Canon in the Smelting Pot: William L. Dawson

Looking at early 20th century music written by Black Americans, particularly music written during the Harlem Renaissance, one cannot help but notice the consistent presence of spirituals. Whether as arrangements, or as quotations in more abstract instrumental works, or as original melodies written in the style of, spirituals seem to form the backbone of Black American classical music. Florence Price, for example, wrote a number of arrangements of spirituals for solo voice and piano, a Concert Overture on Negro Spirituals, and Negro Spirituals in Counterpoint for string quartet. William Grant Still, Margaret Bonds, and today's composer, William L. Dawson, all also wrote or included spiritual styles in their music.
 

Of course, other Black musics appear, as well. Florence Price used the juba dance as an analogue to the waltz/minuet of the symphonic scherzo. William Grant Still used the blues progression in his Afro-American Symphony. Jazz and its precursor, ragtime, make regular appearances as well. But, in my listenings at least, these other Black styles form a presence in a constellation centered around the spiritual melodies. Which is kind of curious, right? That jazz ends up being more strongly associated with white symphonic composers of the time, like George Gershwin, Aaron Coland, and Leonard Bernstein, than with Black symphonic composers. I have some guesses why this might be the case, but I'm hardly knowledgeable enough to speak on it.

 
The use of spirituals in Black American music is, in many ways, a natural outgrowth of a century-long movement connecting "high art" with "low" or "folk art." Early examples are Beethoven's use of the ländler dance in place of the by-then traditional minuet movement in symphonies and sonatas, Chopin's mazurkas, Mahler's use of the Viennese Waltz. Examples abound. Dvorak's famous pronouncements, "The cultural heritage of the American Negro is one of America's richest treasures," and "The future of this country must be founded on what are called the Negro melodies" provided additional oomph to Black composer's use of spiritual melodies. Florence Price's First Symphony has a number of allusions and similarities to Dvorak's New World Symphony.
 
But for this post, I'm mostly curious about a criticism levied against William Dawson's arrangements and conducting of spirituals, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1933. Leading the Tuskegee Choir to a triumphant six-week performance series, William Dawson's performances can be considered nothing less than a resounding success. And yet, one New York Times reviewer wrote, "Alas! Like some other Negro choruses, this one has not escaped the seduction of classicism. The spirituals ... were delivered with the precise formality that oratorio societies sometime mistakenly bestow upon Handel or Bach." The review goes on in this way, eventually concluding "The result of this treatment, unhappily, was to render the spirituals sterile and to substitute their gorgeous vitality pallid concert pieces, stripped of their racial authenticity."
 
I've seen this type of criticism before, that folk musics, translated into music of the European concert halls, loses something essential. It has not the moisture which is the essence of wetness, and so lacks the wetness so necessary to beauty. Some say. One section of the book "Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile," for instance, details a variety of composers jostling about, accusing first one, then another approach to setting Armenian folk tunes as being inauthentic. The threat of this type of criticism is endemic to any attempts at using or referencing folk musics. The classical side bristles at the perceived contamination of high culture, the folksy side resents their music stuffed in hoity-toity garb.
 
Of course, something is always lost in translation. Moving musics from spontaneous aural traditions into notation is not difficult, it is impossible. Notation can only provide, at best, a blueprint and once set stands as a stone monument, rather than as a breathing organism. Many details are lost because they simply can't be notated. Or, if they are, result in a stupefyingly complex appearance. Bartok's transcriptions of Bulgarian folk tunes come to mind. Ornaments are dropped. Nuance is lost. Subtlety of natural improvisation must be compensated for by other means. In the course of translation to notated form, the result is different by necessity. Just like translating a book into a movie, they can never be the same.
 
