William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Saturday, March 10, 2018
REX NELSON: Still’s musical world
"Composers are creative; makers," said Linda Holzer, a professor of
music at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the coordinator
of classical piano studies at the school. "They make music. They use
melody, harmony and rhythm to create a world. It's a musical world, and
it's shaped by what they know.
"I'm a classical pianist, and the music I play includes piano solo
and chamber music. In September 1997, as part of events in honor of the
40th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High
School, I performed a chamber music recital with Arkansas native,
cellist and musicologist Ernest Lamb. ... We played a piece by William
Grant Still. It's called 'Summerland.' The music sounds like Arkansas.
Last summer, I rode my bike along the Arkansas River. On a day in June, I
looked around me and saw the beautiful, expansive flowing water of the
river. I saw the lush vegetation of the landscape. I looked up at the
blue sky and saw the white, fluffy clouds of summer days. And I thought,
'William Grant Still surely makes music that reminds me of Arkansas.'"
On Wednesday, I wrote about Florence Price, a black composer who was born in Little Rock in April 1887. I quoted from a New Yorker
article about Price and noted that there seems to be a resurgence in
interest in the work of this native Arkansan, who died in Chicago in
1953. She's not the only famous black composer to have been raised in
Little Rock. Still wasn't born in Arkansas' capital city. He was born in
May 1895 in Woodville, Miss., but Still's mother moved to Little Rock
with her infant son after her husband died later that year.
"Still and his mother lived with his grandmother, and his mother
worked as a teacher," Michael Dabrishus writes for the Encyclopedia of
Arkansas History & Culture. "In 1904, Still's mother married a
railway postal clerk, Charles Benjamin Shepperson, whose own interest in
music influenced the young Still. With Shepperson's support, he studied
violin in 1908 with violinist William Price, who lived for a short time
in Little Rock. Still attended M.W. Gibbs High School in Little Rock
and graduated in 1911 as class valedictorian. That fall, he enrolled at
Wilberforce University in Ohio, where his mother hoped he would pursue
studies in medicine. His interest in music, however, led him to leave
Wilberforce in early 1915 without graduating in order to play in bands
and orchestras in Ohio."
During the noon hour on a recent Friday, I joined several dozen other
people at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in downtown Little Rock.
We were there to hear Holzer play selections of Still's music and talk
about his life.
Still's mother taught high school English for 33 years. Shepperson
nurtured his stepson's musical interest by taking him to operettas and
buying Red Seal recordings of classical music. His maternal grandmother,
Anne Fambro, would sing spirituals to him.
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