Conference Agenda

Since 2020 a confluence of factors has brought William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony out of the obscurity that swiftly descended after Leopold Stokowski conducted its acclaimed Philadelphia Orchestra premiere in 1934. These overlapping factors include the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the American classical music industry, the advocacy of musicians and scholars for this and other works by minoritized composers, and G. Schirmer’s new performing edition of the Negro Folk Symphony score. Performances and professional recordings of Dawson’s symphony since 2020 have outnumbered those of the previous eight decades together.

Dawson, like his Black contemporaries Florence B. Price and William Grant Still, was inspired by Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 declaration that “the future music of [the United States] must be founded upon what are called the negro [sic] melodies.” Dawson’s copy of Dvořák’s New World Symphony score, which he acquired in the 1920s before he began composing his own piece, contains pencil annotations that reflect his close study of its form, thematic content, and harmonic structure, and also indicate his admiration for the beauty and effectiveness of certain passages. The Negro Folk Symphony’s instrumentation, melodic and harmonic language, texture, and mood at key points unmistakably reference the earlier work.

Because the two are complementary but not redundant, Dawson’s symphony is sometimes programmed on concerts with Dvořák’s 9th. The pairing reveals Dawson’s symphony not only as a worthy contribution to the orchestral canon, but as a necessary corrective to Dvořák’s beloved, romanticized vision of the New World. While the Negro Folk Symphony is a respectful troping of Dvořák’s most famous piece, it can also be heard as implicitly critical, illuminating through contrast how Dvořák’s music remains on the surface, providing an outsider’s perspective on North America’s landscape and inhabitants. Dvořák presents an expertly paced series of almost scenic pleasures; by contrast, Dawson allows his themes to flex and contract unpredictably across the timeline, telling a story that is dynamic, complex, and marked by Dawson’s individual artistry. The Negro Folk Symphony does not daub “Negro folk” color onto a Dvořákian symphonic model that is already complete without it. Rather, by imbuing his symphony with his own distinctive and proudly Black voice, Dawson shines a light on the absence of a non-White subjectivity from Dvořák’s work.

The Negro Folk Symphony is no less deeply engaged with the musical worlds of Dawson’s Black ancestors than with European symphonic precedents. Composing in the Harlem Renaissance era, Dawson turned to African American religious folk songs for thematic material, an approach that was paradoxically both traditional and radical. On the one hand, Spirituals had been sung and played in concert arrangements since the 1870s, and their use as themes for instrumental music had been pioneered by Dvořák, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and others. On the other hand, for a Black composer for whom slavery was recent family history, and whose understanding of African American music and spirituality was bone deep, the implications of bringing the creativity of the enslaved with him into the concert hall were radical indeed. Dawson built into his symphony not only the melodies of the folk songs but the experiences to which the songs bear witness, and the pain, faith, and determination that they express. Dawson’s career as an influential choral director and arranger of Spirituals gives his symphony’s engagement with these songs, and with their singers past and present, a unique depth and significance.

Many of the Negro Folk Symphony’s most politically and aesthetically provocative elements were incorporated in the revision Dawson undertook after his visit to West Africa in 1952–53. Experiencing the music of his ancestors’ homeland equipped him to unsettle the nineteenth-century European aesthetics that had been his touchstone in the 1920s. It is exclusively the revised Negro Folk Symphony that has been performed in the last seven decades, and that has featured in the current revival of interest in the work.

Taking into account details from the never-published version premiered in 1934 as well as the 2023 edition, this presentation’s analysis follows the Negro Folk Symphony’s complex interwoven threads—those of the European symphony (including references not only to Dvořák but also to specific works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky), the African American religious folk songs, and West African drumming. The paper concludes by briefly considering the significance of the ways in which Dawson’s approach to his materials differs from what we hear in the groundbreaking first symphonies of Price and Still, which have also been receiving increased performances and attention.

In the early 1970s, pianist, composer, and poet Cecil Taylor held residencies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (January 1970 to spring 1971), University of Dayton (one week, spring 1971), and Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (fall 1971 to spring 1973). At Wisconsin and Antioch, Taylor directed and composed for a student big band (the Black Music Ensemble), and taught classes on the black aesthetic and the history of black music. Apart from brief discussions by Litweiler (Down Beat, 1971) and Grundy (2020), nothing has been published on Taylor’s classes at Wisconsin and Antioch. This portion of Taylor’s career is poorly known in general; his only commercial recording from the time is Indent, a solo piano concert at Antioch in March 1973.

