An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 13 | BLACK CONCERT MUSIC AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 325

Sissle’s Shuffl e Along, the decade’s most successful black Broadway show. An accom-

plished professional arranger and composer, Still also continued to compose classi-

cal works, including ballets, operas, symphonies, chamber music, and vocal pieces.

The premiere of his Afro-American Symphony in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic

Orchestra with Howard Hanson conducting marked the fi rst time in history that a

major orchestra performed a symphonic work by an African American composer.

Somewhat like Rhapsody in Blue, the Afro-American Symphony uses materials

derived from African American music to build a structure patterned after

European models. Here the model is the traditional four-movement symphony,

and each of Still’s four movements corresponds to the classical norm. The fi rst

movement (LG 13.3) follows the time-honored sonata form established by Haydn

and Mozart in the eighteenth century: an exposition in which two themes estab-

lish contrasting key areas, a development that takes the themes through some-

times agitated transformations, and a recapitulation in which the themes return

in more recognizable form and in the home key. (Like some nineteenth-century

composers, Still reverses the order of the themes in his recapitulation.)

Unlike any European symphony, however—and unlike Rhapsody in Blue, for

that matter—the Afro-American Symphony begins with a theme in the twelve-bar

structure of a blues chorus. Still’s second theme is an original melody in the style

of a Negro spiritual—not the fi rst time such a theme appears in a symphony, since

Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony does the same, most famously in the slow move-

ment’s English horn solo. The very opening of Still’s symphony, for unaccompa-

nied English horn, might be interpreted as an acknowledgment of his debt to

Dvorˇák. Indeed, the Afro-American Symphony seems to fulfi ll Dvorˇák’s prophecy

of an American concert music rooted in African American folk idioms.

Still’s use of those folk idioms extend to orchestration and timbre. He scored

his work for a standard symphonic ensemble, but several details reveal his back-

ground in theater and dance orchestras. Trumpets and trombones use Harmon

mutes, giving them a pinched, nasal timbre common to jazz bands but rarely

heard in the concert hall. The percussion section includes a vibraphone, a metal

instrument something like a xylophone that was just beginning to be taken up

by jazz performers. In addition to the standard pair of hand-held cymbals, Still

calls for a suspended cymbal struck with a stick, producing a sound more famil-

iar from the dance band’s drum kit. Also familiar from popular music is the

sound of a snare drum played with wire brushes. By these means, the sound of

the symphony orchestra is imbued with popular elements.

FLORENCE PRICE

Still’s symphony was a landmark work of the Harlem Renaissance, setting

a precedent for others to follow. One of the fi rst to benefi t from the attention

beginning to be paid to black concert musicians was Still’s somewhat older

contemporary Florence Price. Born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price studied

with Chadwick at the New England Conservatory and taught at various southern

colleges before moving to Chicago in 1927. In 1932, the year after the premiere of

Still’s Afro-American Symphony, Price’s Symphony no. 1 in E Minor took fi rst prize

in a composition contest, and it was premiered the following year by the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra.

A wife and a mother, Price supported her efforts as a composer of concert

music by working where work was to be found, including teaching, writing

Afro-American

Symphony

LG 13.3

Symphony No. 1

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