Carl Van Vechten’s photographic portrait of William Grant Still (restored by Adam Cuerden for the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
While I have not ignored the twentieth-century African American composer William Grant Still over the course of my writing, my articles about him have been so sparse that I have had to use a search tool to remember what they were. I find this more than a little ironic, because my last encounter with his music took place early this season during SF Music Day at the beginning of October, when the program prepared by the Chordless duo of soprano Sara LeMesh and pianist Allegra Chapman included a performance of Still’s song “Grief.” My other major memory, however, reaches back to my Examiner.com days, when pianist Lara Downes and violinist Rachel Barton Pine performed the “African Dance” movement from Still’s suite for violin and piano during a San Francisco Performances Salon at the Hotel Rex.
In that context I decided to return to the DSO Replay archive of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) to view a performance of Still’s first (“Afro-American”) symphony, composed in 1930. This was part of a Classical Roots Celebration concert conducted by André Raphel. Sadly, the Web page for the video provided no background other than the date of the performance (March 9, 2019), while the video itself included the display of each movement’s subtitle at its beginning. As a result I feel obliged to inform readers that Wikipedia has created a far more informative Web page that discusses not only the music but the inspiration behind that music.
That inspiration came from the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Each movement was published with an epigraph of one of Dunbar’s texts; and all of those epigraphs are included on the Wikipedia page, along with the music notation for four of the key thematic elements. The overall rhetoric of the symphony is somber, clearly influenced by blues traditions without trying to shoehorn blues content into symphonic rhetoric. The only exception is the third-movement scherzo, whose upbeat disposition (Still gave it the title “Humor”) was given bright coloration by banjo accompaniment. (This is the only one of the four movements in which the banjo plays.)
Raphel’s conducting delivered a consistently clear account of all of these thematic elements and the engaging diversity of instrumentation summoned to present them. Sadly, the video work for this performance was hit-or-miss. I was particularly disappointed that the video director never seemed to have found the banjo, even though the face of the banjo player could be identified with little difficulty. On a more positive side the video often homed in on the bass clarinet. I have had a long-standing respect for this instrument ever since I realized the impact of its role in the score Richard Wagner composed for his Götterdämmerung. It would not surprise me if Still took Wagner as a point of departure from which he could cultivate his own dark rhetorical colors.
The other disappointment was that it took me so long to have my first encounter with this symphony. Whatever flaws there may have been in the camera-work, Raphel definitely knew how to lead the attentive listener through the emotional panorama of Still’s symphony. The shots of his conducting more than compensated for when the video direction was less informative, and I would be only too happy to have an opportunity to experience his performance skills in a “real-time” concert setting.
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