It is only music that matters. But to talk of music is risky, and entails responsibility. Therefore some find it preferable to seize on side issues. It is easy, and enables you to pass as a deep thinker. (Igor Stravinsky)
As we’ve discussed in class, W.E.B. Du Bois, above, who spent several years studying in Germany in the 1890s, greatly admired German classical music, and considered it a repertoire full of freedom and possibility for black performers. He especially loved the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and in 1936 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the opera house in Bavaria where a festival of Wagner’s operas is put on every year. By this time, it was widely known that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer: here is Hitler at the 1934 Bayreuth festival.
Inspired by Du Bois, and by the remarks made by historian Kira Thurman (above) in the “Studying the Lied” colloquy in the Summer 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, here is a playlist of most of the singers mentioned by Thurman, singing German repertoire. Read the colloquy here.
A live recording of the African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey from 1941 (starts at around 15:00; I couldn’t figure out how to cue the audio, so you may need to listen to a violin sonata by Paul Hindemith first).
Tenor Roland Hayes, a native of Georgia and the son of former slaves, was brutally beaten by a white shoe store clerk while on tour, when his wife and daughter sat in the “whites only” area of the store. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the incident:
Roland Hayes Beaten (Georgia, 1942)
Negroes, Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day They change their minds!
Wind In the cotton fields, Gentle breeze: Beware the hour It uproots trees!Marian Anderson:
The question of whether one’s innate identity is determined by DNA has come up recently in the feud between Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Trump about whether or not Warren has Native American ancestry. Trump, as you may know, has mockingly referred to Warren as “Pocahontas.” Warren had her DNA tested and published the results, which show that she had a Native American ancestor between six and ten generations ago.
Does this make Warren an Indian?
According to Chuck Hoskin (above), the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation (like other Native tribes, a sovereign nation within U.S. territory), no.
What does this argument have to do with our understanding of music?
When Antonín Dvořák came to America in 1892, he did so on the invitation of the wealthy arts patroness Jeannette Thurber (above) — who, by the way, was born not far from here, in Delhi, NY — to lead the new National Conservatory of Music in New York City. It was hoped that he would train American composers to develop a national style of music. Soon after he arrived, Dvořák told the New YorkHerald in an interview:
In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathétic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source. The American musician understands these tunes and they move sentiment in him.
In an unprecedented move, Dvořák welcomed black and female composition students into his classes. Among his students were violinist and composer Will Marion Cook, who had studied with Brahms’s great friend Joseph Joachim in Berlin, and singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh.
“A Negro Sermon,” an art song by Cook.
“Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” an art song by Burleigh.
Harry T. Burleigh’s song “The Young Warrior,” a setting of a poem by James Weldon Johnson, was translated into Italian and sung by the Italian army as they marched into battle During World War I.
Mother, shed no mournful tears,
But gird me on my sword;
And give no utterance to thy fears,
But bless me with thy word.
The lines are drawn! The fight is on!
A cause is to be won!
Mother, look not so white and wan;
Give Godspeed to thy son.
Now let thine eyes my way pursue
Where’er my footsteps fare;
And when they lead beyond thy view,
Send after me a prayer.
But pray not to defend from harm,
Nor danger to dispel;
Pray, rather, that with steadfast arm
I fight the battle well.
Pray, mother of mine, that I always keep
My heart and purpose strong,
My sword unsullied and ready to leap
Unsheathed against the wrong.
While Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9 in in E minor, “From the New World,” was not actually based on spirituals, the famous second movement largo sounded like a spiritual, and later “became” a sort of spiritual in the popular imagination.
Dvořák’s great success in America inspired other composers to take advantage of “Negro melodies.” In the early years of the twentieth century, white American and European composers came out with pieces with such titles as “Negro Folk Symphony” (William Dawson), “Rapsodie nègre” (French composer Francis Poulenc), and “Negro Suite” (Danish composer Thorvald Otterstrom).
The question one might ask about these composers and their work is: were they writing these pieces in a spirit of fellowship? or one of exploitation?
One of the strangest and most egregious examples of a white composer writing in the black style is John Powell’s “Rhapsodie Nègre.”
John Powell was a Virginia-born, Vienna-trained pianist and composer who promoted American folk music. He was also a white supremacist who helped to draft Viriginia’s “Racial Integrity Act,” also known as the “one-drop rule” — which legally classified anyone with any amount of African ancestry as black, and hence subject to Jim Crow.
