BOSTON — Picture a music stand holding
three items: sheet music, a metronome, and a photograph. The sheet music
tells the performer what to play, the metronome how quickly. And the
photograph keeps the performer in sync with the composer’s emotional
state. That may sound a bit newfangled, even new-agey, but this is the
kind of thing people were doing when the Romantic era was in full flower
around the middle of the 19th century. Music was expected to be about
more than itself. And when did that era end? It depends on whom you
ask.
But if you ask Boston Symphony Orchestra violinist Victor Romanul,
he’ll tell you a story about preparing for a performance with the aid
of sheet music and sculpture — that is, photographs of the sculptures
that inspired composer William Grant Still to write his Suite for Violin
and Piano, which Romanul performs with pianist Randall Hodgkinson in Episode 2 of the BSO’s streaming concert series “Pathways of Romanticism.”
(Also, his amazing performance of the suite’s second movement, “Mother
and Child,” is included in the Boston Pops’ streaming Mother’s Day
show.)
Victor Romanul has been performing
professionally since the age of seven. At 11, he made his Symphony Hall
debut performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and he is still in awe of
the place, because he loves the history of the Boston Symphony. And he
lives for opportunities to give performances of pieces like Still’s
suite.
William Grant Still
was an African American composer of over 200 works of classical music
in the European tradition, an Oberlin student who kept one foot in the
commercial music worlds of Broadway and Hollywood, even as he composed
and conducted orchestral and operatic works for the concert hall.
Throughout his career, he faced much the same skepticism from classical
music’s old guard as Leonard Bernstein would face years later, with the
Brahmin wunderkind attempting to foist memorable tunes on an audience
often unreceptive to melody in contemporary music.
This
was not only because, like Bernstein, Grant Still was unable to keep
himself from writing a good tune, but also because he was Black. (One
venue allowed the composer to attend performances of his music only on
“Negro Day.”) Despite this, the young composer made a name for himself
as a purveyor of music that audiences enjoyed listening to, and this was
fine for radio, film, theater, and the dance hall. But the classical
music concert hall was a different matter.
Nevertheless,
at a time when conservatories were already championing the
who-cares-if-you-listen ethos that would reach its zenith in the 1950s,
Arthur Fiedler programmed, and the Boston Pops Orchestra performed,
William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, “Afro-American.”
He enjoyed much popularity with concert audiences and became one of the
most frequently performed composers — Black or otherwise — in his
lifetime. William Grant Still may have been a Black Leonard Bernstein.
But there is no white William Grant Still.
Outside the classical world, Grant Still arranged music for innumerable popular artists, including the father of stride piano, James P. Johnson.
Grant Still wrote music that sounded good and also
satisfied the conservatory crowd.
