Conference Agenda

How did Harlem Renaissance intellectuals theorize Black music? In the 1910s and ‘20s US, even as musicology was coalescing into a disciplinary formation around them, Black intellectuals were engaged in their own scholarly study of Black music (c.f. Work 1915; Dett 1918; Locke 1925). Now a few generations removed from emancipation, Black America faced a crisis of how to reckon with the folk music of enslavement; should this repertoire be left in the past for the benefit of progress, revitalized out of racial pride, or planted as the seed of a new Black art music? These debates played out on the printed page as well as the campuses of historically Black colleges, where students alternately embraced or revolted against the singing of spirituals.

An influential thinker in this discourse was Thomas W. Talley, a chemistry professor at Fisk who exhaustively collected Black folksongs. His 1922 Negro Folk Rhymes, Wise and Otherwise took as its subject Black secular music, which had been roundly dismissed as insignificant or even nonexistent by the previous literature. Throughout his oeuvre, Talley argued that the racial uplift of the Black people was located in their folk music. While the spiritual provided moral guidance, he read the secular folksong as a domain of scientific theorization, an epistemology of the natural world developed by and for a population excluded from elite Western science. By returning to the folksongs of the past, Black America could chart a progressive intellectual future.

In this paper I argue that Talley and his interlocuters spearheaded a reevaluation of Black folk music by Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, advancing a discourse that sought to locate the racial uplift of the New Negro in the folk music of the Old. Institutional musicology has long acknowledged its exclusion of scholars and musics on the basis of gender and race (Cusick 1999; Levitz 2018), but the time is ripe to critically evaluate the scholarship marginalized at the discipline’s founding. Involved yet ultimately excluded from the institutional formation of US musicology, Talley instead found widespread influence within a contemporaneous discourse from Black intellectuals—a Harlem Renaissance musicology.

Composer and educator R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) saw spirituals as a link to the African past, reflective of enslaved people’s resistance and coping. In the spirit of Sankofa, and as a medium for racial uplift, he aimed to uphold the significance of Black sacred music while ridding it of “caricature and defilement” (Du Bois 1903). This imperative is evident in his 1932 work, The Ordering of Moses which combines the Biblical Exodus with Negro folktales and infuses the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” with a 20^th century neo-romantic style. By observing this melding of sacred and secular (scripture and folklore), I trace a Black theology that reconciles religion and the Black social consciousness of the period. It is critical to (re)consider this relationship, as the Church was a foundational site of Black gathering and education in New Negro culture. This argument counters claims that the Harlem Renaissance was a staunchly secularist movement (Levering Lewis 1994), a position negligent of influential Black participation within not only the “Black Church,” but also Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches.

Dett’s scholarly and musical works are demonstrative of the complex and diverse spectrum of Black social, political, and religious thought during the period. His multiple mentions in The Crisis magazine, namely his “Men of the Month” feature, become evidence of the (then) blurred boundaries we have more steadfastly and retrospectively upheld between sacred and secular spheres. Moreover, his music proposes an additional “soundtrack” for the movement adjacent to jazz, ragtime, and the blues. In conversation with scholars such as Jon M. Spencer, Edward Said, and Dett himself, this paper focuses on the ethos and reception of The Ordering of Moses. To view this composition as representative of assimilationism (as some peers did) is to neglect the role of sacred music in Dett’s Black nationalistic project and to ignore the ways that Dett pushes back on the limits of Black authenticity. Consciously abandoning claims of assimilation, I position the work’s sonic, thematic, and lyrical qualities as disruptions of Western hegemony and evidence of the interrelations between sacred music, theology, and Black-conscious thought in the Harlem Renaissance milieu.

For more than sixty years, Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha (1911) sat unperformed, but with the help of Rockefeller Foundation funding, composer T.J. Anderson, music director Wendell Whalum, choreographer and stage director Katherine Dunham, and conductor Robert Shaw brought the full production to life for the first time in January 1972. Not only did this premiere precede the Wolf Trap rendition later that year, as well as the Gunther Schuller and Frank Corsaro Houston Grand Opera version in 1975, but the Atlanta staging was also the only one led by a predominantly Black, biracial creative team, combining the forces of Morehouse College, Spelman College, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the Memorial Arts Center. In the words of Melvin Drimmer, a critic who attended the premiere, this performance of Joplin’s opera was an example of “Black Theatre,” with “the Black community play[ing] the key role in the production and mounting of the opera.” By calling it “Black Theatre,” Drimmer was citing renowned sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois, who had developed the concept in 1926 as theatre “about,” “by,” “for,” and “near” Black people. Compared to DuBois’s idea of “double consciousness,” “Black Theatre” has been significantly underutilized in musicological analyses.

Through archival research at the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York Public Library, and Tufts Archival Research Center, this paper analyzes the Rockefeller grants to Anderson and Whalum as seed funding that supported Black artists with substantive financial support to mount Black Theatre. It also provides a corrective history that reveals how conflicts and legal threats from individuals like Vera Brodsky Lawrence and organizations like the Lottie Joplin Thomas Trust and the Dramatic Publishing Company replaced Anderson’s landmark orchestration by those of white composers and arrangers. For an opera that was conceived at the crossroads of turn-of-the-century minstrelsy, vociferous debates surrounding racial uplift and progress, and the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, the deplorable death of a biracial collaboration led primarily by Black artists at HBCUs showed how aspects of the Joplin revival continued to exploit Black artistry for white profit.