Masterworks 7 Program Notes

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. 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

WILLIAM DAWSON

quoting melodies from spirituals. “The themes are handled with such virtuosic flexibility of rhythm and timbre that each movement seems to evolve organically.” Brown added that Dawson presents a “persuasive musical bridge between the ‘Negro Folk [Music]’ and the ‘Symphony’.” In 1952 Dawson visited seven countries in West Africa to study indigenous African music, after which he revised his Negro Folk Symphony infusing a more rhythmic foundation inspired by his travels. He said he wasn’t out to imitate Beethoven or Brahms, but wanted those who heard it to know it was “unmistakably not the work of a white man.” His inspiration was from traditional spirituals that he preferred calling “Negro folk-music.”

Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony has three movements: The Bond of Africa, Hope in the Night, and O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star! The opening seconds of the first movement have the solo French horn in a soaring blues gesture that quickly morphs into the woodwinds and trombones evoking a moody Cotton Club-era Ellington ballad, fusing with Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Within the first minutes we are treated to music that is reminiscent of a Hollywood film score, developing into an operatic overture-like structure such as Smetana’s Bartered Bride.

The second movement, Hope in the Night, is the gem of the symphony. It opens with three strokes on the gong, intended by Dawson to represent the Trinity “that guides the destiny of man.” The lush and sophisticated opening is reminiscent of Dvořák’s famous Largo movement in his New World Symphony or Gershwin’s Summertime. Dawson described the opening segment of the movement as an “atmosphere of the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed with the whip for two hundred and fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born.” The second section of the movement symbolizes “the merry play of children yet unaware of the hopelessness beclouding their future.” When the opening section returns there is a heaviness marked by timpani and chimes, followed by the opening theme. The movement ends with sustained tremolo strings growing from pianississimo to fortississimo and back again over a fatalistic drumbeat.

The final movement takes its name from the first of the two spiritual tunes that make up its themes: O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star! The second theme is based on Hallelujah, Lord, I Been Down Into the Sea. It must be stated that the authentic melodies Dawson uses are not well-known tunes and they are used in such a fragmented way that they are mostly unrecognizable. In the first movement and in the development of the finale the composer uses rhythmic references to the Juba dance that was brought by slaves from the Kingdom of Kongo to the plantations of South Carolina. The dance style involves stomping as well as slapping the arms, legs, chest and cheeks, which provided the percussive rhythms because the slaves were not allowed rhythm instruments for fear that there might be secret codes hidden in the drumming.

Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony is a beautiful work that deserves repeated performances. His use of folk songs is genius. He writes, “These are folk songs and we have got to know and treat them as folk songs because they contain the best that’s in us.”

Dawson describes the “march like” beat in his central movment “Hope in the Night” as,

ATMOSPHERE OF THE HUMDRUM LIFE OF A PEOPLE WHOSE BODIES WERE BAKED BY THE SUN AND LASHED WITH THE WHIP FOR TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS; WHOSE LIVES WERE PROSCRIBED BEFORE THEY WERE BORN.