represent “the American colored
man of today,” a vision and hope for an integrated society. This theme
is manifested in the characteristically expansive nature of the piece
and is further highlighted through his use of the brass section to
express a call and response dialogue—which is common practice in African American churches and folk songs.
Darker America
Still’s Darker America (1924) was both his first extended piece
and indicator of his success as a concert music composer. Premiered in
1926, Still reflected on the depth of his intentions for the piece
noting that it “is representative of the American Negro, and suggests
triumph over sorrows through fervent prayer.” The opening theme of this
tone poem features “the American Negro” in the strings, a “sorrow theme”
in the English horn, a theme of “hope” in the muted brass, and a prayer
of “numbed rather than anguished souls” in the oboe. As the rest of the
piece unfolds, the listener can bear witness to the development of the
theme from sorrow to triumph.
Artists
Composed by William Grant Still
Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Audio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grant_Still
William Grant Still
 Portrait of Still by Carl Van Vechten | |
| Born | May 11, 1895 Woodville, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Died | December 3, 1978 (aged 83) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Signature | |
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William Grant Still Jr. (May 11, 1895 – December 3, 1978) was an American composer of nearly 200 works, including five symphonies, four ballets, eight operas, over thirty choral works, plus art songs, chamber music and works for solo instruments. Born in Mississippi, he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas,[1] attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music,[2][3] and was a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and later Edgard Varèse.[4] Due to his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to have been part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Often referred to as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers," Still was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. Still is known primarily for his first symphony, Afro-American Symphony (1930), which was, until 1950, the most widely performed symphony composed by an American. Also of note, Still was the first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony (which was, in fact, the first one he composed) performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television.
Life
William Grant Still, Jr. was born on May 11, 1895, in Woodville, Mississippi.[1]:15 He was the son of two teachers, Carrie Lena Fambro[5] (1872–1927) and William Grant Still Sr[1]:5 (1871–1895). His father was a partner in a grocery store and performed as a local bandleader.[1]:5 William Grant Still Sr. died when his infant son was three months old.[1]:5
Still's mother moved with him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught high school English.[1]:6 She met and in 1904[5] married Charles B. Shepperson, who nurtured his stepson William's musical interests by taking him to operettas and buying Red Seal recordings of classical music, which the boy greatly enjoyed.[1]:6 The two attended a number of performances by musicians on tour.[citation needed][6] His maternal grandmother Anne Fambro[5] sang African-American spirituals to him.[7]:6, 12
Still started violin lessons in Little Rock at the age of 15. He taught himself to play the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, double bass, cello and viola, and showed a great interest in music.[citation needed] At 16 years old, he graduated from M. W. Gibbs High School in Little Rock.[7]:3
His mother wanted him to go to medical school, so Still pursued a Bachelor of Science degree program at Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio.[2] Still became a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. He conducted the university band, learned to play various instruments, and started to compose and to do orchestrations. He left Wilberforce without graduating.[1]:7
Upon receiving a small amount of money left to him by his father, he began studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.[3] Still worked for the school assisting the janitor, along with a few other small jobs outside of the school, yet still struggled financially.[3] When Professor Lehmann asked Still why he wasn't studying composition, Still told him honestly that he couldn't afford to, leading to George Andrews agreeing to teach him composition without charge.[3] He also studied privately with the modern French composer Edgard Varèse and the American composer George Whitefield Chadwick.[4]:249[5]
On October 4, 1915,[5] Still married Grace Bundy, whom he had met while they were both at Wilberforce.[1]:1,7 They had a son, William III, and three daughters, Gail, June, and Caroline.[5] They separated in 1932 and divorced February 6, 1939.[5] On February 8, 1939, he married pianist Verna Arvey, driving to Tijuana for the ceremony because interracial marriage was illegal in California.[1]:2[5] They had a daughter, Judith Anne, and a son, Duncan.[1]:2[5] Still's granddaughter is journalist Celeste Headlee by way of Judith Anne.
On December 1, 1976, his home was designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #169. It is located at 1262 Victoria Avenue in Oxford Square, Los Angeles.[8]
Career
In 1916 Still worked in Memphis for W.C. Handy's band.[5] In 1918 Still joined the United States Navy to serve in World War I. After the war he went to Harlem, where he continued to work for Handy.[5] During his time in Harlem Still was involved with other important cultural figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen, and is considered to be part of that movement.[9]
He recorded with Fletcher Henderson's Dance Orchestra in 1921,[10]:85 and later played in the pit orchestra for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's musical, Shuffle Along[1]:4 and in other pit orchestras for Sophie Tucker, Artie Shaw, and Paul Whiteman.[11] With Henderson, he joined Henry Pace's Pace Phonograph Company (Black Swan).[12] Later in the 1920s, Still served as the arranger of "Yamekraw", a "Negro Rhapsody" (1930), composed by the Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson.[13]
In the 1930s Still worked as an arranger of popular music, writing for Willard Robison's Deep River Hour and Paul Whiteman's Old Gold Show, both popular NBC Radio broadcasts.[11]
Still's first major orchestral composition, Symphony No. 1 "Afro-American", was performed in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic, conducted by Howard Hanson.[5] It was the first time the complete score of a work by an African American was performed by a major orchestra.[5] By the end of World War II the piece had been performed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London.[5] Until 1950 the symphony was the most popular of any composed by an American.[14] Still developed a close professional relationship with Hanson; many of Still's compositions were performed for the first time in Rochester.[5]
In 1934 Still moved to Los Angeles. He received his first Guggenheim Fellowship[15] and started work on the first of his eight operas, Blue Steel.[16]
In 1936, Still conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl; he was the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra in a performance of his own works.[17][11]
Still arranged music for films. These included Pennies from Heaven (the 1936 film starring Bing Crosby and Madge Evans) and Lost Horizon (the 1937 film starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt and Sam Jaffe).[5] For Lost Horizon, he arranged the music of Dimitri Tiomkin. Still was also hired to arrange the music for the 1943 film Stormy Weather, but left the assignment because "Twentieth-Century Fox 'degraded colored people.'"[5]
Still composed Song of a City for the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.[18] The song played continuously during the fair by the exhibit "Democracity."[18] According to Still's granddaughter, he couldn't attend the fair except on "Negro Day" without police protection.[19]
In 1949 his opera Troubled Island, originally completed in 1939, about Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti, was performed by the New York City Opera.[5] It was the first opera by an American to be performed by that company[20] and the first by an African American to be performed by a major company.[17] Still was upset by the negative reviews it received.[5]
In 1955 he conducted the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra; he was the first African American to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South.[17] Still's works were performed internationally by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the BBC Orchestra.[citation needed]
In 1981 the opera A Bayou Legend was the first by an African-American composer to be performed on national television.[21]
Still was known as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers".[9][17] Still and Arvey's papers are held by the University of Arkansas.[9]
Legacy and honors
- Still received three Guggenheim Fellowships in music composition (1934, 1935, 1938)[15] and at least one Rosenwald Fellowship.[11]
- In 1949, he received a citation for Outstanding Service to American Music from the National Association for American Composers and Conductors[5]
- In 1976, his home in Los Angeles was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument.[8][22]
- He was awarded honorary doctorates[5] from Oberlin College, Wilberforce University, Howard University, Bates College, the University of Arkansas, Pepperdine University, the New England Conservatory of Music, the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and the University of Southern California.[citation needed]
- He was posthumously awarded the 1982 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for music composition for his opera A Bayou Legend.[5][23]:6
Selected compositions
Still composed almost 200 works, including eight operas,[24]:200 five symphonies,[24]:200 four ballets,[25] plus art songs, chamber music, and works for solo instruments.[5] He composed more than thirty choral works.[11] Many of his works are believed to be lost.[5]:278
- Saint Louis Blues (comp.W.C.Handy; arr.Still; 1916)[26][27]:310
- Hesitating Blues (comp.W.C.Handy; arr.Still; 1916)[27][28]
- From the Land of Dreams (1924)[5][2]:4
- Darker America (1924)[4]:251
- From the Journal of a Wanderer (1925)[29]:224
- Levee Land (1925)[4]:251
- From The Black Belt (1926)[4]:252
- La Guiablesse (1927)[5]
- Yamekaw, a Negro Rhapsody (comp.J.P.Johnson; arr.Still; 1928)
- Sahdji (1930)[2]:4
- Africa (1930)[5]
- Symphony No. 1 "Afro-American" (1930, revised in 1969)[4]:253
- A Deserted Plantation (1933)[2]:4
- The Sorcerer (1933)[2]:4
- Dismal Swamp (1933)[4]:251
- Kaintuck (1933)[4]:252
- Blue Steel (1934)[2]:4
- Three Visions (1935)[4]:253
- Summerland (1935)[4]:253
- A Song A Dust (1936)[4]:253
- Symphony No. 2, "Song of A New Race" (1937)[4]:253[25]
- Lenox Avenue (1937)[4]:252
- Song of A City (1938)[4]:253
- Seven Traceries (1939)[2]:5
- And They Lynched Him on A Tree (1940)[4]:251
- Miss Sally's Party (1940)[2]:5
- Can'tcha line 'em, for orchestra (1940)[2]:5
- Old California (1941)[4]:252
- Troubled Island, opera, produced 1949 (1937–39)[5]
- A Bayou Legend, opera (1941)[5]
- Plain-Chant for America (1941)[4]:252
- Incantation and Dance (1941)[2]:5
- A Southern Interlude (1942)[2]:5
- In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943)[4]:252
- Suite for Violin & Piano (1943)[2]:5
- Festival Overture (1944)[4]:251
- Poem for Orchestra (1944)[4]:252
- Bells (1944)[4]:251
- Symphony No. 5, "Western Hemisphere" (1945, revised 1970)[4]:253[25]
- From The Delta (1945)[4]:252
- Wailing Woman (1946)[2]:5
- Archaic Ritual Suite (1946)[4]:251
- Symphony No. 4, "Autochthonous" (1947)[4]:253
- Danzas de Panama (1948)[4]:251
- From A Lost Continent (1948)[4]:251
- Miniatures (1948)[4]:250
- Constaso (1950)[4]:251
- To You, America (1951)[4]:253
- Grief, originally titled as Weeping Angel (1953)[citation needed]
- The Little Song That Wanted To Be A Symphony (1954)[4]:252
- A Psalm for The Living (1954)[4]:252
- Rhapsody (1954)[4]:252
- The American Scene (1957)[4]:251
- Serenade (1957)[4]:252
- Ennanga (1958)[4]:251[2]:6
- Symphony No. 3, "The Sunday Symphony" (1958)[4]:253[30]
- Lyric Quartette (1960)[2]:7
- Patterns (1960)[4]:252
- The Peaceful Land (1960)[4]:252
- Preludes (1962)[4]:252
- Highway 1 USA (1963)[4]:252
- Folk Suite No. 4 (1963)[4]:251
- Threnody: In Memory of Jan Sibelius (1965)[4]:253
- Little Red School House (1967)[4]:252
- Little Folk Suite (1968)[4]:252
- Choreographic Prelude (1970)[4]:251
See also
- Black conductors
- List of African-American composers
- List of jazz-influenced classical compositions
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, early Black British composer
Sources
- Horne, Aaron. Woodwind Music of Black Composers, Greenwood Press, 1990. ISBN 0-313272-65-4
- Roach, Hildred. Black American Music. Past and Present, second edition, Krieger Publishing Company 1992. ISBN 0-894647-66-0
- Sadie, Stanley; Hitchcock, H. Wiley. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986. ISBN 0-943818-36-2
Further reading
- Reef, Catherine (2003). William Grant Still: African American Composer. Morgan Reynolds. ISBN 1-931798-11-7
- Sewell, George A., and Margaret L. Dwight (1984). William Grant Still: America's Greatest Black Composer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi
- Southern, Eileen (1984). William Grant Still – Trailblazer. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.
