Black Composers and Concert Artists

During the colonial period, Africans brought to the Northern colonies acculturated much more quickly than those in the southern colonies. The ratio of Africans to Europeans favored the latter in the North and where the two groups frequently interacted. Many Africans, both enslaved and freed, for example, worshiped with the Europeans, adopted their religious practices, and participated in their musical activities. Organizations such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel converted both American Indians and Africans to Christianity and provided literacy training in their charity schools in the North. In New England, where religion defined every aspect of life, Blacks participated in the singing of Psalmody, an early form of sacred music introduced in the American colonies by the Pilgrims and Puritans.

The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 significantly impacted the culture of public music-making in the colonies. In the subsequent years, efforts to increase the quality of music-making in America gave rise to the Singing School Movement. From this movement emerged a generation of Black singing school masters who eventually became composers, such as Newport Gardner, who was brought to America as an enslaved African, yet his master provided the means for him to study music formally.

During the Post–Revolutionary War Years, free Blacks in the north lived primarily in their own segregated communities. They established churches, which served as the focal point of community life. In addition to Sunday worship, they were sites for all educational and cultural activities and provided spaces for singing schools, religious study, and training in literacy. They also sponsored concerts of European sacred and secular music by European composers, such as Bellini, Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart.

Many African American composers and concert artists of this period were self-taught. Yet under a patronage system emerging in America, some traveled to Europe, where they concertized and received formal training in European classical forms. Their compositions and performance repertory display a mastery of both the European concert and American popular traditions (band and dance music), as illustrated in the musical activities of bandleader and composer Francis Johnson (1792–1844). For years, he led a band consisting primarily of African Americans who performed largely for Black audiences. The band played primarily marches, cotillions, waltzes, and other dance music. Over time, Johnson became one of the central figures in Philadelphia’s concert culture and sustained a career in music, unlike most musicians regardless of color. In 1818, he became the first African American to have a composition published as sheet music. During his lifetime, he composed more than 200 works. In 1837, he became the first Black bandleader to take a group to Europe and performed for Queen Victoria. Impressed with his talent, she gifted him a silver bugle. Johnson and his band toured most of the United States and Canada during the late 1830s and were influential in shaping America’s concert life in the early 19th century.

Prominent Composers:

Justin Miner Holland

Aaron J. R. Connor

William Appo

Francis Johnson

Prominent Concert Artists:

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield – “The Black Swan”

Thomas Bowers – “The Colored Mario”

Sarah Sedgwick Bowers – “The Colored Nightingale”

The Negro Renaissance that commenced in the years immediately following the end of World War I spawned a surge in the literary, artistic, and musical output of America’s Black elite. This affirmation of the values of Black cultural heritage had a decisive impact on composers, whose primary goal was the elevation of Negro folk idioms like the spiritual, blues, and dance music to symphonic form, opera, and other genres of Western classical music. In many ways, the music that the Renaissance generated extended the efforts to create an “American” sound that began during the last decade of the 19th century. Unlike in the 19th century, Black composers now had access to major orchestras and mainstream concert halls. The central concern that linked these two periods of creative activity was countering notions of racial inferiority as evidenced by the two ideologies of the Renaissance movement: the mastery of European form and the representation of the African spirit—defined by the use of polyrhythms, the nuances in pitch that defined Black vocalism, and the adaptation of Black folk melodies such as the blues and folk spiritual. At the height of this cultural movement, the works of a number of composers reflected this ideology. In the 1930s, three major American orchestras were the first to perform the works of Black composers that incorporated Black folk forms into a European form. The Rochester Symphony Orchestra programmed William Grant Still’s (1895–1978) Afro-American Symphony in 1931; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Florence Price’s (1888–1953) Symphony in E Minor in 1933; and The Philadelphia Orchestra presented William Dawson’s (1899–1990) Negro Folk Symphony the following year.

America’s entrance into World War II in 1941 and the issuance of a general moratorium on cultural activities significantly impacted the careers of Black concert artists. Black instrumentalists seeking employment with opera companies and symphonic orchestras faced considerable challenges. While a few instrumentalists garnered positions with regional orchestras, no considerable gains were made. Singers faced fewer challenges. While a number of them continued to gain prominence through concert tours and recitals, some earned spaces on the operatic stage. In 1941, Mary Cardwell Dawson founded the National Negro Opera Company, which toured the country performing major operas, and debuting works of Black composers. The Karamu Theater in Cleveland provided a space for the production of both operas and plays. The 1940s also marked the period in which some major opera companies began hiring Black singers. In 1946, Camilla Williams made her operatic debut as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. She was the first African American woman to do so with a major opera company. Roland Hayes became the first African American male singer to garner international acclaim, and Marian Anderson became a symbol of the racial inequality that Black concert artists endured when, in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at Constitution Hall. The furor that followed resulted in Anderson being invited to give a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1955, she became the first African American woman to perform with the Metropolitan Opera, and three years later, she was named a US delegate to the United Nations. These singers were also significant in debuting and popularizing a repertory of solo spirituals that promoted the works of Black composers in both American and European concert halls and churches.

