American Voices: Rhapsody in Blue SoNA
April 19, 2025
Walton Arts Center
Paul Haas, conductor
Afro-American Symphony (Symphony No. 1) (1930)
William Grant Still
b May 11, 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi*
d December 3, 1978 in Los Angeles, California
*Following his father’s death in 1895, Still (an infant) and his mother moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.
William Grant Still’s long career saw him active in an almost overwhelming variety of musical activities. He was first black person to conduct a major orchestra.
He played the oboe in theater orchestras for Eubie Blake, Sophie Tucker, Artie Shaw, and Paul Whiteman. He arranged music for NBC radio shows. He wrote nine operas. He arranged music for film composers, including Dimitri Tiomkin for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. He was on the musical staff for the TV show Perry Mason. And he wrote prolifically for the concert hall—so much so, in fact, that much of his output awaits broader discovery.
Still was also the composer of the first symphony by a black composer
to be played by a major orchestra, Afro-American Symphony (Symphony No. 1). He was out of work when he wrote it, the Depression having taken a firm hold on the American economy. “I knew I wanted to write a symphony; I knew that it had to be an American work; and I wanted to demonstrate how the blues, so often considered a lowly expression, could be elevated to the highest musical level,” wrote Still.
The symphony is filled with the fervor of the Harlem Renaissance, encompassing jazz and blues idioms within its largely traditional symphonic framework. (The third movement even includes a banjo part.) In its early years it never failed to create a sensation for its spectacularly effective orchestration, its bluesy lyricism, and its blending of propulsive energy with deeplyfelt spirituality. Today we cherish it as an American classic, a glorious expression of the late Jazz Age, and an important landmark in our collective cultural evolution. But mostly it’s just a wonderful piece of music, filled with yearning, sadness, humor, and in its closing pages, exuberant joy.
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
George Gershwin
b September 26, 1898 in New York City
d July 11, 1937 in Los Angeles, California
Only serendipity saved Paul Whiteman’s 1924 experimental/ pedagogical Aeolian Hall concert from becoming yet another instance of a certain well-known road paved with good intentions. It was long, it was boring, it was pretentious. The pieces all sounded alike. The ventilation system was on the fritz.
The aforesaid serendipity arrived with George Gershwin, second-tolast on the bill, and his Rhapsody in Blue, a score so new that he hadn’t even written out the piano part: Whiteman simply waited for George’s nod to cue in the orchestral entrances. It has become an article of faith that Gershwin wrote the score with blinding speed (either four days or three weeks, depending on your source) but Gershwin’s own account of the composition of the
work hints at something more like two months, from about December of 1923 through January 1924. Given Gershwin’s experience in the hurly-burly of musical theater, where songs were written overnight and entire scores were prepared within a matter of a few weeks, two months represents a relatively lavish time frame, even allowing for Gershwin’s lack of formal training and subsequent struggles with the nuts and bolts of symphonic composition.
His inexperience was such, in fact, that Whiteman house arranger Ferde Grofé provided the orchestration. He was also a neophyte as to musical form, so the Rhapsody is more potpourri than organically-unified structure. But no matter. It rightfully brought down the house, uniquely American, Jazz Age anthem that it is. “How trite, feeble and conventional … so stale, so inexpressive!” sniped New York critic Lawrence Gilman. Definitely a minority opinion.
Symphony No. 1 in E Minor (1932)
Florence Price
b April 9, 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas
d June 3, 1953 in Chicago, Illinois
It’s everybody’s good luck that when the run-down house in St. Anne, Illinois was sold in 2009, the buyers were Vicki and Darrell Gatwood and not some crass house-flippers. The Gatwoods immediately realized that the boxes of books, manuscripts, and sheet music stored in the attic were worthy of preservation rather than being consigned to the weekly trash collection. As it turned out, the house had belonged to the near-forgotten black composer Florence Price, and the scores that had languished there were American musical heirlooms. They had come within a hair’s breadth of obliteration. But they were saved and, with them, Florence Price began the long uphill climb to posthumous recognition.
This wasn’t the first time Price had been obliged to clamber out of
the shadows. During much of her adult life the pressures of raising a family sapped whatever time and energy she had for composition. Add to that the devastating stress of an abusive husband. Only after their 1931 divorce was the 44-yearold Price able to begin exploring a career as a composer, despite having studied at both the New England Conservatory of Music and the Chicago Musical College.
Her first large-scale orchestral composition was Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, which she worked on from 1931 through 1932 and entered in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition, where it won the first prize. That led to the work being noticed by Frederick Stock, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Stock and the CSO gave the symphony its world premiere on June 15, 1933, the first time a major American
orchestra had ever played a symphony by a black woman. “First there was a feeling of awe as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an aggregation of master musicians of the white race, and directed by Dr. Frederick Stock, internationally known conductor, swung into the beautiful, harmonious strains of a composition by a Race woman,” wrote Robert Abbot, editor of the Chicago Defender.
The Price E Minor Symphony channels Dvořák’s “New World” in some ways, but Price’s voice was very much her own. For example, there’s nothing in Dvořák that remotely resembles the “Juba Dance” movement of the Price, with its echoes of ragtime and the popular theater. All in all, it’s a remarkably effective work, filled with haunting melodies and rich harmonic textures, happily restored to us after its long slumber.