- Still, Verna Arvey (1984). In One Lifetime. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.
- Still, Judith Anne (2006). Just Tell the Story. The Master Player Library.
- Still, William Grant (2011). My Life My Words, a William Grant Still autobiography. The Master Player Library.
External links
- William Grant Still Music, Official Site
- Bibliography at Encyclopedia of Arkansas
- William Grant Still, A Study in Contradictions, University of California
- William Grant Still, Interview, African American Music Collection, University of Michigan
- William Grant Still, "Composer, Arranger, Conductor & Oboist". Extensive info at AfriClassical.com
- William Grant Still and Verna Arvey Papers, University of Arkansas, Special Collections Department, Manuscript Collection MC 1125
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-harlem-renaissance-and-american-music-by-mike-oppenheim.php
The Harlem Renaissance and American Music
The Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro"
One of the most
significant intellectual and artistic trends of twentieth century
American history, the Harlem Renaissance impacted art, literature, and
music in a manner that forever altered the American cultural landscape.
The Harlem Renaissance was a movement in the 1920s through which
African-American writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers sought to
embrace black heritage and culture in American life. This shift towards a
more politically assertive and self-confident conception of identity
and racial pride led to the establishment of the concept of the "New
Negro," coined by Alain Locke.
While describing the "New Negro,"
Locke referred to a renewed intellectual curiosity in the study of
black culture and history among the African-American population. This
evaluation of identity required an honest representation of the
African-American experience. The adoption of serious portrayals of black
American life in art, as opposed to the caricatures provided through
minstrelsy and vaudeville, was a necessary step in the cultivation of
the Harlem Renaissance ideals. To Locke, the black artist's objective
was to "repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social
perspective" (1968:10). Significantly, these goals were most immediately
attainable through the "revaluation by white and black alike of the
Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions,
past and prospective" (ibid.:15). For the thinkers and artists of the
Harlem Renaissance, the way to achieve this revaluation was through
incorporating themes of black identity and history into their works.
The
perception of Africans and African-Americans as essential cultural
contributors became significant in the social struggles black Americans
faced in the twentieth century. Using the concept of the "New Negro,"
artists of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond sought to bring black
culture from the status of folk art to a position of sophistication and
dignity.
William Grant Still,
the most prominent African-American art music composer of the time, was
greatly influenced by the concept of the "New Negro," a theme
frequently evident in his concert works. Duke Ellington, a renowned jazz artist, began to reflect the "New Negro" in his music, particularly in the jazz suite Black, Brown, and Beige
. The Harlem Renaissance prompted a renewed interest in black culture
that was even reflected in the work of white artists, the most well
known example being George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
Through applying the concept of the "New Negro," the depiction of
African-Americans in American art music shifted from a misrepresentative
stereotype to a depiction of people of African descent as significant
contributors to the American cultural landscape.
William Grant Still: Tone Poems and Operas
The composer most often associated with the Harlem Renaissance and
African-American art music is William Grant Still, a prominent figure
musically, socially, and politically. A major factor contributing to the
birth of the Harlem Renaissance was the emergence of an educated black
middle-class, to which William Grant Still belonged. Still began
studying music at Wilberforce University in 1911 with the goal of
composing concert music and opera. Still produced several instrumental
works, choral works, and operas during his career, often championing
black culture and sometimes overtly criticizing American society (such
as in the 1940 choral work And They Lynched Him on a Tree).
The values introduced by the Harlem Renaissance are clearly discernible in Still's Afro-American Symphony,
composed in 1930, and heavily based on the blues "to prove that the
Negro musical idiom is an important part of the world's musical culture"
(Murchison 2000:52). Still incorporated the blues scale and blue notes
(flat third and flat seventh), call-and-response structure, and
descending melodic contours typical of the blues into the art music
genre of a symphony, merging black culture and "high art."
Additionally, the Afro-American Symphony
is a programmatic work, or tone poem, intended to be an emotional or
psychological portrait of the African-American experience. In this
representation of black America, Still aimed to express emotional
longing, sorrow, and the aspirations of the "Old Negro," themes overcome
through hope and prayer in his later tone poems. This series of tone
poems presents Still's conception of the history, culture, and
psychology of African-Americans; in his representation black Americans
rise up from a history of slavery and sorrow to a position of
self-empowerment and triumph.
The 1939 opera Troubled Island,
a collaborative effort between William Grant Still and the poet
Langston Hughes, features an even more attentive representation of black
cultural history than Still's tone poems. Hughes' libretto is based on
his 1928 play Drums of Haiti. The opera is about the rise and
fall of Haiti's first emperor, Jean Jacques Dessalines. Dessalines leads
the Haitian revolt against French colonials and installs himself in
power, yet as the emperor, he laments his own illiteracy and ignorance
when requested to provide a teacher for one of his villages. The opera
concludes with Dessalines death at the hands of a revolting population.
Dessalines
rise to power represents the elevation of the African-Americans,
paralleling the rise from slavery depicted in Still's tone poems. The
themes of sorrow and ignorance are again presented to contrast with the
concept of the educated and hopeful "New Negro." Troubled Island
challenges the viewer to contemplate the importance of history,
education, and the cultural contributions of black America to American
culture in general.
William Grant Still's music exemplifies the incorporation of Harlem
Renaissance ideals into art music through expressing African-American
heritage in his music. In addition to championing black culture as a
composer, Still broke several racial barriers in the American music
scene. His Afro-American Symphony was the first symphony
composed by an African-American and performed by a major orchestra, and
he was the first black American to conduct a white radio orchestra (Deep River Hour,
1932), conduct a major orchestra (the Los Angeles PO in 1936), or
receive a series of commissions from major American orchestras.
Duke Ellington: Beyond the "Jungle Sound"
Duke Ellington provides an interesting contrast to his contemporary,
William Grant Still. While both are among the most prominent composers
of the Harlem Renaissance, they came from strikingly different
backgrounds. Ellington was never formally trained in music; he began
studying piano at age seven, taught himself harmony at the piano, and
learned orchestration through experimentation with his band. Ellington
is best known as a big band leader and arranger, as a songwriter, and as
the voice of "jungle music." In the 1920s and early 1930s Ellington's
band was the house band for Harlem's Cotton Club. Far from
sophistication, the Cotton Club gigs often featured jungle decor and
elaborate costumes to accompany the "jungle sound," intended to imply
the "exotic" music of Africa.
Despite Ellington's early
involvement with the Cotton Club he eventually embraced the beliefs of
Alain Locke and sought to present black music as high art, most notably
achieved when his suite Black, Brown, and Beige
debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1943. In 1930, Ellington expressed the
desire to compose a work that would serve as a musical history of the
black experience; beginning in Africa, progressing through Southern
slavery, and finally to Harlem (Tucker 2002: 69). This framework
eventually became Black, Brown, and Beige, though it was not
composed for over a decade after its conception. However, during this
period Ellington did compose several pieces dealing with
African-American themes including Symphony in Black in 1934, Jump for Joy in 1941, and the unfinished opera Boola.
Black, Brown, and Beige
was Ellington's conception of a "tone-parallel," illustrating the
history of black Americans. The composition is accompanied by poetry
penned by Ellington, depicting the scenes that the music is meant to
evoke. The overall work is divided into three sections, which are
further divided into songs. The first section, Black, first depicts blacks in Africa and proceeds to give a narrative of life as a Southern slave. Black
consists of "Work Song," "Come Sunday," and "Light;" these songs and
poems represent the ideas of the sorrow of slavery, the redemption of
faith, and the hope for a better future. Brown depicts the triumph of blacks over the oppression of slavery in the song "Emancipation Proclamation." The work ends with Beige, which celebrates Harlem and depicts African-Americans as a community characterized by pride and knowledge.
Composed with the goal of racial advancement, Black, Brown, and Beige
expresses racial pride and history, the celebration of African-American
identity, and the social progress of black Americans in the twentieth
century. The structure of the work emphasized the continuity of black
history from slavery to the present. Brown deals with the
sacrifices made by black soldiers in the Revolutionary War and connects
it to the black soldiers participating in the Second World War; clearly
marking African-Americans as loyal and dedicated American citizens.
Ellington aimed to correct "the common misconception of the Negro which
has left a confused impression of his true character and abilities,"
through his portrayal of modern black America (DeVeaux 1993:129
Though
Ellington presented African-Americans as culturally distinct, he sought
to draw this identity into unity with American culture. The final
movement is accompanied by the text "We're black, brown and beige but
we're red, white and blue!" (ibid.:132). In the midst of World War II
Ellington aimed not only for the social advancement of
African-Americans, but for the unity of the United States as a whole.