Prominent Composers:

William Grant Still

Florence Price

William Dawson

Prominent Concert Artists:

Mary Cardwell Dawson

Camilla Williams

Roland Hayes

Marian Anderson

Emma Azalia Hackley

Anita Patti Brown

Joseph Douglass

Helen Hagan

Lillian Evanti

Todd Duncan

The professional gains made by Black composers and concert artists during the postwar years were linked to the changing dynamics of America’s political climate. The 1950s brought fear that communism would invade America’s political life and that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was imminent. As America entered the Cold War period, domestic unrest grew as Blacks faced racist policies that excluded them from education, housing, and jobs. The result was a wave of public activism that evolved into the modern Civil Rights Movement.

In the early 1950s, the US State Department initiated a strategy of combating the spread of communism using art and music, which provided new opportunities for Black composers and concert artists. Specifically, the US Information Services sponsored cultural tours, lectures, performances, and exhibits in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Black composers that participated in this initiative or gained funding from fellowships such as the Guggenheim or Ford foundations concertized and studied extensively in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Many went to France to study with famed composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. In the 1960s, the support of musicians, composers, and researchers increased with the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Two central events that influenced the compositional approaches of this generation were the immigration of European composers to America and the expansion of music programs in liberal arts colleges during the 1940s and 1950s. The international composers, who introduced new compositional approaches, such as serialism and atonality, became an important part of the curriculum of the postwar college music department. As a new generation of aspiring Black composers and musicians enrolled, they were exposed to these musical ideals, which influenced their compositional identity.

As in previous years, Black churches and Black colleges continued to be the primary supporters of Black musicians and composers. These institutions, especially Black colleges, provided not only financial stability through professorships, but also access to performing groups. Only a few Black composers during the midcentury years were not college professors, such as Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) and Howard Swanson (1907–1978). Swanson spent most of the postwar years in New York, where he lived modestly and survived on a small pension. Margaret Bonds, who is sometimes viewed as the protégé of Florence Price, financed her work as a composer through recitals and concerts. An accomplished pianist, Bonds concertized extensively throughout the midcentury years. It is rumored that she is the only composer Nadia Boulanger refused to take on as a student because she believed that Bonds’ compositional voice was well developed and did not need tampering. Bonds’ music pointed strongly to how jazz, gospel, and blues influenced the work of some midcentury Black composers. She and Howard Swanson were significant in popularizing the poetry and writings of Langston Hughes. Hughes’s prose came to represent the type of Black consciousness that inspired the modern civil rights struggle, and for decades, he collaborated closely with Bonds to produce a number of influential works, including the cantata The Ballad of the Brown King and incidental music for the play Shakespeare in Harlem. By the late 1960s, the relationship between the civil rights struggle and Black concert music increased and was represented not only in the works of Black composers, but also in their efforts to challenge their exclusion from concert halls.

During the Cold War and Civil Rights eras, Black concert and opera singers such as Camilla Williams (b. 1919–2012), Leontyne Price (b. 1927), Grace Bumbry (b. 1937), Simon Estes (b. 1938), and George Shirley (b. 1934) made significant strides, winning prestigious national and international competitions and historic operatic roles in some of America’s and Europe’s most premiere opera houses. Through the 1970s, they became household names in opera, swinging the doors wide open for subsequent generations of opera singers.

Prominent Composers:

Margaret Bonds

Howard Swanson

Undine Smith Moore

Zenobia Powell Perry

Ulysses Kay

Julia Perry

Hale Smith

Frederick Tillis

Prominent Concert Artists:

Leontyne Price

Grace Bumbry

Camilla Williams

Simon Estes

George Shirley

Carol Brice

William Warfield

Rawn Spearman

Mattiwilda Dobbs

Natalie Hinderas

Kermit Moore

Willis Patterson

Shirley Verrett

Martina Arroyo

The 1970s and 1980s defined a new chapter in America’s history. The 1970s transition from a segregated to a desegregated society that held promise for new opportunities followed the rise of the Black Power movement, which promoted racial pride and self-empowerment. Both events impacted the creative endeavors of Black musicians of the Post–Civil Rights Era. Similar to their predecessors, Black composers and performing artists received fellowships for study and other creative endeavors in Europe. This generation, more than any other, benefitted from the teaching and mentorship of established Black composers and concert artists who populated college-level music departments at historically Black colleges (e.g., Mark Fax, Natalie Hinderas, and Mattiwilda Dobbs at Howard University; Undine Smith Moore at Virginia State College). Others joined the faculties of predominantly white institutions during this period (e.g., Olly Wilson at University of California, Berkeley; Hale Smith at University of Connecticut, Storrs; T.J. Anderson at Tufts University; David Baker, and Camilla Williams at Indiana University; William Warfield at University of Illinois; and George Shirley at University of Maryland and University of Michigan).