As a music historian with a particular interest in these things, it’s hard not to view Senator Warren’s insistence on an Indian identity, based on her DNA test results, as (unintentionally) evocative of the efforts and beliefs of figures like John Powell.
And what about this? In 2013, an Afrofunk band, Shokazoba, was booked to play at the elite Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. The gig was cancelled, however, when it was found out that many of the band members were white.
The earliest-known published book of African-American music, the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, is primarily devoted to the religious vocal music of the slaves of the eastern seaboard. However, there are several songs at the end that are of a very different nature. These songs are in French and were collected in Louisiana, and they are dance songs.
The editors say of these songs that:
The language, evidently a rude corruption of French, is that spoken by the negroes in that part of the State [Louisiana]; and it is said that it is more difficult for persons who speak French to interpret this dialect, than for those who speak English to understand the most corrupt of the ordinary negro-folk [dialect]. . . . The “calinda” was a sort of contra-dance, which has now passed entirely out of use.
Or has it? This is what it sounds like:
Louisiana planters imported slaves from the Caribbean, and it is believed that the Calinda was one of the dances performed by slaves in Congo Square in New Orleans on Saturday nights. It is still danced and played in Trinidad and Tobago, where it is also related to an Afro-Carribean form of martial arts called Kalinda.
The Trinidadian calinda performed above seems to be related, both lyrically and musically, to this sea shanty:
The calinda is mentioned in the story “La Belle Zoraide” by the nineteenth-century New Orleans-based novelist Kate Chopin.
“La Belle Zoraide” is a story about the horrors of family separation in slavery, and about the hierarchy of color in Louisiana — which is told in part in the Creole language (referred to in Slave Songs of the United States as “evidently a rude corruption of French”). Read it here.
The traditional Cajun song “Allons danser Colinda” (Let’s dance, Colinda) was also influenced by the Afro-Carribean Calinda. Cajuns are a mostly white, French-speaking ethnic group that settled Louisiana after being expelled from Canada by the British in the eighteenth century.
The calinda even shows up in the work of English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). While Delius is best known as a composer of English “pastoral” music, he managed an orange plantation in Florida briefly in the 1880s, where he heard and was influenced by African-American music. In 1904, he wrote an opera called Koanga, a tragic love story about slavery in the eighteenth century. This is Delius’s version of the calinda.
In a kind of full circle, Koanga was performed in Trinidad in 1995.
For more on Slave Songs of the United States and the earliest attempts at American ethnomusicology, watch this brief film.
This year, a (mostly) white singer caused controversy by booking a Selena tribute gig at a Dallas club.
Singer Suzanna Choffel explains:
Some cried foul. One Facebook commenter noted:
“Call it what you want, but the fact that you preface your video with, ‘Yes, I know I’m a white girl,’ means that the little 1/8 of you that you now (after being called out for appropriation) claim is Mexican means very little to you, and you ain’t Latina.”
Choffel was defended, on the other hand, by Rachel V. González-Martin, a professor of Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, who
To put it in a certain context: this is one of the best-known songs by Flaco Jiménez, a Texas-born singer and accordionist, like Selena a master of the Tejano style.
Every year on his birthday, these two white Dutch guys make a video of themselves covering it as a tribute to Jiménez. Is it cultural appropriation? Is it cultural appreciation?
What about the Japanese group Orquesta de la Luz, considered one of the best salsa bands of the 1980s and 1990s?
Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa.
Professor González-Martin’s idea that once culture is out there, it’s out there, is not true just for the cultural expressions of historically-oppressed or underresourced groups. In recent years, for instance, Richard Wagner’s operas have been adopted as required listening by American white supremacists who probably never took Music 101. (If they had taken it with me, I like to think, they might have emerged with a little more love for their fellow man.)
The great American contralto Marian Anderson in 1928.
Music scholar and historian Kira Thurman discusses the exodus of African-American classical musicians to the German-speaking lands in the late nineteenth century, and their reception once they arrived.
The visionary free jazz musician and Afro-Futurist Sun Ra was a visiting artist and professor at the University of California-Berkeley in 1971. Here is fascinating audio from a lecture he gave in his Spring course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”
In 1972, a feature-length Afrofuturist/blaxploitation film, Space is the Place, was made based on Sun Ra’s Berkeley lectures. You can watch the complete film on Youtube.
Brahms did not actually write any string trios, i.e. pieces for two violins and a cello. Perhaps the boys the poet describes were playing one of his piano trios, with the piano part transcribed for violin.