That Black, Brown, and Beige was performed in Carnegie Hall is also significant. First, it elevated
black music to the premier American concert hall; and second, it broke
social barriers by bringing a significantly large black audience into a
white venue.
George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as it Reflects the Harlem Renaissance
George Gershwin began formally studying piano in 1912, focusing on
works by classical composers such as Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy, but by
the age of fifteen Gershwin worked as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley.
Living in New York, Gershwin was in prime location to take notice of the
happenings of the Harlem Renaissance. His compositions show significant
influence from African-American musical styles. Gershwin's use of the
blues scale and jazz syncopation is heard in several of his songs and
larger compositions, particularly in 1924's Rhapsody in Blue.
Gershwin demonstrated that jazz, a black music, was worthy of elevation
to symphonic arrangements and performance on the concert stage. As a
result Gershwin is credited as the first to bring jazz into the concert
hall.
Porgy and Bess, a collaboration between Gershwin
and writer DuBose Heyward, was conceived as a folk opera based on the
lives of African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina. The libretto
is based on a work of Heyward's entitled Porgy. Porgy
was intended to be a "Negro novel" that would "leave an authentic record
[of black life in] the period that produced it" (Crawford 1972:18). In
1926, one year after its publication, Gerswhin contacted Heyward with
the idea for Porgy and Bess. Though he was already using
aspects of black music such as syncopation and blue notes, Gershwin
decided to visit Heyward in Charleston, South Carolina to "hear some
spirituals and perhaps go to a colored café or two," in order to
experience the local culture and music firsthand (ibid.:20).
Gershwin's Porgy and Bess does not represent black
characters in the context of the "New Negro." In fact, it seems to
adhere to the existing stereotypes that the artists of the Harlem
Renaissance sought to discredit. Gershwin and Heyward's approach to the
topic of the African-American experience differs from those of William
Grant Still and Duke Ellington. Still and Ellington both created a
cultural history of African-Americans culminating in the establishment
of black communities in urban centers. Porgy and Bess was an
attempt to create a representation of rural black life, contrary to
Harlem Renaissance ideals of the sophisticated, city-dwelling "New
Negro." As a result, Gershwin was accused of creating "fakelore," or
pseudo-folklore, denigrating the black community through the portrayal
of their culture as quaint and primeval.
Musically, Porgy and Bess
tells a different story of black culture. Gershwin continued to
incorporate the blues scale, syncopated rhythm, and call-and-response
technique into the score. More importantly though, Gershwin made use of
the practice of "signifying" African-American music, showing a degree of
perception and understanding of black music and culture not expressed
in the libretto.
Signifying is the practice of quoting ideas
from another song or musical form of black origin (i.e., gospel,
spirituals, blues). Signifying is seen in jazz, the blues, spirituals,
and ragtime; it is important because it connects all of these forms
through their African-American origin. "Summertime," which occurs
throughout Porgy and Bess, features excellent examples of
signifying. The spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" is
actually the basis for "Summertime." Gershwin used the intervallic
structure and the rhythm (in augmentation) from the spiritual to create a
new piece of music that maintains an identity as a product of black
culture, linking black culture and history to contemporary America
(Floyd 1993).
Towards a New Perception of American Identities
Bibliography
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1993. "Troping the Blues: From Spirituals to the Concert Hall." Black Music Research Journal 13(1): 31-51.
Locke, Alain. 1968. "The New Negro," in The New Negro: An Interpretation. Edited by Alain Locke. New York: Arno Press.
Murchison, Gayle. 2000. "'Dean of Afro-American Composers' or 'Harlem Renaissance Man': The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still," in William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Edited by Catherine Parsons Smith. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press.
Tucker, Mark. 2002. "The Genesis of 'Black, Brown, and Beige.'" Black Music Research Journal 22: 131-150.
WILLIAM GRANT STILL
"The Dean of Afro-American Composers"
May 11, 1895 - December 3, 1978
William Grant Still is remembered for many musical and historical achievements, including becoming the first African-American...
United States, (after his death ).
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/how-composer-william-grant-still-changed-classical-music/
How William Grant Still, the ‘Dean of Afro-American composers’, changed American classical music forever
16 October 2020
Classicfm.con
William Grant Still.
Picture:
Getty / International Opus
William Grant Still was the first American to have an opera produced by New York City Opera, and the first African American composer to conduct a major US symphony orchestra – here’s everything you have to know about the ‘Dean’ of Black classical music.
“William Grant Still will conduct two of his own works.”
With that, The Los Angeles Times’ music and dance critic, Isabel Morse Jones, nonchalantly tabulated one of the most momentous occasions in American classical music history – that on 23 July 1936, at Hollywood Bowl, a Black conductor would lead a major US orchestra in concert, for the very first time.
When William Grant Still took to the podium at the helm of the LA Philharmonic, he was just ticking off a “first” of the many “firsts” that defined his career. Still was also the first American composer to have an opera performed by the New York City Opera and the first African American composer to have an opera performed by a major company; the first African American to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra; and the first to have an opera performed on National TV.
Dubbed ‘The Dean of African American Composers’, Still composed more than 150 works, including five symphonies – his first of which was the most-performed symphony of any American for a long time – eight operas, and numerous other works. He was also a conductor, arranger and oboist.
Read more: 9 Black composers who changed the course of music history >
Read more: Discover the life and music of Scott Joplin, the ‘King of Ragtime’ >
Who was William Grant Still?
William Grant Still was born on 11 May in 1895. His mother, Carrie Lena Fambro, and his father, William Grant Still Sr, were both teachers.
His father died when Still was young, and music came from his stepfather, who encouraged him from a young age. Still took violin lessons from 15, and also taught himself to play the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bass, cello and viola.
At his mother’s encouragement, Still studied medicine at university, but never completed the course. While at university, he stayed heavily involved with music, playing in university orchestras and bands, and he eventually got to Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio to further his musical studies.
His composer credentials come from a teacher lineage that includes French revolutionary Edgard Varèse among others, and Still combined this classical clout with his passion for folk- and jazz-inspired styles.
Depicting the African American experience through orchestral music
Grant Still incorporated the blues, spirituals, jazz, and other ethnic American music into his orchestral and operatic compositions.
His orchestral piece, Wood Notes, depicts Still’s love of nature. And works like his ‘Afro-American’ Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 2, the symphonic tone poem Africa, and his ballet Sahdji all “depict the African American experience” and “present the vision of an integrated American society.”
William Grant Still is very much considered part of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ movement, which highlighted and celebrated African American intellectual, social, and artistic contributions to American cultural life, fanning out from Harlem in New York.
His works were performed internationally by the best orchestras in the world, including the Berlin Phil, the London Symphony Orchestra and Tokyo Philharmonic.
Other contributions to musical life
As well as being a prolific composer of symphony, opera and ballet works – many of which highlighted struggles of Black lives in America, including The Troubled Island and Highway No. 1 USA – William Grant Still also worked for ‘Father of the Blues’ W.C. Handy in Memphis.
Still was a prolific arranger of pop music, and played in pit bands and for recordings, including for pianist Fletcher Henderson, singer Sophie Tucker and jazz clarinet Artie Shaw, and many others.
He also arranged movie music, including for Pennies from Heaven (1936) and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon.
William Grant Still received an honour for Outstanding Service to American Music from the National Association for American Composers and Conductors, and had a raft of honorary doctorates, reflecting the extraordinary contribution he made to classical music history in America – and the world.
Still died on 3 December 1978 in LA.
Hear William Grant Still’s music played by Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE, the founder of the Chineke! Foundation, on Chi-chi’s Classical Champions, and during other programmes on Classic FM.
Click here to catch up with Chi-chi’s Classical Champions on Global Player, the official Classic FM app.
https://www.allclassical.org/black-history-month-william-grant-still/
Black History Month: William Grant Still
Since 1976, the United States has officially recognized February as Black History Month, an annual time to recognize the central roles blacks have played in U.S. history and a celebration of the achievements of African Americans in our culture and society. All Classical Portland will be joining the celebration of Black History Month, featuring some of the best recordings of composers of African origin (American, and around the world).
One of the critical values of classical music (and of art in general)
is that it allows listeners to hear the world through different lenses.
Through their unique set of backgrounds, experiences, and values,
composers create works that expose their audiences to humanity’s rich
variety of perspectives and cultural traditions. However, as an art that
draws from a primarily western European tradition, celebrating
diversity is also one of classical music’s greatest challenges to
overcome. Even today, black composers remain on the outskirts of the
classical music establishment. Social prejudices, as well as other
factors, have excluded them from entering the classical canon, which
continues to be largely dominated by white, male composers. However,
African-Americans have deeply influenced the orchestral tradition in the
United States and beyond.
One of the most prominent African American contributors to the history of classical music was William Grant Still (1895-1978), a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and known to his colleagues as the “Dean of Afro-American composers.” Born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas, Still took formal violin lessons and taught himself clarinet, saxophone, oboe, viola, cello and double bass. He was interested in pursuing a college music education, but his mother pushed him to study medicine at Wilberforce University in Ohio, concerned that societal limitations would prevent a successful career as a black composer. Nevertheless, Still later dropped out of Wilberforce and entered Oberlin University to study music.
Still had a diverse musical training. He wrote jazz arrangements for
blues masters and bandleaders such as Artie Shaw, Paul Whiteman and W.C.
Handy, but also received formal instruction from composers including
George Chadwick of the first New England school, and the French
modernist composer Edgard Varèse. Over his career, Still wrote over 150
compositions, including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works,
choral pieces, and solo vocal works.
Still broke racial barriers and earned many “firsts” in the realm of classical music. He was the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, as well as first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States. Additionally, Still composed the first symphonic work by a black composer to be performed by a major U.S. orchestra, the Afro-American Symphony, premiered by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in 1931 under the direction of Howard Hanson. On Thursday, February 1st, All Classical will be featuring this work alongside some of the other greatest works by African-American composers.
The Afro-American Symphony fits within the standard framework of a European four-movement symphony but incorporates African American musical idioms throughout the piece. By blending jazz, blues, and spirituals into a traditional classical form and placing them within the context of the concert hall, Still highlights these styles as something to be celebrated, rather than downcast as low class or vulgar music. Let’s explore the ways that Still interweaves these three African American idioms – jazz, blues, and spirituals – into his Afro-American Symphony, with a focus on the first movement.
