An Introduction to America’s Music

324 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II

since the uncut opera’s fi rst performance in 1976, have opera lovers come to appre-

ciate its reliance on other sources as well. Gershwin acknowledged the infl uence

of Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, to which recent scholarship has

added Wozzeck, an expressionistic opera by the Viennese modernist composer

Alban Berg. Gershwin met Berg during his 1928 European visit, studied his atonal

music closely, and attended Wozzeck’s introduction to the United States in a 1931

concert performance conducted by Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia. More than

any other single work, perhaps, Porg y and Bess demonstrates Gershwin’s ability to

forge a distinctive personal style from a huge range of diverse infl uences.

Gershwin achieved celebrity in his lifetime as a songwriter, a dazzling pianist,

and a composer of concert music and opera. His friend and fellow song writer

Kay Swift once said that “he heard his music simultaneously through his and

yours and anyone else’s ears.” That empathy between composer and audience

helps to explain not only the music’s popularity but also its remarkable afterlife,

judging by the number of recordings, arrangements, and concert performances

of Gershwin’s music from his lifetime to the present. Through the history of his

music’s performances and recordings, Gershwin emerges as one of the most sig-

nifi cant composers of the twentieth century.

BLACK CONCERT MUSIC AND THE

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Our study of African American music so far has emphasized the folk and popular

spheres. But in the years between World War I and World War II, black musicians

also worked to establish a beachhead in the concert hall. The cultural movement

known as the Harlem Renaissance—under way by around 1920 and led by black

intellectuals including philosopher Alain Locke, social scientist W. E. B. DuBois,

and poet and author James Weldon Johnson—focused primarily on the arts. Cul-

tural achievement, the leaders hoped, would crack the seemingly impregnable

wall of racism, for once black writers, painters, and composers showed their mas-

tery of classical techniques, whites would be forced to give up their stereotype of

black inferiority. The Harlem Renaissance’s aesthetic ideal prescribed work that

refl ected the artists’ black heritage but in culturally prestigious (i.e., European-

derived) forms. That call to action resulted in the creation of an impressive body

of music rooted in both European classical and African American folk traditions.

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

The generation’s most versatile black composer was William Grant Still. Born in

1895 in Mississippi, Still grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended Wilberforce

College and the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Later formal study included lessons

with George Chadwick and Edgard Varèse. Still earned his living in popular music,

however, beginning in 1914 as a dance orchestra performer. In 1916 he worked as

an arranger for W. C. Handy’s music-publishing company in Memphis, produc-

ing the fi rst band version of St. Louis Blues. In 1919 Still accompanied Handy to New

York, where he continued in the publishing business and played in Handy’s bands.

He joined the Black Swan Phonograph Company in 1921 as manager and arranger,

and from 1921 to 1923 he played oboe in the pit orchestra of Eubie Blake and Noble

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