But, I dunno. I think Mr. Dawson's arrangements are pretty darn cool. They certainly aren't spirituals you would find sung in Black churches, obviously. I mean, I spent half this article talking about why they can't be. But he has a great ear for choral sonority and color. And his Negro Folk Symphony is a refreshing work, expressive without necessarily being emotive. I can only speculate why Mr. Dawson moved away from composing. Maybe he found conducting and teaching more fulfilling. Maybe he was dissatisfied by the meteoric rise and fall of his Negro Folk Symphony's popularity, so turned to other pursuits. Maybe the seismic shits in styles during the 1940's left him cold. Whatever it is, I'm glad he wrote what he wrote. Here's a recording of him conducting the Tuskagee Choir in his arrangement of King Jesus is a-Listening.
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Canon in the Smelting Pot: Olly Wilson

There's been a trend, lately, of programming concerts of music by various minorities. In America, these concerts tend to follow a kind of secular festival calendar, in the way medieval chant cycled through the year. Black History Month? A program of African-Americans. Women's History Month? Program women. And... actually, in my immediate awareness, it just kind of ends there, but Google assures me there are months for other minority histories as well. Why we can't just program music of minorities throughout the year like normal people would is beyond me, but I guess it's better than nothing.

 
I bring this up because I, too, have tried to program off-canon music, although being a heathen, I don't adhere to the strict lunar cycle of minority months. But I consistently bumped into a problem that I am sure is familiar. I would find an interesting composer, think to myself, "Man, I want to play their music," search for their sheet music, and... find nothing. It's like their music only exists on old 78s and in no other form. A key part of the historical record (pun intended, you're welcome) is missing.
 
This trend runs deep. In 1977 and '78, musicologist and researcher Eileen Southern published an interview of Olly Wilson in her music journal, The Black Perspective in Music. She was specifically discussing Wilson's musical education, from childhood through just past his doctorate, and two moments stood out to me. The first was, Wilson mentioned almost in passing that Black composers didn't get their music reviewed in papers. The second was how, after performances of his music, Wilson would often hear from admiring audience members, "That's not how I expected your music to sound."
 
To the first point, the repercussions are obvious. If your concerts don't get reviewed, the number of musicians who even know about your music to ask for a demo is limited to your personal social circle. Without that key media circulation, a new work gets its premier and then dies on the vine. (Aside: Mr. Wilson mentions that one of his most successful works got 8 performances in a year, to give you an idea of what "success" looks like in this job.) If the music doesn't get played, the sheet music doesn't get ordered/rented; if the sheet music doesn't make buck, publishers don't publish it. And that's IF publishers of the time had any interest in publishing the works of Black composers to begin with which, surprise! Wasn't exactly a common thing either.
 
To the second point, I can't help but notice that the music of some of the bigger African American names in composition (Florence Price, William Grant Still, Margaret Bonds) have a beefy segment of their works devoted to arrangements of spirituals or works which draw upon various other strands of African-American music: jazz and ragtime in particular. Hence the "I didn't expect your music to sound like that" comment. Wilson had a strong modernist streak. He didn't much like Romantic or programmatic music (he didn't tie his music to concrete images, for instance), and a number of his early works used the 12-tone method to generate musical material. You can hear elements of spirituals and jazz, yes, but he was a dyed in the wool, mid-20th century modern composer and he wasn't shy about it.
 
He didn't fall into a good marketing box, is what I mean. People think, "That time of year again, lets do an all Black composers concert for Black History Month," and they program all manner of musics drawing upon what is familiar Black music, perform it, and then the audience will nod and say, "Yes, this is Black music," and suddenly huge swathes of 20th century musical experimentation and technical developments are shown the door and never heard*. It's the musical version of "Well, you don't sound Black..." Would you guess that the first prize winner of the first electronic music contest was a Black man? Was Olly Wilson? Or that he established Oberlin's TIMARA, the first conservatory program in electronic music? Probably not, because when we think "electronic music," we think Varèse or Pierre Schaeffer, not Halim el-Dabh.
 
So what does Olly Wilson's music sound like? Well, it sounds kind of like this.
 