The Afro-American Symphony is scored for full orchestra, including celeste, harp, and tenor banjo (the piece was the first time a banjo had been used in symphonic music). The symphony has a typical sonata-form first movement, a slow movement, a scherzo, and a fast finale. While Still did not intend the Afro-American Symphony to be an explicitly programmatic piece, his notebooks did include alternate titles for each movement (“Longing,” “Sorrow,” “Humor,” and “Aspiration”). After completion of the symphony, Still linked each movement to verses from poems by the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), which heighten the emotional impact of each movement. Dunbar was one of the first African American poets to achieve a national reputation from both white and black audiences. His accurate portrayals of African American life in the South using folk materials and dialects aptly complement Still’s efforts to interweave African and European traditions in his piece.
William Grant Still: Afro-American Symphony - I. Moderato Assai:
For the music itself, the opening movement begins with an introductory melody by the English horn, followed by the first theme played by a muted trumpet, a blues melody adapted from W.C. Handy’s Saint Louis Blues. This tune becomes a prominent centerpiece, reappearing in altered forms throughout both the first movement and the symphony as a whole. We might now think of blues music as any sort of sad, downcast kind of song, but the blues has a rich African American history, beginning as a folk style that developed in the southern United States and becoming a standard genre by the end of the nineteenth century.
Since the 1920s, the blues has helped shape jazz, country music,
and rock’n’roll, and many other popular musical genres. Still’s melody
has several key features that make it a classic blues tune, including
its use of the standard twelve-bar blues harmonic progression, a swung
rhythm, and a use of lowered fifth, third, and seventh scale degrees in
the melody that imitate “blue” notes. Still was aware that inserting a
blues tune into his symphony could cause some listeners to perceive it
as unrefined. However, as he writes in his sketchbook, his decision to
place the tune at the forefront of the piece reflects his fierce defense
of blues as a powerful emblem of African American identity:
“I harbor no delusions as to the triviality of the Blues, the secular folk music of the American Negro, despite their lowly origin and the homely sentiment of their texts. The pathos of their melodic content bespeaks the anguish of human hearts and belies the banality of their lyrics. What is more, they, unlike many Spirituals, do not exhibit the influence of Caucasian music.”
Other elements throughout the movement reflect characteristic
features of African American music. Later, for example, the first theme
repeats in the clarinet, this time with interjections from other winds.
These interjections between short phrases of melody suggest the
“call-and-response” style found in much African music. Still also
frequently uses syncopation in the melody and accompaniment (rhythms
with accents displaced on the weak beat) and chords including both major
and minor thirds, further suggesting African American-influenced jazz
music.
Also of note is Still’s unusual instrumental timbres. Still groups
instruments together to create sounds typical of jazz big bands,
including trumpets and trombones with Harmon mutes, drum set effects
such as steady taps on the bass drum, dampened strikes on the cymbal,
and col legno (on the wood of the bow) rhythms in the violins.
All of these factors give a nod to the seminal influence of jazz as the
style that became most associated with America between the two World
Wars. American classical composers seeking a way to write music that was
distinctly “American” took advantage of the new idiom of jazz as
inspiration, including George Gershwin, Marc Blitzstein, and Leonard
Bernstein. Jazz also influenced classical composers in Europe, including
Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky.
As the first movement continues to develop the jazzy melodies from the first theme, however, it transitions to a second theme with a melancholy mood, with pentatonic contours suggestive of an African American spiritual. Spirituals originated when slaves heard hymns upon conversion to Christianity and used the hymns as musical models, applying their own ideas to Biblical texts with themes of longing freedom from bondage. Still’s combination of blues and spiritual-influenced music fittingly reflects movement’s subtitle of “Longing” while sharing a core aspect of the African American experience with his audience.
William Grant Still: Afro-American Symphony - II. Adagio:
The rest of the symphony continues with this fusion of African
American experience into classical European form. The second movement, Adagio
(“Sorrow,”) continues with themes that relate to the first movement but
carrying on in the spiritual style. The third movement, Animato
(“Humor”), presents a pair themes and variations. Interestingly,
several measures into the first theme is a tune that closely resembles
Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” Did Gershwin get his melody from Still, or
was it the other way around? While scholars haven’t reached a decisive
conclusion, musicologist Catherine Parsons Smith suggests that Still
believed Gershwin had picked up the melodic and rhythmic ideas of the
tune from improvisations by Still while playing in the orchestra pit of Shuffle Along
ten years earlier. Either way, the melody is a joy to listen to, and in
addition to the more fanfare-like second theme the movement echoes the
themes of African American emancipation and empowerment in the Dunbar
poem attached to the movement. The final movement, Lento con risoluzione (“Aspiration”),
begins with a poignant hymn-like section reminiscent of gospel and
choral music, and gradually culminates into a lively finale.
The Afro-American Symphony is a compelling reflection of
Still’s diverse range of experiences as a composer and musician. Still’s
incorporation of three prominent forms of African American music into
his piece, the blues, jazz, and spirituals, creates a unique symphonic
style that celebrates the complexity and richness of the black
experience in the post-Civil War musical era. Since the 1931 premiere of
the Afro-American Symphony, Still’s multifarious style has
gone on to influence even non-classical music. In 1934, Still moved to
Los Angeles, where he composed music for films alongside his classical
works, helping shape a style that other composers and arrangers used for
scoring films and popular music. The Afro-American Symphony,
however, remains as Still’s landmark piece, and remains one of the most
frequently performed symphonies by an American composer in the United
States. Bringing together a lifetime of musical experiences, it has
earned a place in the canon of the Western classical music tradition not
in spite of, but because of its daring and creative integration of African American and European idioms.
Hungry for more listening? Music Director John Pitman also has some recommended recordings of Still’s works from All Classical’s music library. John chose a particular recording of Still’s Symphony for several reasons:
“The performance, by the Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, is especially bright and full of life. There are also two rare gems by the composer on the CD, and a work by Olly Wilson called Expansions II, which connects Still’s mid-century music to more recent times. The liner notes are especially valuable, as they include several paragraphs by the composer’s daughter, Judith Anne Still, who has dedicated her life to preserving her father’s important contribution to American music.”
If you are interested in listening to this CD, it can be purchased via this link to Arkivmusic.com. When purchasing the CD using this link, All Classical’s programming receives 10% from the sale.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more blog posts this month featuring composers, conductors and musicians in celebration of Black History month, including Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, André Watts, Kathleen Battle and more!
References
- Burkholder, J. Peter, Grout, Donald Jay, and Palisca, Claude V. A History of Western Music. 9th New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Print.
- Burkholder, J. Peter, and Palisca, Claude V. Norton Anthology of Western Music. Volume Three: The Twentieth Century and After. 7th New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Print.
- “Dunbar and Still.” Duke Library. Web. Accessed 30 Jan 2018. https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/sgo/texts/dunbar.html
- Latshaw, Charles William. “William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony: A Critical Edition.” Indiana University, doctoral dissertation, May 2014. Web. Accessed 30 Jan 2-18. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/17492/Latshaw%2C%20Charles%20%28DM%20Orch%20Cond%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
- O’Bannon, Ricky. “Listening Guide: William Grant Still.” Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Web. Accessed 30 Jan 2018. https://www.bsomusic.org/stories/listening-guide-william-grant-still/
- “Symphony No. 1 “’Afro-’”Wikipedia.com. Web. Accessed 30 Jan 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_%22Afro-American%22
- William Grant Still. Richard Fields, Piano. Cincinnati Philharmonia Jindong Cai, conductor. CD. Centaur: CRC 2331.
Symphony No.1 in A flat major "Afro-American" - William Grant Still
Symphony No.2 in G minor "Song of a New Race" - William Grant Still
Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi
I
Slowly: 0:00
II
Slowly and deeply expressive: 9:55 III
Moderately fast: 18:17 IV
Moderately slow: 22:00
The Symphony No.2 in G minor by William Grant Still was completed in 1937, premiered on December 10, 1937, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The structure of the symphony is identical to his first symphony. A classic style in four movements, inherited from Brahms, in which the weight of the work falls on the extreme movements, being the two central ones more lighter. If we analyze the internal structure of each of the movements we will see that it is identical to the one used previously. The first movement, Slowly, begins with a brief introduction, presenting the main theme of the work, a new blues theme. This theme is developed before the interpretation of the second theme, a lyrical theme of noble grandeur. After a brief development, the recapitulation presents the themes in reverse. The main theme leads us to a conclusive coda. Corresponds to the longings of his previous symphony, but now, what was once only a project, has been realized. The second movement, Slowly and Deeply Expressive, begins presenting a sweet theme, which develops until its conversion into the main theme. Presented by the first violin, it consists of a characteristic theme of folk affinity. Its development leads us to moments of romanticism, until being interrupted by a new theme of rhythmic character. But a brief climax brings us back to the main theme that is recapitulated. The coda, with a more agitated character, acts as a link with the next movement, which is interpreted without interruption. The feelings of pain of his first symphony have become a spiritual development of these feelings, to achieve the greatness of his goals. The third movement, Moderately Fast, which corresponds to the scherzo, presents us with an air of folkloric dance, typically of the American ragtime. Classic jazz motifs adorn the theme. The music shows the style of symphonic jazz cultivated by white Americans. The religious exaltation of his previous Humor, has been moderated to approach the religiosity of other peoples. The last movement, Moderately Slow, presents a theme derived from the blues of the first movement. Its development becomes more classical, as to indicate the possible integration of black music in the patrimony of the white race. The westernized blues theme is repeated solemnly. A conclusive coda closes the work. The previous Aspirations have become the desire to offer humanity, the best heritage inherited by the Africans of America. Despite having the structure similar to his first symphony, this style is more tempered, more moderate. He has left primitivism to approach Western civilization. According to the composer himself, "the Afro-American Symphony showed the daily life of black people shortly after the period of the civil war. The Symphony in G minor describes the black people of the current America, a totally new man, as a result of the mixture of white, Indian and black bloods". Picture: “The 99 Series/Part Three" (2014) by the Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh. Sources from this spanish website on Still symphonism: http://www.historiadelasinfonia.es/na...
https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/william-grant-still/454
October 12, 2018
WILLIAM GRANT STILL (part 1 of 5)
William Grant Still (with instrument case) with his friends at Wilberforce University, 1915. Photo from the holdings of the University of Arkansas Libraries’ Special Collections.
