Dominique-René de Lerma: A response to Bill McLaughlin's 'Portraits in Black, Brown and Beige'

Dominique-René de Lerma writes:

A response to Bill McLaughlin's Portraits in Black, Brown and Beige, Program #1 (18 February 2013).

·       Among the earliest works we have identified by a Black composer is Heu me Domine, written by Vicente Lusitano, a composer and theorist from Portugal who was active in Rome of the Counter-Revolution in the 16th century.

·       Eileen Southern had established her musicological credentials in Renaissance keyboard music before Dr. Barry Brook (Executive Director of the Ph.D. Program in Musicology for the City University of New York) suggested she give attention to Black music.  When she attended the 1969 conference I held at Indiana University in 1969, she had begun her research.  We met again after the first edition of The music of Black Americans (New York; W. W. Norton, 1971) had been published.  She had the works of Trotter and Hare as a foundation, but there were an enormous amount of additional research to do, plus translating into the written tradition that which had been preserved orally.  In the process, while Eileen fully merits our deep appreciation and respect, there were errors as she later confessed to me ("All the dates are wrong," she hyperbolized in a conversation we had in Minneapolis while waiting for transportation.  She caught many of these in time for the second and third editions (1997).  Even so, Arthur  R. LaBrew issued a review of more than 70 pages (Perspective in Black music, 1981), specifying errors that had had appeared.

·       Did Saint-Georges know Haydn's string quartets?  Probably not, but he was instrumental in the commission of  Haydn's six Paris symphonies and in their publication and premières.

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Dominique-René de Lerma

http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com