A drawing of composer William Dawson in 1935 by Aaron Douglas. Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, long neglected, has received a new recording.
Aaron Douglas/Tuskegee University Archives
On Nov. 20, 1934, a brand new symphony brought a Carnegie Hall audience to its feet. The concert featured the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its star conductor Leopold Stokowski. The music was the Negro Folk Symphony,
by the 35-year-old African American composer William Dawson. He was
called back to the stage several times to take bows after his symphony
ended.
Stokowski conducted four back-to-back performances of
the piece, one of which was nationally broadcast by CBS radio. One New
York critic called it "the most distinctive and promising American
symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved." Olin Downes,
writing in The New York Times, noted: "This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech."
The
immediate success should have made Dawson a household name and buoyed
him to write more symphonic works. But after just a handful of
performances over the next 18 months, the symphony inexplicably dropped
off the radar, and Dawson never wrote another. After decades of neglect,
a new recording of the Negro Folk Symphony has finally been released this week, performed by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.
The three-movement piece is emotionally charged and rigorously
constructed. Dawson said he wasn't out to imitate Beethoven or Brahms,
but wanted those who heard it to know that it was "unmistakably not the
work of a white man." He found inspiration for the piece in traditional
spirituals, which he preferred to call "Negro folk-music."
***
The Negro Folk Symphony was Dawson's first and last. Stokowski recorded the piece in 1963 after Dawson made a trip to Africa and revised the music, and the Detroit Symphony recorded it in 1992. But since then, nothing. The problem in part, was the score: There were never enough copies of it available to meet the early demand, and some say it could stand a careful editing and republication.
***
This new recording, while lacking some of the visceral immediacy of
Stokowski's, has plenty of elegance and fire. Arthur Fagen deftly
conducts the orchestra, and to his credit also includes two exemplary
works by Ulysses Kay — another African American, slightly younger than
Dawson, but more prolific.
Kay's music, too, deserves to be heard more. His Fantasy Variations,
from 1963, is brilliantly orchestrated and deceptive. Instead of
starting with the theme and spinning off variations, Kay does the
opposite, offering his big reveal at the end. His Umbrian Scene,
written under the spell of his days in Italy after winning the
prestigious Prix de Rome Prize twice, presents Kay at his tranquil best.
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