William Grant Still (1895-1978) is known as “The Dean of African-American Composers”, for good reason. The standard sites and survey history books cite the same litany of impressive firsts:
—the first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra,
—the first to have a symphony (his First Symphony) performed by a leading orchestra,
—the first to have a grand opera performed by a major opera company,
—the first to have an opera performed on national television,
—the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra, the New Orleans Philharmonic, in the Deep South
Along with multiple honorary doctorates, abundant commissions, and two Guggenheim Fellowships, all these landmark accomplishments suggest a blessed, prolific career flowing smoothly from recognition to recognition. Still’s lived reality was far rockier, however, and the fate of his work, as with almost all art, was completely enmeshed in the complex racial and cultural politics of his time.
We are extremely lucky to have an abundance of Still’s writings and
speeches. He communicated in words as he did in music, presenting
nuanced ideas in an unaffected, understandable way that talks neither
above his audience, nor down to them either.
When at all possible, I’ll be quoting Still’s own words, or those of his
wife Verna Arvey, or his daughter, Judith Anne Still, or granddaughter,
Celeste Headlee, as well as various scholars. This series of entries
will cover different periods of Still’s life and work. Sources will be
referred to in an abbreviated form in the body of the entries, and
fully identified at the end of the last blog entry.
Finally, of course Still was only one of many African-American composers for the concert hall who came before and after him, each with their own particular perspective, such as R. Nathaniel Dett, who studied at Harvard, later with Nadia Boulanger, and earned a masters from Eastman; the prolific Florence Price, who graduated from the same Little Rock, Arkansas high school Still would, and was the first African-American woman to have a composition played by a major orchestra; and William Levi Dawson, whose gorgeous Negro Folk Symphony premiered in 1934. Of necessity, however, this extremely *brief* overview will have to focus on Still’s life and career in particular.
William Grant Still, who was of not only African-American, but also Spanish, Native American, and Scots-Irish ancestry, was the first generation of his family not born into slavery; one of his ancestors, William Still, was a famous African-American abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad. Born in Mississippi to two high school teachers, he grew up with all the expectations attendant to being a ‘teacher’s kid.’ His parents were also very musically inclined; his grandmother would sing him spirituals.
After William’s father passed, his mother moved the family to Little Rock and remarried. The family “lived in a comfortable middle-class home, with luxuries such as books, musical instruments, and phonograph records…” (WGS, “My Arkansas Boyhood”). Still’s stepfather collected and played ‘Victor Red Seal’ records, which was a premium label representing the highest level of classical performance including opera, and took him to stage shows, where young William fell in love with the stage. His life in Little Rock, which would become infamous for its segregation and resistance to school integration, was unusual for the time:
It is true that there was segregation in Little Rock during my boyhood, but my family lived in a mixed neighborhood and our friends were both white and colored. So were my playmates…So, while I was aware of the fact that I was a Negro, and once in a while was reminded of it unpleasantly, I was generally conscious of it in a positive way, with a feeling of pride….my association with people of both racial groups gave me the ability to conduct myself as a person among people instead of an inferior among superiors. (WGS, “Boyhood”)
His mother continued to encourage literacy in her community and took other active roles in social/cultural leadership, while planning for her son to become a doctor and community leader as well. Still thus dutifully enrolled in Wilberforce University, the nation’s first private historically black university, for pre-med studies. Nevertheless, he spent most of his time in music ensembles and spent his money on instruments.
When Still eventually decided that he wanted to be a professional composer, his mother was initially extremely upset because, as he wrote, “in her experience, the majority of Negro musicians were disreputable and were not accepted into the best homes.” As he reflected later, though,
She lived long enough to know that my initial serious compositions had been successful, and her pride knew no bounds. Although she had opposed my career in music, she finally understood that music meant to me all the things she had been teaching me: a creative, serious accomplishment worth of study and high devotion as well as sacrifice. She knew at last that the ideals which she had passed on to me during my boyhood in Arkansas had borne worthy fruit. (WGS, “Boyhood”)
Indeed, the progress of Still’s composing style seems to have been integrally motivated by a series of social ideals, his approach to music determined by what he felt to be the highest calling of his life in each period.
Click here to read part two of the series.
Carolyn Talarr
Community Programs Coordinator
11/05/18 | WILLIAM GRANT STILL (part 1 of 5)
https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/william-grant-still-early-adult-years/455/
October 10, 2018
WILLIAM GRANT STILL: EARLY ADULT YEARS (part 2 of 5)
Company photo, “Shuffle Along” on tour in Boston, 1921; Still is second from far left. Photo from Broadway Collection.
Even though William Grant Still never completed his Bachelor’s degree, in his twenties he managed to cobble together an astoundingly broad and deep musical education that was probably more multifaceted and multicultural in its outlook than any other single composer of his era. Even more astounding, he did it in and amongst the need to make money while also serving his country and navigating twentieth-century racial tensions.
In 1915, at 20 years old, Still left Wilberforce without a degree but completely set on a career in music. (In 1936 Wilberforce awarded him his first honorary degree, a Master of Music.) Luckily, he got hired to play oboe and cello in an orchestra in Cleveland and gigged around the city in various ensembles as well. While he was living job to job, he composed his first orchestral work, which proved to be characteristically entitled the American Suite, and sent it, unsolicited, to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It wasn’t performed, but the boldness is impressive in a 20 year-old!
The next year was pivotal for Still; he was hired to arrange, and play oboe and cello, in one of the bands of W.C. Handy, “the father of the Blues.” Still and Handy quickly became lifelong friends; in this era Still “made the first band arrangements ever of the historic ‘Beale Street Blues’ and ‘St. Louis Blues’” (Handy/Southern). Still commented that at this time “I had been making it a point to listen to Negro music everywhere I went. On Beale Street in Memphis…as an onlooker in small Negro churches, and in popular bands” (WGS, “Boyhood”).
Through learning about Blues in their original contexts, he “realized that the American Negro had made an unrecognized contribution of great value to American music” beyond the more socially-acceptable spirituals and folk songs:
When he reached 21 and could receive his father’s inheritance, Still enrolled in Oberlin Conservatory, although he needed to take on significant work-study as well. He couldn’t afford to take composition, but his theory professor arranged for Still to study privately with the composition professor free of charge. It was a heady few terms, cut short by Still’s enlistment in the navy in WWI.
After the war ended in 1918, Still painfully worked his way back to Ohio for a short time, studying a bit more at Oberlin, only to leave when W.C. Handy called him to New York once again, to arrange music for him and tour in his main band. One gig led to another, including playing oboe in the pit orchestra of the epochal musical Shuffle Along.
While on tour in Boston with Shuffle Along, Still reached out to the person who proved to be the second major influence on his musical philosophy: George Chadwick. Chadwick, a well-known, generally conservative composer of the time, was Director of the New England Conservatory (NEC). Florence Price had also studied with Chadwick when she attended the NEC.
Important for Still, however, was that Chadwick had evidently recently come to champion the nationalistic idea that Antonín Dvořák had advocated in the 1890s when he briefly directed the then-prestigious National Conservatory of Music in New York: the necessity of creating a purely American idiom rather than imitating European styles. Dvořák had stated that a non-European idiom would have to come from Native American and African-American musical traditions; despite initial resistance from the European-inclined American music community, his words eventually changed the course of both American and world music. Still credited his brief private study with Chadwick with “acquainting [him] with serious American music” (although his stepfather’s records had surely helped in that regard as well). (SIDE NOTE: PYP will be performing Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 as part of this same program; it was the last symphony Dvořák composed before coming to the United States. The Third Movement, Furiant, based on a traditional Bohemian [later Czech] dance, is a perfect example of Dvořák’s integration of folk music into the classical idiom.)
Back in New York, Still continued arranging for Handy’s publishing house, and then served as arranger and recording director at the first Black-owned record company, Black Swan Records. It could be said that in terms of symphonic music, Still’s “big break” happened here, when he found his third major educational influence: Edgard Varèse.
Inspired by Dvořák’s having taught many African-American musicians at the National Conservatory, the modernist Varèse wrote to Black Swan specifically asking for any promising Black composers to study avant-garde composition with him. Still happened to see the letter and jumped on the offer for himself, as he was always trying to learn from everyone he could.
It’s somewhat ironic that the “ultramodern,” “cerebral” (Still’s words) musical idiom Still acquired from this instruction, which was intended to inflect what Varèse called “[Still’s] lyrical nature, typical of his race,” was actually European in origin, not an American-originated style at all. Further, the ‘European-influenced’ American modernists would play an unexpectedly pivotal role decades later in Still’s future.
At this time, however, Still absorbed the lessons Varèse taught—yet one can hear his experiences with “Negro music” already insisting on a place at the ‘serious music’ table. After a couple of attempts, Still’s first ‘serious’ success in 1926 was the amazing tone poem Darker America, which premiered a mere 9 months after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Such a clear document of where Still’s mind was at the time, the piece fascinatingly integrates modernist dissonances, blues and jazz.
Although Still continued to employ modernist techniques when he found them appropriate for the rest of his career, the most lasting outcome of this period was that Varèse crucially promoted Still and his music to the concertgoing community. From that point for years afterward, Still straddled the commercial world of arranging music, which was more open to African-Americans, and the less-open world of the concert hall. As Harold Bruce Forsythe, a friend and colleague who astutely subtitled his vivid 1930 biographical sketch of Still “A Study in Contradictions”, wrote affectionately, “He has hidden behind his position as an arranger of popular music…I knew him for months before I had the first inkling of his significance and before he showed me one of his orchestral scores” (Forsythe in Smith, 2000).
Click here to read part three of the series.
Carolyn Talarr
Community Programs Coordinator
11/05/18 | WILLIAM GRANT STILL: EARLY ADULT YEARS (part 2 of 5)
https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/william-grant-still-crystallizing-the-dream/456/
October 8, 2018
WILLIAM GRANT STILL: CRYSTALLIZING THE DREAM (part 3 of 5)
William Grant Still in rehearsal. From Houston Public Media.
