Scott Joplin
(Copyright picture-alliance/Hulton Archive)
Classical music is a largely European, even Eurocentric art form. Yet
there are largely neglected composers with African roots worth getting
familiar with.
Black classical composers worth a listen
Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
He died of syphilitic dementia and was buried in an unmarked grave.
His opera "Treemonisha" wasn't performed until seven decades later. But
Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" and 43 other ragtime piano pieces made
him one of the 20th century's most influential composers. Melody in the
right hand, accompaniment in the left, and those syncopations! Jazz? No,
thoroughly classical in form and structure.
***
As for the "classical" branch itself, a number of black composers,
against all odds, found their own voice and made a contribution. That
their music is only rarely heard in the concert hall points to the
obstacles and prejudices they faced — and shows that concert organizers
have some catching up to do.
Indeed, the Czech composer Antonin
Dvorak, who took on a professorship in the US from 1892-1895, was only
one of several Europeans who delved into indigenous — i.e., Native
American and African American — musical forms and advocated the
development of a uniquely "American" art music out of those sources.
Dvorak's famous "New World Symphony" is an expression of that.
In the 1930s, American composers of color such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still
and William L. Dawson took Dvorak at his word and integrated spirituals
and gospel into their symphonic works. The results were hailed by
critics yet somehow never lodged themselves in the repertory.
Scott Joplin and Wynton Marsalis: two very different lives
Fast-forward
to 1974 and "The Sting," which won an Oscar for Best Picture of the
Year. Inseparable from the film is its lilting, syncopated theme, classy
and a bit lascivious: "The Entertainer" by Scott Joplin, the son of a
slave and the "King of Ragtime." Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag
was played in every parlor around the turn of the 20th century. But
obsessed with being accepted as a composer of art music, Joplin ran up
against formidable obstacles.
It wasn't until the 1970s that his only surviving opera was
performed, and his unmarked grave in the New York borough of East
Elmhurst was finally given a marker. Joplin is considered one of the
originators of jazz, although in form, content and harmony, his
creations were thoroughly classical.
"To begin with I have two
handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro
blood in my veins," wrote the composer Florence B. Price to the
conductor Serge Koussevitzky in 1943. It wasn't for lack of
determination however. The onetime child prodigy had her first
composition published when she was 11, and she was an early graduate of
the New England Conservatory. As a divorcee and a single mom, she later
earned her living as a music teacher and an organist for screenings of
silent films; she also composed for radio ads. Her concert pieces were authentic in the sense that Dvorak had once called for, and her popular Songs to a Dark Virgin were described by a reviewer in the Chicago Daily News
as "one of the greatest immediate successes ever won by an American
song." Yet the concert stage stubbornly remained the domain of DWM
composers — dead white men.
Black composers writing "white" music — and vice-versa
It wasn't until 1996 that a Pulitzer was first awarded to a black composer: George Walker (1922-2018), creator of Lilacs, a
setting of a poem by Walt Whitman mourning the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. Walker was a student of the American composer Samuel Barber,
and his roughly 100 compositions show a wide range styles and idioms,
from Debussy and Stravinsky to serial, atonal music. A couple of
centuries earlier, Guadeloupe-born Joseph Bologne,nChevalier de
Saint-Georges wrote operas, quartets, symphonies and concertos that blended perfectly into the style of the times: European music for court royalty.
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