R. Nathaniel Dett: MY CUP RUNNETH OVER
Navona Records NV 6013 (2015)
is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which
features a comprehensive Works List
and a Bibliography by Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma,
WRTI
By Mark Pinto
Black History Month would not be complete without acknowledging R. Nathaniel Dett, one of the most successful black composers. An authoritative new recording of his complete piano works by Clipper Erickson shines a welcome light on a major portion of Dett’s output.
Dett
was distinguished as a choir leader, pianist, teacher, poet, and
writer, as well as composer. Born in Drummondville (now Niagara Falls),
Ontario in 1882, Robert Nathaniel Dett moved with his family to Niagara
Falls, New York in 1893 and at that young age took up the piano. He
attended local music conservatories, and then became the first person of
African descent to graduate from Oberlin, in 1908, with a degree in
piano and composition. He studied with composer Arthur Foote at Harvard
in the early 1920s, and earned his Master's Degree from Eastman in 1931,
following studies in France with Nadia Boulanger.
But
in 1913 Dett became the first black director of music at the Hampton
Institute in Virginia, a position he held until 1932. He founded
Hampton’s School of Music and several of their performing ensembles. One
of his most praised choral works, the oratorio The Ordering of Moses,
premiered at the Cincinnati May Festival in 1937 with 350 singers and
the Cincinnati Symphony, conducted by Eugene Goosens. Dett toured Canada
and the U.S. with the chorus of Bennett College (North Carolina) in the
late '30s and early '40s, but died of a heart attack in 1943 while
traveling with the chorus of the U.S.O. to contribute to the war
efforts.
Dett is really the first American composer to fuse Negro
folk music and spirituals with the European classical tradition in an
elevated, highly refined way. His essay, “The Emancipation of Negro
Music” won him Harvard University’s prestigious Bowdoin Prize in 1920.
Dett
composed his six piano suites over the course of his creative life. The
earlier suites depict scenes of life and nature in the black American
South and make use of ragtime, folk song, and popular dance rhythms of
the day. Dett’s gift for innovative and compelling melodies, combined
with well-placed virtuosic writing, give these early works an immediate
attractiveness.
The later suites reflect his growing
preoccupation with poetic and philosophical ideas and ideals. They
employ more modern ideas in the use of complex rhythms, impressionistic
colors, and dissonance, while retaining an assured and poetic melodic
line and more than an occasional reference to the Negro spiritual. This
is indeed music on a high level of sophistication and inspiration. Even
Dett’s earliest ragtime pieces aim for an appeal beyond that of the
masses in their degree of melodic and rhythmic inventiveness. No less a
figure than pianist/composer Percy Grainger championed Dett’s best known
piece, the suite In the Bottoms.
Clipper Erickson’s recording of Dett’s complete piano music has the ring of authenticity.
Comment by email:
Comment by email:
Thanks again for putting this up! It just came across on my Google alert but you caught it first. All best, Clipper [Clipper Erickson]
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