Still’s self-identified second period took its shape, as his wife Verna Arvey later related, from a “dream dating back to 1916 when as a young man, he went to Memphis to work with W.C. Handy” (Arvey, Memo to Musicologists). Once he learned about the Blues in their original context, he resolved that he someday he would elevate the Blues so they could hold a dignified position in symphonic literature” (Arvey, Memo). Still wrote,
From about 1924 through the 1930s, Still “made countless musical experiments” in what he called the “Negroid” idiom. What made Still’s take on the “Negroid” idiom unique at the time was that “Still was the first African-American to employ the blues and jazz [italics mine] in a symphonic work; previously, black composers had confined their use of Negro folk idioms in concert works to spirituals, worksongs, and dance songs” (Southern, Music, 433).
In 1930, Still’s “dream finally crystallized in the Afro-American Symphony” (Arvey,Memo), the first symphony composed by an African-American to be performed by a major orchestra. It premiered in Rochester, New York in 1931, under Howard Hanson, and was performed subsequently by the New York Philharmonic and hundreds of other orchestras. If people know anything by Still, it is usually this piece; local audiences will have a chance to discover it when the Oregon Symphony performs the Afro-American Symphony in January 2019.
It didn’t escape notice that Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (mentioned above) and his other Blues & Jazz-tinged music were appearing a few years after Handy became famous for popularizing Blues across the country and Still was developing his own long-envisioned authentic “Negroid” symphonic style. “I Got Rhythm” can arguably owe its famous melodic line to an earlier, almost identical, line by Still (Smith, 2000). Further, Gershwin reportedly even “gave W.C. Handy a copy of the Rhapsody in Blue autographed to the effect that he recognized Handy’s work as the forerunner of his own” (Still in Smith, 2000).
Yet beyond the issue of plagiarism, Arvey wrote about the lasting, fundamental difference between Gershwin and Still’s introduction of Blues into the concert hall:
Still kept defeating racial stereotypes and straddling his two worlds. His Hollywood connections developed mostly after the move to Los Angeles in 1934, as soon as he got his first Guggenheim. Judith Anne wrote that Still loved the west because it wasn’t as “clannish and racist as New York” (J.A. Still, 2018). He enjoyed success for a time with commercial composing and arranging, including work on such major films as “Pennies from Heaven” and “Lost Horizon.”
It is ironic and portentous, however, that Still’s final film involvement was “Stormy Weather,” the landmark musical that showcased a multitude of world-famous Black performers. His actions demonstrate once again how deeply, for better or worse, Still held his principles concerning the proper appreciation of Black culture and art. Those principles led him to resign from this historic project because the “crude”, “sexy” musical stereotypes that he felt the director wanted “are the sort of misconceptions that…indirectly influence the lives of our thirteen million people.” This would not be the last time that Still’s hard-won, admittedly individual musical and political perspectives would find him supposedly on the ‘wrong side of history’ in a time when society could encompass no more than a binary perspective.
Click here to read part four of the series.
Carolyn Talarr
11/05/18 | WILLIAM GRANT STILL: CRYSTALLIZING THE DREAM (part 3 of 5)Community Programs Coordinator
https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/william-grant-still-troubled-history/457/
October 5, 2018
WILLIAM GRANT STILL: TROUBLED HISTORY (part 4 of 5)
“Musicians William Grant Still, L. Wolfe Gilbert, W. C. Handy, Frank Drye and Andy Razaf in Los Angeles, Calif., circa 1954.” From UCLA Library, Islandora Repository, Los Angeles Daily News Negatives.
During the 30s and 40s, Still was at the height of his standing in the ‘serious’ music world; his compositions in many genres, including five symphonies, numerous tone poems and orchestral suites, Sahdji, the first ballet by an African-American, and many different kinds of choral works, won several awards. He received the first three of his eight eventual honorary degrees. Dearest to him of all his choral music were Still’s eight operas. The most famous, and infamous, of those is Troubled Island; it proved to be a turning point in his life.
Based on a play by Langston Hughes, Troubled Island concerned the Haitian Revolution and its first leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Its libretto was begun by Hughes and finished by Arvey in 1939, when Hughes and Still parted company over political differences, and Hughes went off to cover the Spanish Civil War. Finally published under all three of their names in 1941, it took eight years of rejection and negotiation to arrive at a premiere.
The opera’s production by the New York City Opera was again a historic first: the first opera composed by an African-American to receive production in the United States at all, much less by a major company. Still envisioned that “…with a successful opera, [his family] would have the prestige to get recordings of all the music, in spite of the bigotry rampant in the major recording companies. Now they would have money that they had not had heretofore…”(J. A. Still, quoted in DjeDje, 2011). Expectations and stakes were high.
Troubled Island’s opening night was a huge success, with 22 ecstatic curtain calls over “a flood of applause.” Nevertheless, critics were surprisingly mostly neutral to negative in their reception. After it closed, Still couldn’t get another production anywhere; the State Department, which had previously promoted Still’s music, withdrew the recording from radio stations in Europe in 1950 without explanation (it was not performed in its entirety again until 2013, when it was given one performance by the South Shore Opera Company of Chicago). Performances of his other works suddenly declined as well.
This extreme disappointment led Still into the most controversial and damaging period of his life. There is some evidence of a concerted effort on the part of critics and others in the classical music community to sabotage Troubled Island, either because of straight racism or because of Still’s conservative, anti-communist politics (as opposed to Hughes’s connections with the Communist Party).
In 1951, in frustration and despair over losing almost all his musical professional momentum, and concern that Communist operatives, in partnership with ‘European’-modernist-influenced American composers, were plotting against truly ‘American’ music and “duping” the Black community, Still asked to testify to McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and was refused. He then ‘named names’ publicly in a 1953 speech to the San Jose, California, Chamber of Commerce.
As Leon Botstein described,
Still’s national professional career plummeted further from here on. Yet he and Arvey raised their family in Los Angeles and maintained a vibrant social life in this time. Judith Anne Still relates,
Whatever one thinks of Still’s anticommunist actions, he was true to his beliefs throughout his personal and professional life; he never compromised for the sake of expediency or career advancement. His music and words represented his truth from beginning to end, and he both reaped the rewards and paid a high personal price.
Click here to read part five, the final entry of the series.
Carolyn Talarr
Community Programs Coordinator
11/05/18 | 0 Comments | WILLIAM GRANT STILL: TROUBLED HISTORY (part 4 of 5)
https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/blog/william-grant-still-we-all-rise-together-or-we-dont-rise-at-all/458/
October 3, 2018
WILLIAM GRANT STILL: “WE ALL RISE TOGETHER OR WE DON’T RISE AT ALL” (part 5 of 5)
Mural by Noni Olabisi, the William Grant Still Art Center, Los Angeles, CA: “William Grant Still conducting his powerful operatic score [“Troubled Island”], with his spiritual “eye” in the middle of his forehead, which expresses the need for a new era of interracial understanding, loving-kindness and God-consciousness on the earth.” From WilliamGrantStill.com.
One word that could sum up Still’s life and work could very well be “integration.” Integration—of musical styles and influences, of races and cultures – was actually Still’s explicit byword at least from around 1949. He arrived at his most integrated composing style, which he called “universal,” starting in the late ‘30s, once he had lived in Los Angeles for a while. He explained the process of his development:
Going beyond simple expected binary constructions has always challenged conventional thinkers, and Still’s life, from his ancestry on, was about nothing if not challenging and complicating binaries.
He wrote “…in New York, I began to feel that one way to serve God would be to serve my race. Then that in itself began to seem a narrow objective, so I decided that I wanted to serve all people” (WGS, Boyhood). Whether or not others understood or approved, music, rather than direct political action, was how he served;
The family’s experiences in Los Angeles may also have played into Still’s actions:
Reflecting years later, Still explicitly connected his vision of the music of America to its unique makeup:
The overarching philosophy of integration motivates The American Scene: Five Suites for Young Americans, indeed could serve as a thesis statement for it. Still dedicated the suite to the Pasadena Interracial Women’s Club, an organization founded on the intentional sharing of cultures.
In 1957, The American Scene was composed for the “Standard [Oil] School Broadcast” on radio. This music-appreciation broadcast, which reached throughout the west coast, was the oldest educational radio program in the United States, and produced at that point by Still’s friend, Adrian Michaelis. The composer, conductor, and arranger Carmen Dragon conductor several segments from it—Florida Night, Levee Land, New Orleans Street, and Grand Teton —for the broadcast.
The suite wasn’t performed in its entirety, however, “until November 18, 1990. The conductor, Jack Abell…wanted to do a premiere of WGS that would be known for its importance in future years. He thought that WGS would rise into the public consciousness in future decades“ (J. A. Still, 2018).
The entire work is made of fifteen short, easily digestible, programmatic units that traverse the country creating an integrated mosaic of different landscapes and various cultures’ contributions to The American Scene:
Suite 1: The East -
a) On the Village Green, b) Berkshire Night, c) Manhattan Skyline
Suite 2: The South -
a) Florida Night, b) Levee Land, c) A New Orleans Street
Suite 3: The Old West -
a) Song of the Plainsmen, b) Sioux Love Song, c) Tribal Dance
Suite 4: The Far West -
a) The Plaza, b) Sundown Land, c) Navaho Country
Suite 5: A Mountain, A Memorial, and A Song -
a) Grand Teton, b) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, c) Song of the Rivermen
Judith Anne remarked about The Far West:
(J.A. Still, 2018).
Regarding the third movement, “Navajo Country”, it’s significant that Still did not merely rely on scholarship done by others to understand Native American, specifically Navajo musical traditions; Judith Anne explained that “my Father and my Mother went to Taos, New Mexico,and probably they visited reservations around Flagstaff. There was no other direct [emphasis mine] way to study Native American music” (J.A. Still, 2018). William Grant Still researched Native American music as he did the Blues, going to where it was made in order to hear it in its original context. Only this way could he understand the cultural motives behind the music as well as the music itself.
