Category: music

One of the finest Black composers of the 20th century, William Grant Still lived from 1895 to 1978, bearing witness to the growth of the American vernacular in classical music, as well as the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Still’s work occasionally sounds almost like a rougher answer to Gershwin–in fact, the work heard below contains what seems to almost be a quote from Gershwin in its third movement–but Still is much more than that. He was prolific, writing five symphonies, nine operas, and a number of other works in many forms and genres. Still was also a proficient session musician on his own, playing in many bands and orchestras over his life, and he did a bit of arranging work for film. Still was in many ways a trailblazer, in much the same way that Florence Price was.

This work is his most well-known: the first of his five symphonies, subtitled “The Afro-American”. The work blends the sounds of spirituals with the emergent sounds of jazz. Formally, it is purely a symphony in the European tradition, but it is well-steeped in the sounds of the Black vernacular of the time. It’s dramatic, lyrical, and at times, thrilling.

Here is the “Afro-American Symphony” by William Grant Still.

Share This Post

When I’ve listened to Florence Price’s music over the last few years, I’ve thought often of Antonin Dvorak’s observation from the time he spent in the United States, among American musicians and composers. Paraphrasing, Dvorak noted that the American musicians in that time were relying heavily on the forms and modes coming out of Europe. There isn’t anything particularly wrong with that, and a lot of fine music, if not great music, emerged from composers like Edward MacDowell. But Dvorak–whose own music was deeply steeped in the folk music of his beloved homeland in Moravia and Bohemia–felt that American music’s real rise to greatness would come when composers looked not to Europe for inspiration but rather to the music of Native Americans and the African-American community.

Later in the 20th century, this would come to pass, and Florence Price was a part of that.

This work is simply called “Concert Overture No. 2”, but its musical forebears do indeed come from the African spirituals of her own forebears. The work’s mood is set from the very beginning in that unique blend of sad hopefulness that imbues so many of those very spirituals.

Share This Post

Composer Omar Thomas was born in Brooklyn in 1984 to Guyanese parents. He eventually studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and has moved on to a highly praised career as a composer. While he is mainly known as a jazz musician, he has not allowed genre to bind him, as we here in this work, which blends the classical and jazz idioms in a work that sounds at times like a primal scream against a world filled with racist violence and at others like an affirmation of a world that many are trying to fill with grace and forgiveness.

The impetus for Of Our New Day Begun was the attack by a white supremacist on Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, in which nine people were shot dead.

In Thomas’s own words:

The work’s ending is particularly fascinating to me. The piece feels like it is coming to a slow, meditative, and even peaceful conclusion…but then something new stirs in the band, starting with a rhythm emerging softly from the percussion, a rhythm that is a blend of march and waltz, and the entire band fills the hall with sound again. It feels like a rejection of the expected peaceful acceptance of the world in favor of a defiant facing of that world head-on.

Here is Of Our New Day Begun, performed by the James Madison University Wind Symphony.

Share This Post