MASTERWORKS 7
Negro Folk Symphony WILLIAM DAWSON BORN: September 26, 1899, in Anniston, Alabama DIED: May 2, 1990, in Montgomery WORK COMPOSED: 1934 WORLD PREMIERE: November 20, 1934, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting PERFORMANCE HISTORY: Tonight’s is the first DSSO performance of any music by William Dawson. INSTRUMENTATION: : Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (gong, chimes, triangle, tenor drum, snare drum, xylophone, cymbals, bass drum, steel plate), harp and strings DURATION: 35 minutes William Levi Dawson was an American composer, professor, musicologist and choir director. In 1912, at the age of thirteen, he ran away from home to study music full-time as a pre-college student at the Tuskegee Institute (now University) under Booker T. Washington, the school president. Dawson paid his tuition by working as a music librarian and manual laborer in the school’s Agricultural Division. He participated as a member of Tuskegee’s choir, band and orchestra, composing and traveling with the Tuskegee Singers for five years; by the time he completed his studies in 1921 he had learned to play most of the instruments. Dawson earned his Bachelor of Music from the Horner Institute of Fine Arts, studying later at the Chicago Musical College with Felix Borowski, and then received his Master of Music from the American Conservatory of Music. He was a trombonist in the Redpath Chautauqua and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago from 1927-30, followed by teaching in the Kansas City public school system and subsequently a tenure with the Tuskegee Institute from 1931-56. His best-known works are arrangements of and variations on spirituals, however he is also known for his contributions to chamber, orchestral and choral literature.
36 D U L U T H S U P E R I O R S Y M P H O N Y O R C H E S T R A
WILLIAM DAWSON National Public Radio, in announcing a new recording of the Negro Folk Symphony reported that: “On November 20, 1934, a brand new symphony brought a Carnegie Hall audience to its feet. The concert featured the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its star conductor Leopold Stokowski. The music was the Negro Folk Symphony, by the 35-year-old African American composer William Dawson.” The composer was called back several times to take bows. Stokowski conducted four back-to-back performances of the piece and one was nationally broadcast by CBS radio. One New York critic called it “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.” Olin Downes reviewed the work for The New York Times, “This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech.” One critic observed, “It is no wonder Stokowski put his Negro Symphony [sic] last on the program, and no wonder the audience heralded the end of each movement with spontaneous applause and stood to cheer the young composer.” Unfortunately, after its immediate success there were only just a handful of performances over the next eighteen months and then the symphony inexplicably disappeared. Dawson never wrote another symphony. Gwynne Kubner Brown, professor of Music History and Music Theory at the University of Puget Sound, wrote that Dawson didn’t simply build his symphony by