 
That was Wilson's work, "Voices," commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for Tanglewood's 1970 season. If you thought you heard musicians humming and whistling, you thought right! If you thought, "Wow, that's not what I was expecting it to sound like!" well... Go listen to more music, I guess? There's more out there than can be dreamed in any of our philosophies.
 
 
*Huge swathes of 20th century musical experimentation and technical developments are shown the door just as a matter of course, but that's a whole other blog.
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Perchance to dream?

Right now is basically Willy Wonka's crazy LSD trip of a boat ride in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. There's no way of knowing which way we are going, but hopefully, some bright day, we pop out of the hell tunnel and see a world more wondrous than could have been dreamed. Hopefully, too, the Oompa Loompas aren't laboring away behind closed doors to make your wonder world so wonderful. Ay, there's the rub.

But that word: hope. To hope for a better future. Without it, there is no movement forward, no impetus, no drive. Yet how quickly that hope can turn to crushing despair. To fight and flail forward only to find another dead end, or to finally stand close to the dreamed for and see through the cracks of closed doors the Dorian Gray reality. Who wouldn't burn out? Who wouldn't sit, exhausted, head held low, and shuffle forward another day?
And yet, perchance to dream... 
To hope without striving is futile optimism. I hope all students who come to me feel safe to learn their art, and part of that is opening windows on other artists like them. I hope those who want to learn music face no obstacle to their access, so I work with MusicLink to ensure finances, at least, are not a problem. I hope that all who want it have the opportunity to perform, so I strive to find a stage for them. I hope that all who want to write, to compose, will find their voice validated, so I strive to program as diverse a repertoire as is possible.
I hope that any Black student who wants to learn can travel from home to lesson without fear for their life, and so I stand with them until their struggles are (one day!) merely the banal vicissitudes of existing.
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My composer for today is Florence Price (1887-1953). Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, she received her first music lessons from her mother, also named Florence. Ms. Price must've been the type to know what she wanted to do right from go, because she got her first composition published when she was 11 years old. At 14, she graduated high school, and applied and was accepted into the New England Conservatory of Music. Tellingly, she identified as a Mexican to avoid prejudice. There, she wrote her first String Trio and her first Symphony, graduating with honors in 1906.
Her family left for Chicago in 1927, fleeing Jim Crow in the South, and there she met a number of artists who helped facilitate her career as a composer. Among them were Margaret Barnes, Langston Hughes, and Marian Anderson. Another important figure in her career was Frederick Stock, a German conductor who led the premier of Ms. Price's First Symphony with the Chicago Symphony in 1933. This marks the first time a composition written by an African-American woman was performed by a major symphony orchestra.
Musically, Florence Price's compositions are often cut from 19th century romantic cloth, which makes sense given her mother's love for classical music. She also made use of elements from African-American culture, weaving spirituals and dances like the juba into her symphonies. While Ms. Price's reputation lies largely on her orchestra works, she has a good body of songs, some of them arrangements of spirituals, some of them original melodies, which are all excellent. The song below is a setting of Langston Hughes' text "Hold Fast to Dreams," given a jaw dropping interpretation by soprano Louise Toppin. Sorry, accompanist! Your name was not listed for me to credit you!
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Canon in the Smelting Pot: Margaret Bonds

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) has been making some appearances on my Twitter feed as an example of African American presence in European classical music. What has become increasingly clear to me (what was certainly already clear to POC in conservatory environments) is not just the lack of representation in/access to conservatory style musical education, but the erasure of a history of people who have been there all along. Music History 101 students, raise your hand if you know Joseph Boulogne! Well, the way things have been going recently, there might be a couple kids now a days who know that name, but we certainly didn't talk about him at any point in my schooling between 2004-2008. Funny, that.

 
Speaking about things education overlooks, did you know that in my AP English class's discussion of Langston Hughes' poem, "A Dream Deferred," we never talked about what the explosion at the end was? Now just give me a second. I've got to check my notes, because something happened recently that seemed like what that poem might be referring to... Hm. What was it again? Something about protests against racial injustice... Maybe you'll know what he was talking about, but whatever it is, it wasn't worth mentioning to us white high school students. As far as we knew, the poem "Hold Fast to Dreams" was a reminder that we could be "whatever we wanted to be" as long as we dreamed it, the kind of poem meant for a person who wears "Live, Laugh, Love" T-shirts.
 
