So here it is. A full length flat-out American stunner by an African-American composer written as far back as the mid-thirties, clearly inviting listeners into a soundscape which speaks of something essential in the African-American experience, brined in a palate of jazz, blues, gospel, worship call and response, rhythms from the African continent, the pentatonic scale, not to mention all sorts of progressive tonal modulations and original chord sequences. Causing a colossal ovation when Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered it in 1936. There's the same DNA coursing through as Gershwin and Copland, but perhaps it sounds even more like Hindemith and Prokofiev, and perhaps Nielsen especially.
With William Grant Still, there are two-hundred works to perform (and at some point we'll get to them), including no less than thirty choral works and eight operas, works of virtually every genre and form, along with other works simply lost to posterity. Florence Price is suddenly appearing on orchestral programs rather ubiquitously, but the bulk of her compositions were for piano, nearly fifty separate piano works, many of which are collections of piano pieces themselves, and well over a hundred art-songs for voice and piano.
Meanwhile, William L. Dawson lived to his nineties, and yet there seems to have been no successor work to the Negro Folk Symphony. Unless a trove shows up in some desk drawer or storage unit, it's just one hugely promising symphony, before that a few chamber works, afterward some highly popular choral arrangements of and variations on spirituals, yet for the remaining fifty-five years of his life, never again reaching for the ambition of a full-fledged work, seemingly not even so much as an original chamber work. On the one hand, we have no idea what part of his experience soured him on trying to mount another work of great scope and ambition. On the other hand, we know perfectly well.
To hear this work is to hear a very particular time in both American history and the African-American experience - the same period in which August Wilson's The Piano Lesson takes place, the period of Roosevelt's America when the country was suffused with Great Depression idealism and the cause of social justice seemed entirely commensurate with patriotism. However poor people were before, they were poorer during the Great Depression, and yet such was the optimism of the experience that the vast majority of Americans expected their their aspirations to middle class life to be met, black as well as white. For White America, it generally turned out quite well...
The music of Dawson, Still, Price, Ulysses Kay and George Walker was in large part formed from this era of high idealism when the brief possibility was dangled that the black experience would join itself relatively seamlessly to the story of American history as a triumph against injustice, because it was taken as an optimistic given that the story of American history is the story of continual progress. But like every country, the story of America is not a story of continual progress, and the dream was yet again deferred as it was before and ever has been afterward. The story of African-American classical music is one of a million ignominious stories of African-American exclusion, exclusion which in many ways not only ruined African-American opportunity, but wasted a lion's share of opportunity for greatness within American classical music.
The fact remains that in this country, the vastly disproportionate plurality of great American musical achievement, perhaps even the majority of our great musical achievement, is African-American. They were completely shut out of American classical music, and therefore made great art out of appallingly tragic circumstances in other genres that so exponentially exceeds even the greatest achievements of American classical music.
Great art is the story of struggle. Art is the story of a rigged system working against people outcast from acceptance. No struggle? No art. No divided self between our aspirations and our achievements? No art. Great art is written in the blood of its creation. There is no great art if you've experienced no life circumstance from which to create great art. It's not a myth that so many of the greatest composers wrote their music amid tragedy and suffering, and it's not a myth that outside of the Soviet sphere, the greatest music of the 20th century was written elsewhere than the classical genre.
Like the Jewish experience, what makes the history of African-American experience so extraordinary and inspiring is the millions of ways forward it had to negotiate in the midst of continual, bottomless tragedy unlimited. But African-Americans deserve the right to stop being extraordinary, to be just as mediocre in their comfort as the rest of us. But, one must unfortunately add, the same forces which finally liberated Jews from two-thousand years of exclusion were the exact same forces which created the Shoah. There is no great achievement without great failure, no great triumph without great tragedy. If a reckoning is finally coming with our legacy of racism against people of color, the results are likely to fall disproportionately well upon some of its intended beneficiaries, yet also visit worse tragedies than ever before upon others by those who would do literally everything within their power to prevent such a reckoning.
Great art is the story of struggle. Art is the story of a rigged system working against people outcast from acceptance. No struggle? No art. No divided self between our aspirations and our achievements? No art. Great art is written in the blood of its creation. There is no great art if you've experienced no life circumstance from which to create great art. mediocre as the rest of us, and when these social forces are finally fixed, the lion's share of great artistic achievement will likely move on too to the next group of human beings to be appallingly marginalized. There are exponentially more people in the world than ever before, and the world is ever full of suffering. From the fiery cauldron of the human inferno comes the art which tells the hard truths that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but such is the overwhelming price of this gift that like so much of the human condition, one has to wonder if great art is at all worth the price of its existence. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that the world will always make someone suffer appallingly, and therefore, there is unfortunately no danger that the beams of great art which illuminate the darkness will ever be extinguished.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18yg27GTo0
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