My paper begins with a summary history of Taylor’s residencies at all three schools, including the content of his classes and his work with the Black Music Ensemble, followed by a close examination of a key theme from those classes—the central role of spirit possession in west African religion and its role in music of the diaspora, with special reference to Haitian vodou. I will draw on a wide range of sources: interviews with surviving members of the Black Music Ensemble and others who worked with Taylor at the time; archival materials from all three schools, including unreleased tapes from Antioch; contemporaneous newspaper and magazine reports; examples of notated music from the Black Music Ensemble; surviving posters and programs; texts assigned by Taylor in his classes, including Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu and Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen; Taylor’s own poetry from the time; and recent scholarship on Taylor, his contexts, and his poetry (especially Grundy, “Cecil Taylor’s Voodoo Poetics”). Rituals of spirit possession have a clear if overlooked relevance to Taylor’s own performances from that time and throughout the rest of his career, but in his lectures he traced the thread of spirit possession through performers as diverse as Bubber Miley, Aretha Franklin, and Albert Ayler. Vodou was also the theme of two concerts by the Black Music Ensemble at Antioch: “Feeding the Sea” and “Evening of the Blacken’d Goat.”

This story begins with a performance that did not happen. Marian Anderson, aged 66, was invited to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Anderson’s performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial would have symbolized a return to the site of her iconic 1939 Easter Sunday concert, where she took an early stand against the racial illogics of inequality. However, the hundreds of thousands of protesting marchers filling the National Mall prevented Anderson’s arrival to the podium, and the program continued without her. The March’s organizers belatedly slotted Anderson in between speeches upon her eventual arrival, and Anderson sang with just moments’ notice her signature rendition of the spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

This performance was politely received, but paled in comparison to Mahalia Jackson who was the day’s musical highlight. Historical records of the March and scholarly and critical writing on Anderson’s career often omit Anderson’s performance. I show that one reason for this reception is Anderson’s vocal “oldness,” indexed by her classically inflected vocal style. The assumption that old age and “old-fashioned” singing corresponds with cultural and political irrelevancy rendered Anderson’s performance and political commentary inaudible to a younger generation of activists who were turning to popular music styles that gave new sound to expressions of resistance in the 1960s (Kernodle, 2008).

Voice and style analysis of Anderson’s performance of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” however, show how her insistence to continue singing regardless of reception articulated a type of “fugitive voice” — an envoiced refusal to be defined, settled, or located in a singular past, present, or future of African American history (Feldman, 2021). As such, being “old” and refusing to stop singing belongs to a repertoire of Black radical aesthetics (Moten, 2003, 2013, 2018; Brooks, 2014; Ibrahim, 2021) that defined Anderson’s late career. I argue for the potential of older African American voices and singing styles within musical analyses of antiracist protests of the 1960s, and critique age ideologies that posit old bodies and voices as politically insignificant.

Although Florence Price’s compositional training at institutions including the New England Conservatory has been the subject of research in recent years (Rae Linda Brown, 2020; Douglas Shadle, 2020), little research has been done on the last years of Florence Price’s life and her interaction with her mentor Roy Harris.

Price’s late studies with Harris are documented in her diary entries dating 1946-50. Here, she commented on daily activities, correspondence, commissions, compositional ideas, and notes she took at events she attended at Chicago Musical College, including lectures by Harris in 1946, with whom she frequently met when he was “in the city”, had private instruction, phone conversations, and who gave her regular assignments. In 1949 and 1952, respectively, Harris and Price wrote violin concertos; Harris’s was a response to Copland’s Americana style, and Price’s concerto a work that did not rely on Black vernacular idioms, but on a national populist language. Both works are through-composed and rely on pervasive triplet figurations and metrical changes.

Given Price and Harris’s interaction from 1946 and onwards, it is not inconceivable that their concertos originated out of a shared populist aesthetic based on the principles of “individual effort”, a way for Price to imagine an American identity beyond her perceived double handicap as a black woman composer. In the same manner as Price believed that “no history of American music could be written without bringing in the subject of steel” – in fact, the US produced 50% of the world’s steel in the 1950s – Price’s diary perhaps reveals that she may have dreamed of a homogenous American music that could be exported and enhanced in value, just like the steel that Midwestern mills produced and exported, thereby providing a way forward for her identity as an American composer.