Judith Anne has often shared her father’s beautiful motto, which is the title of this section; sometimes alternately quoted as “Together we rise, or not at all”, they are words that are just as necessary today as they were sixty years ago. The diverse musical portraits brought together into the gentle, unpretentious mini-suites that make up The American Scene could serve as a miniature ‘crystallization,’ to borrow Arvey’s term, of Still’s motto in his culminating “universal” period. Yet this work remains rather obscure today, and only three of the five mini-suites have been recorded; one of the three is The Far West. Perhaps someday we will be lucky enough to have a recording of the entire suite made available as part of Still’s ever-relevant contribution toward our country’s understanding of its history and realization of its potential.
Carolyn Talarr
Community Programs Coordinator
SOURCES CITED
Arvey, Verna, “Memo to Musicologists”, reprinted in William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.
Author unknown, notes to Redlands Symphony program, “Paris, New York, Jazz!” 2017. https://www.redlandssymphony.com/pieces/darker-america
Botstein, Leon. Concert notes for “Revisiting William Grant Still”, American Symphony Orchestra program, 3/22/2009. http://americansymphony.org/revisiting-william-grant-still_2/
DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell. “Context and Creativity: William Grant Still in Los Angeles.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–27. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacmusiresej.31.1.0001.
Forsythe, Harold Bruce. “William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions”, in Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.
Handy, W. C., and Eileen Southern. “Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still.” The Black Perspective in Music, vol. 8, no. 1, 1980, pp. 65–119. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1214522.
Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Still, Judith Anne. Personal communications, 2018.
Still, Judith Anne. Commentary on Catherine Parsons Smith’s William Grant Still. 2012. http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com/CatherineParsonsSmith_files/SmithCommentary.pdf
Still, William Grant, “My Arkansas Boyhood”, and “A Composer’s Viewpoint”, reprinted in Haas, Robert B. et al. William Grant Still and the fusion of cultures in American Music. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. (A later edition exists too, but this is the edition I was working from)
Still, William Grant, interview with R. Donald Brown: “Negro Serious Music,”California State University-Fullerton, Oral History Program, Nov. 13, 1967 and Dec. 4, 1967, 29. Quoted in Catherine Parsons Smith, William Grant Still. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Recommendations for Reading
The entire Haas, Robert B. et al. William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music is invaluable.
Both biographies by Catherine Parsons Smith are must-reads, especially the 2000 (see ‘sources cited’, under Forsythe), not least because that book contains added essays and the only published version of Harold Forsythe’s biographical sketch. The second book comes with the caveat that one should accompany it with a reading of Judith Anne Still’s commentary (see ‘sources cited’).
Kernodle, Tammy L. “Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s ‘Troubled Island’”. The Musical Quarterly, 83 (4), Winter 1999, pp. 487-508.
Excellent critical bibliographical article with leads to many more sources: Murchison, Gayle. “Current Research Twelve Years after the William Grant Still Centennial.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 25, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 119–154. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30039288.
11/03/18 | WILLIAM GRANT STILL: “WE ALL RISE TOGETHER OR WE DON’T RISE AT ALL” (part 5 of 5)
https://www.laphil.com/about/watch-and-listen/get-to-know-william-grant-still-jr
Get to Know: William Grant Still, Jr.
Explore the music by the “Dean of African American Composers.”
Many exceedingly talented musicians of color have contributed to our classical music culture, and William Grant Still (1895–1978) may be the greatest of them all. He was born into a musical golden era – early 20th-century America, where jazz, pop, classical, and even film music overlapped as never before – just as he was born into the vile system we now call Jim Crow. Because of all the firsts he managed to achieve, he became known as the Dean of African American Composers.
As an infant, William Grant Still, lost his father, leading his mother, a teacher, to move from Mississippi to Little Rock, Arkansas. At nine, he gained a stepfather who nurtured the boy’s interest in music. At 15, he began violin lessons and taught himself to play clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bass, cello, and viola.
To please his mother, Still pursued pre-med at Wilberforce University but spent much of his time conducting the band, as well as composing and arranging. He left Wilberforce without a degree but moved on to study music at Oberlin Conservatory. Still even studied privately with avant-garde French composer Edgard Varèse, but Still always retained his essential folk- and jazz-inspired sound.
Before and after WWI, Still worked for the great W.C. Handy (self-described “Father of the Blues”) and ended up in Harlem where Still got connected with the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–37), an unprecedented blossoming of African American culture, especially in literature, art, theater, and music. With overt racial pride, participants sought to challenge racism and change pervasive stereotypes, essentially laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
In the ’30s, Still arranged popular music for two NBC radio shows, while, in 1931, Howard Hanson led the Rochester Philharmonic in Still’s Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.” This was the first time a major orchestra had performed a complete score by an African American. By 1945, the piece had been played in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London. Still developed a friendship with Hanson, who went on to premiere many of Still’s orchestral compositions.
In 1934, Still moved to Los Angeles, received his first Guggenheim Fellowship, and began work on the first of his nine operas. Two years later, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, becoming the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra in his own music.
Still also began to arrange for the movies, including the Bing Crosby film Pennies from Heaven (1936) and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). Although he was hired for Stormy Weather, which also included appearances from Lena Horne and Cab Calloway, he quit 20th Century Fox for their treatment of people of color. Still also wrote a song for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York but wasn’t allowed to attend without police protection – unless he came on “Negro Day.”
Ten years after he finished it, Still’s Troubled Island, a collaboration with leading Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, was performed in 1949 by the New York City Opera, becoming the first American opera performed by NYCO and the first by an African American to be performed by a major company. In 1955, Still conducted the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra, making him the first African American to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South. Three years after he died, his A Bayou Legend became the first opera by an African American to be performed on national television.
William Grant Still lived long enough to experience the tributes, honors, and acclaim due his talent and perseverance.
Symphonies
William Grant Still is most often encountered these days as a symphonist, having composed five striking examples. In a Los Angeles Times interview, conductor Thomas Wilkins assessed Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American,” as Still’s “strongest piece. It’s the reality of the sorrow, the reality of the longing. The symphony opens with that solo plaintive English horn sound. It’s the perfect instrument to start this piece, and, then, in the last movement, there’s this aspirational, lovely song that the entire orchestra plays, and, then, he puts it in the voice of a cello, which, in my mind, is the closest instrument in the orchestra that sounds like a human voice.”
Still preferred moderate and slower tempos, sumptuous sonorities, and pastoral, often bittersweet, passages, all unmistakably American, tinged with blue notes and jazz chords.
Vocal Music
Recordings of Still’s operas are few and far between, but you can get a good idea of his approach with Highway One, USA, a one-hour, two-act drama, recorded by Philip Brunelle. Brunelle has also led Skyward My People Rose, a wide-ranging collection of Still’s vocal music with orchestra, including the stunning six-section choral ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree, with parts for two choruses: an all-white lynch mob and a black chorus of mourners of the murdered man.
Chamber Music
Having composed more than 200 works, William Grant Still left examples in many forms. Here are some highly attractive collections of his music for piano and for violin and piano. The last listed album includes his lively Danzas de Panama in an arrangement for string quartet.
You can listen to his symphonies here and his vocal music here.
http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com/BiographicalNotes.htm
WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978)
Biographical Notes
Long known as the "Dean of African-American Classical Composers," as well as one of America's foremost composers, William Grant Still has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. On May 11, 1895, he was born in Woodville (Wilkinson County) Mississippi, to parents who were teachers and musicians. They were of Negro, Indian, Spanish, Irish and Scotch bloods. When William was only a few months old, his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English in the high school. There his musical education began--with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather.
In Wilberforce University, he took courses leading to a B.S. degree, but spent most of his time conducting the band, learning to play the various instruments involved and making his initial attempts to compose and to orchestrate. His subsequent studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were financed at first by a legacy from his father, and later by a scholarship established just for him by the faculty.
At the end of his college years, he entered the world of commercial (popular) music, playing in orchestras and orchestrating, working in particular with the violin, cello and oboe. His employers included W. C. Handy, Don Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison and Artie Shaw, and for several years he arranged and conducted the Deep River Hour over CBS and WOR. While in Boston playing oboe in the Shuffle Along orchestra, Still applied to study at the New England Conservatory with George Chadwick, and was again rewarded with a scholarship due to Mr. Chadwicks own vision and generosity. He also studied, again on an individual scholarship, with the noted ultra-modern composer, Edgard Varese.
In the Twenties, Still made his first appearances as a serious composer in New York, and began a valued friendship with Dr. Howard Hanson of Rochester. Extended Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships were given to him, as well as important commissions from the Columbia Broadcasting System, the New York Worlds Fair 1939-40, Paul Whiteman, the League of Composers, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the American Accordionists Association. In 1944, he won the Jubilee prize of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the best Overture to celebrate its Jubilee season, with a work called Festive Overture. In 1953, a Freedoms Foundation Award came to him for his To You, America! which honored West Points Sesquicentennial Celebration. In 1961, he received the prize offered by the U. S. Committee for the U. N., the N.F.M.C. and the Aeolian Music Foundation for his orchestral work, The Peaceful Land, cited as the best musical composition honoring the United Nations.
After moving to Los Angeles in the early 1930's, citations from numerous organizations, local and elsewhere in the United States, came to the composer. Along with them came honorary degrees like the following: Master of Music from Wilberforce in 1936; Doctor of Music from Howard University in 1941; Doctor of Music from Oberlin College in 1947; Doctor of Letters from Bates College in 1954; Doctor of Laws from the University of Arkansas in 1971; Doctor of Fine Arts from Pepperdine University in 1973; Doctor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Southern California.
Some of the awards that Still received were: the second Harmon Award in 1927; a trophy of honor from Local 767 of the Musicians Union A.F. of M., of which he was a member; trophies from the League of Allied Arts in Los Angeles (1965) and the National Association of Negro Musicians; citations from the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Board of Supervisors (1963); a trophy from the A.P.P.A. in Washington D.C. (1968); the Phi Beta Sigma George Washington Carver Award (1953); the Richard Henry Lee Patriotism Award from Knotts Berry Farm, California; a citation from the Governor of Arkansas in 1972; the third annual prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. He also lectured in various universities from time to time.
In 1939, Still married journalist and concert pianist, Verna Arvey, who became his principal collaborator. They remained together until Still died of heart failure on December 3, 1978. ASCAP took care of all of Dr. Stills hospitalization until his death.
