An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 13 | BLACK CONCERT MUSIC AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 327

Listening Guide 13.3

Afro-American Symphony, fi rst movement (Moderato assai)

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

CD 2.16

timing section subsection comments

6:03 fi rst theme Blues theme now with all three trumpets

with Harmon mutes and a more swinging

rhythm.

6:40 coda Harp leads into a short closing section, with

bass clarinet on blues theme underneath

high strings, then clarinets. Woodwinds,

then strings, create a fi nal blues-tinged

cadence. The last chord contains an added

sixth, common in popular music but unusual

in classical harmony.

note Still originally titled this movement “Longings” and attached the following lines from a poem

with the same title by the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906):

All my life long twell de night has pas’

Let de wo’k come ez it will,

So dat I fi n’ you, my honey, at last,

Somewhaih des ovah de hill.

Listen & Refl ect

1. What do you think it might have meant to William Grant Still, an African American com-
   poser, arranger, and performer, to write a movement of a symphony built around a theme
   based on the twelve-bar blues structure? What do the resources of an orchestra bring to
   this traditional genre?


2. The epigraph by Dunbar uses black dialect, a literary device that presents an obstacle for
   many present-day readers, for whom such language suggests offensive stereotypes. Can
   any parallels be drawn between the language of Dunbar’s poem and the musical language
   of Still’s symphony?

popular songs, and a stint as a silent movie accompanist. During a long career

that lasted until her death in 1953, she also continued to compose. Her list of com-

positions includes four symphonies and other orchestral works, chamber pieces,

solo works for piano and organ, choral pieces, and art songs.

Along with her contemporaries William Dawson and Roland Hayes, Price also

carried forward the development of the concert spiritual as begun by Harry T.

Burleigh. Her arrangements were taken up by a new generation of performers,

which included not only Hayes, a classically trained tenor, but also Paul Robeson

and Marian Anderson. Robeson was a singer, actor, and political activist whose

commanding, cultivated baritone voice conveyed the dignity and emotional

force of a music that expressed long centuries of oppression. Anderson was one

concert spirituals

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