Of course, bringing up minority representation in just about anything in the US brings swift vitriol. "I don't care about color," says some white dude, "I just care about quality." What kind of quality? Never mind. Somehow it's never quite good enough. And god forbid somebody cast John Boyega as a stormtrooper. After all, the entire Star Wars universe, a whole galaxy of planets and civilizations, that has aliens of every color from green to orange, somehow only has one human with a skin tone darker than double-bleached Wonder Bread.
 
Which brings me back to Margaret Bonds. Her musical education included piano lessons from her mother, Estelle C. Bonds, composition lessons from Florence Price (who I wrote about in a previous post) and William L. Dawson (who I most certainly write about in a future post) and both a bachelor's and master's degree in music from Northwestern University. She also became quite close with soprano Abbie Mitchell and composer Will Marion Cook. Among her performance achievements were performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as playing Florence Price's Piano Concerto with the Women's Orchestra of Chicago.
 
She also was a close collaborator with Langston Hughes, and the two did not shy away from lyrics which either drew explicitly on Black experience in America (like The Negro Speaks of Rivers or Three Dream Portraits) or worked to restore the presence of Black people in history. To that second point, I refer particularly to the work The Ballad of the Brown King, a cantata focusing on Balthazar's trip with the Three Kings to pay homage to Jesus. Tying the context from above paragraphs here, one can hopefully understand how setting these lyrics would be a gutsy move in a world where there were separate water fountains for Black Americans, because it would still be a gutsy move today. Sigh. Hold fast to dreams, indeed.
 
Here is Margaret Bonds' Three Dream Portraits, given a phenomenal performance by soprano Icy Simpson and pianist Artina McCain. The recordings are drawn from their album "I, too," a collection of African American art songs and spirituals. 
 
 
 
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Where the Lilacs Grow

When is a war over? When a government says it is so? When the generals agree with a gentleman's handshake and say with a photoshoot smile, "Good game, guys!" When the general populace loses interest and simply walks away, first pretending then forgetting of the landmines left beneath their feet?

Not so easy, of course. The Civil War never really stopped, it merely shifted. From explosions on a battlefield to covert slinking, Confederate flags hung not quite hidden in the hearts of Real Americans™, a pipeline lay enough out of sight that the well-meaning white can say, "No, but I didn't see!" Then finally, with a cry through choked throats, the African Americans rise again en masse and lays bare again the cankerous boil in the soul of America, then, through every media outlet available, the quailing powers that be point at the protesters and shout, "Sic sempre tyrannis!" and the police march like a military, shooting in the name of.

The protests continue. In the face of plague and poverty and police brutality, the protests continue.

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Today's composer is George Walker (1922-2018). It is always sad to learn of a composer only because they died, but that is how his name first came to me. While in high school, Mr. Walker attended Howard University, which hosted his first piano recital. He then attended Oberlin Conservatory, and completed his early musical education at the Curtis Institute of Music, becoming one of the first black graduates from the music program. He eventually went on to become the first black person to receive a Doctorate in Music from Eastman School of music.

Mr. Walker was beyond a formidable pianist. Not long after his New York debut recital, he performed Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. In 1950, he became the first black musician signed on by major management with the National Concert Artists, and he embarked on numerous tours across Europe. His teaching career is no less impressive, having held professorships at Dalcroze School of music, the New School for Social Research, Smith College, University of Boulder, Rutgers University, Peabody Institute of John Hopkins, and the University of Delaware.

The piece I am sharing, Lilacs, is also the first composition awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music to an African American. The text is drawn from Walt Whitman's poem, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd," written as an elegy to Abraham Lincoln.

 
 
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  1. Talk the Walk, Walk the Talk