Dr. Still's service to the cause of brotherhood is evidenced by his many firsts in the musical realm: Still was the first Afro-American in the United States to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra. He was the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, when in 1936, he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in his compositions at the Hollywood Bowl. He was the first Afro-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the Deep South in 1955, when he directed the New Orleans Philharmonic at Southern University. He was the first of his race to conduct a White radio orchestra in New York City. He was the first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States, when in 1949, his Troubled Island was done at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City. He was the first to have an opera televised over a national network. With these firsts, Still was a pioneer, but, in a larger sense, he pioneered because he was able to create music capable of interesting the greatest conductors of the day: truly serious music, but with a definite American flavor.
Still wrote over 150 compositions (well over 200 if his lost early works could be counted), including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes, especially Negro spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works.
ADDITIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL RESOURCES:
William Grant Still, a distinquished member of ASCAP, is mentioned in hundreds of books published in the United States and abroad, and is himself the subject of eleven volumes available from The Master-Player Library ( a subsidiary of William Grant Still Music ):
"In One Lifetime", by Verna Arvey
https://www.cpr.org/2020/10/22/the-dean-of-african-american-composers-didnt-think-hed-be-remembered-william-grant-still-125/"Just Tell the Story: Troubled Island", edited by Judith Anne Still and Lisa M. Headlee
"Little David Had No Fear", by Judith Anne Still
"William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music", 2nd edition, edited by Judith Anne Still and Lisa M. Headlee
"William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography", by Judith Anne Still, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin
"William Grant Still: An Interview", with R. Donald Brown
"William Grant Still: An Oral History", edited by Judith Anne Still with contributing editors Dominique-Rene de Lerma and Lance Bowling
"William Grant Still: A Register of His Works", by Dominique-Rene de Lerma
"William Grant Still: A Voice High-Sounding", by Judith Anne Still
"William Grant Still Reader: Essays On American Music", The, edited by Jon M. Spencer
"William Grant Still Studies: A Congress Report", from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Dept. of Music
The Dean Of African-American Composers Didn’t Think He’d Be Remembered: William Grant Still At 125
William Grant Still thought he would be forgotten.
That’s what his granddaughter, musician and journalist Celeste Headlee, told us when she spoke about her beloved grandfather- a composer whose lush, emotional music lends itself to the distinctly American sound of the early 20th century. Still’s compositions paint a landscape of the world around him, and of the musical heritage of fellow African Americans.
The First African American Symphonist
Take his first symphony, “Afro-American”, for example. Not only is it Still’s most famous work, it was performed by 38 orchestras in the U.S. and Europe in its first 20 years, making it the most popular American symphony until 1950. When he began sketching the piece in 1924, Still had recently finished playing in the pit for the Broadway musical, “Shuffle Along”, which was produced and performed entirely by African Americans. According to writer and activist Langston Hughes, that show ushered in the Harlem Renaissance. Headlee told CPR Classical that Still mused on the symphony and its inspirations for years, but it took until the Depression for Still to buckle down, shut himself in a New York City apartment, and write the whole thing in a few months. The Rochester Philharmonic premiered the symphony a year later in 1931. “Afro-American” was the first symphony by a Black composer to be performed by a leading orchestra.
Still's Influence On Gershwin
The symphony incorporates original blues themes and jazz rhythms, a rarity at the time and even today. Still deftly includes a banjo in the piece and also incorporates a familiar theme. Back in his “Shuffle Along” days, Still improvised a four-note riff and then played it every night. One person who loved attending the popular musical was George Gershwin. Gershwin set the words “I Got Rhythm” to Still’s four-notes in the song of the same name. It’s disputed whether Gershwin consciously or unconsciously lifted that riff but you can hear Still take it back in the third movement of his first symphony, “Afro-American.” While the similarity is audible, Headlee says, “Honestly, I never heard my grandfather rant about it.”
Still took violin lessons at the age of 15 and eventually taught himself to play all the instruments in the orchestra except for piano. Headlee said that being able to play an instrument was important to Still. “He didn’t want to write for an instrument unless he knew where the instrument’s sweet spot was,” she explained to CPR Classical. In “Darker America,” written before “Afro-American,” Still uses those “sweet spots” to create an evocative musical texture that was his signature style. His instrumental talent allowed Still to find gigs as a performer, like in “Shuffle Along,” but also for background music on the radio and in bands. Headlee hears Still’s masterful incorporation of some of those influences in the symphonic poem “Africa,” even though Still had a very low opinion of the piece and originally discarded it.
The Gentle Grandfather
William Grant Still
Headlee knows what Still thought about these pieces because of his diligent note taking. He kept numerous notebooks. She was almost 9 when her grandfather died and remembers many visits to his L.A. home.
He was very gentle, she says. He had slender fingers “and tapped them all the time.” Headlee also says “he was completely wrapped up in music. He was always singing it, humming it, tapping it, pointing it out, always.” And her grandparents’ house was full of love. Her grandfather made what he called Honest to Goodness Toast, which Headlee thinks contained molasses and wheat germ. He made puzzles that he cut out with an exacto knife. And she hears his personality in his music. Still’s Suite for “Violin and Piano” musically depicts three sculptures by fellow Harlem Renaissance artists: Richmond Barthé’s “African Dancer,” Sargent Johnson’s “Mother and Child,” and Augusta Savage’s “Gamin.” “What he saw was the possibility for mischief,” Headlee says of the third movement, “He saw a boy that was very much like himself as a boy. If we are to believe what his mother said and his own stories of his childhood, he was a handful.”
Still The Patriot
Handful, yes, but also a patriot with optimism despite the challenges of being a Black American. Still served in the Navy during World War I and wrote music to honor the fallen soldiers of World War II. Of his piece “In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy,” Still wrote,
Headlee says, “My grandfather was a patriot to his dying day. He came out of a tradition from my great grandmother of believing that African Americans could earn a safe and successful place in the United States. His mother had been born into slavery, he was the first of our family born outside of slavery.” Headlee goes on to say that her family, including her grandfather, saw a lack of knowledge as the reason for racism. “He believed that if white people in general knew how hard working and good and brave and moral African-Americans were that racism would end.” Headlee says, “He was wrong about that. But part of his patriotism and love for his country came from this optimism.”
A Continuing Fight Against Racism
Still’s optimism faltered in his later years. The reason was lingering racism and violence against African Americans. “Again and again and again doors closed for him because of his color,” Headlee says. His opera "Troubled Island" was the first written by a Black composer to be performed by a major opera company in the United States. It received 22 curtain calls at the New York City Opera premiere in 1949, but closed after it was panned by critics.
Discrimination paired with a steady decline in commissions had a heavy impact on Still. By the time Headlee was born, she thinks he was a “little sadder.” The joy and optimism she hears in his early works was gone. Still is a great American symphonist and it’s hard to deny the emotional impact of his work today. He faced barriers that Black composers still face, even as progressive orchestras attempt to program music by diverse voices.
His last symphony, the “Sunday Symphony,” was premiered six years after his death by the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra during a William Grant Still Festival in 1984. And in the years since, U.S. orchestras, universities and classical radio stations (like CPR Classical) have programmed his pieces more often and are rediscovering his contribution to American classical music. But sadly, Headlee told us, “I don’t think he thought he would be remembered. I think he thought there was a chance that racism had actually won.”
William Grant Still on CPR Classical
Hear more insights from Headlee paired with full length pieces from Still on Oct. 26 through Oct. 30 at 8 p.m. and Saturdays Oct. 31 through Nov. 21 at 1 p.m.
Listen to CPR Classical by clicking "Listen Live" on this website. You can also hear CPR Classical at 88.1 FM in Denver, at radio signals around Colorado, or ask your smart speaker to “Play CPR Classical.”
A curated playlist of some of our favorite pieces by Still.
https://houstonsymphony.org/listening-to-the-voice-of-william-grant-still/
Listening to the Voice of William Grant Still
Listening to the Voice of William Grant Still
William Grant Still (1895–1978), one of the most versatile American composers, wrote more than 150 works in his lifetime. He built a career in a predominantly white world of classical music, bringing the African American voice to an industry that didn’t fully accept composers of color.
An Individual Style
Still blended African American and popular traditions with his European classical music training, crafting his individual style while creating authentically American classical music. Many types of musical traditions are interwoven in his orchestral works, from blues harmonies and jazz idioms to call-and-response passages, reminiscent of African American spirituals. His strength as a composer gave him a solid platform for amplifying the need for racial equality and social justice, including the 1949 opera Troubled Island, a collaboration with leading Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Still also voiced a desire for a fully integrated society, saying once that “For me, there is no white or Black music—there is only music by individual men that is important if it attempts to dignify all men, not just a particular race.”
A Long List of Firsts
A true individual, Still defied social stereotypes his entire life. He became known as the “Dean of African American composers” because of his long list of firsts: the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television. In fact, his Symphony No. 1 (titled Afro American Symphony) was played by major orchestras more than any other symphony by an American composer until the 1950s. Although he received numerous awards and prestigious commissions, it should be noted that he also encountered discrimination because of the color of his skin. He wrote a song for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but he wasn’t allowed to attend the fair without police protection. Despite a successful premiere of his opera Troubled Island, it was closed after only three performances (an act that many suspect was racially motivated).
Still Relevant Today
Still’s voice may be more relevant today than ever before. He was a strong voice that amplified African American culture in classical music and broke through barriers imposed by a predominantly white industry. He also maintained an ideal of a fully integrated American society that manifested itself in his unique style of authentic American classical music.
As you prepare to hear William Grant Still’s “Summerland” from Three Visions at the Houston Symphony’s Live from Jones Hall concert on Saturday, August 8, listen to this William Grant Still playlist. It will be evident that this composer deserves to be a household name in 2020.
THE MUSIC OF WILLIAM GRANT STILL: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH WILLIAM GRANT STILL:
William Grant Still: "Afro-American" Symphony
Symphony No.3 "Sunday Symphony" - William Grant Still ...
William Grant Still: The American Scene: The Far
Poem for Orchestra - William Grant Still - YouTube
"Africa" Symphonic Poem - William Grant Still - YouTube
William Grant Still: Serenade | The Orchestra Now
Interview with the Afro-American Composer William Grant Still ...
William Grant Still: "Out of the Silence"
Symphony No.4 ''Autochthonous'' - William Grant Still
William Grant Still | A Thread Through Time