January 18, 2022

WHAT WE LOST:

Someone Finally Remembered William Dawson's 'Negro Folk Symphony' (Tom Huizenga, 6/26/20, NPR: All Things Considered)

On Nov. 20, 1934, a brand new symphony brought a Carnegie Hall audience to its feet. The concert featured the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its star conductor Leopold Stokowski. The music was the Negro Folk Symphony, by the 35-year-old African American composer William Dawson. He was called back to the stage several times to take bows after his symphony ended.

Stokowski conducted four back-to-back performances of the piece, one of which was nationally broadcast by CBS radio. One New York critic called it "the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved." Olin Downes, writing in The New York Times, noted: "This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech."

The immediate success should have made Dawson a household name and buoyed him to write more symphonic works. But after just a handful of performances over the next 18 months, the symphony inexplicably dropped off the radar, and Dawson never wrote another. After decades of neglect, a new recording of the Negro Folk Symphony has finally been released this week, performed by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The three-movement piece is emotionally charged and rigorously constructed. Dawson said he wasn't out to imitate Beethoven or Brahms, but wanted those who heard it to know that it was "unmistakably not the work of a white man." He found inspiration for the piece in traditional spirituals, which he preferred to call "Negro folk-music."

"The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals," Dawson wrote for the program notes of the Carnegie Hall performance. "In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother's knee."

In an article published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, professor of Music History and Music Theory at the University of Puget Sound, notes that Dawson didn't simply build his symphony by quoting singable melodies from spirituals. "The themes are handled with such virtuosic flexibility of rhythm and timbre that each movement seems to evolve organically," she writes, adding that Dawson offers a "persuasive musical bridge between the 'Negro Folk' and the 'Symphony.'"

William Levi Dawson was born in 1899, in Alabama. At age 13, he ran away from home to the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied music, wrote his first pieces and graduated in 1921. Ten years later, after earning a master's degree, he returned to the historically Black institution to launch its music school, while making its choir internationally famous, singing his arrangements of spirituals.




Posted by at January 18, 2022 12:00 AM

  

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