New World Prophecy
IN 1934, LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI and his incomparable Philadelphia Orchestra premiered a new work by a black composer : the Negro Folk Symphony of William Levi Dawson. Four days later, Stokowski conducted the symphony at Carnegie Hall, a performance that was nationally broadcast and widely reviewed. “Hope in the Night,” the second movement, ignited an ovation—the orchestra had to stand. At the close, Dawson was repeatedly called to the stage. Pitts Sanborn of The New York World-Telegram wrote that “the immediate success of the symphony [did not] give rise to doubts as to its enduring qualities. One is eager to hear it again and yet again.” Leonard Liebling of the New York American (like Sanborn, a critic of consequence) went the full distance; he called Dawson’s symphony “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.” Yet the Negro Folk Symphony would soon be forgotten.
Around the same time, two other notable symphonies by African Americans were prominently premiered: William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony, performed by the Rochester Philharmonic in 1931, and Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor, played by the Chicago Symphony in 1933. And yet, writes the music historian Gwynne Kuhner Brown (in her 2012 article “Whatever Happened to William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony? ”), “the tumultuous approbation [Dawson’s symphony] received from critics and audiences alike set it apart—not only from contemporaneous works by African Americans, but also from most new classical music of the period.”
In 1934, Stokowski told audiences for the Negro Folk Symphony that “a wonderful development is taking place in American music.” In 1963, he returned to the work and recorded it with his American Symphony Orchestra—a reading of seething intensity and irresistible panache. You don’t have to go looking for this recording. It’s hiding in plain sight on YouTube. So is a brilliantly played (if less deeply felt) 1994 Detroit Symphony recording. Nevertheless, the Negro Folk Symphony retains its veil of obscurity. When a rare performance (of the first movement only) was given last February by the orchestra of the State University of New York at Purchase, a prevalent response among the student musicians was shame.
Dawson died at the age of 90 in 1990, an éminence grise. His eminence, however, remained restricted to his choral arrangements of African-American spirituals. Though Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, and Artur Rodziński all expressed interest in conducting the Negro Folk Symphony, though Dawson envisioned it as his Symphony No. 1, he never again composed for orchestra. The reasons are both obvious and not.
PETER FARRELLY’S Academy Award–winning film about the African-American pianist Don Shirley, tells a pertinent story of an artist in limbo in the 1950s and ’60s. Whatever the veracity of the film’s widely discussed account of a black musician in white America—it succumbs to bloated clichés of race and ethnicity—the real Don at La Scala, and Gershwin’s Concerto in F at the Metropolitan Opera House for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He also composed for orchestra. His admirers included Igor Stravinsky. He did not identify as a jazz artist. But Shirley’s performing career took place in clubs, where he purveyed a singular musical hybrid, intermingling “Blowin’ in the Wind” with a Rachmaninoff etude, or “I Can’t Get Started” with a Chopin nocturne.
