William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/wPhDb3XnXHs


William Dawson (1899–1990) is probably better known as an educator and an arranger of spirituals, but one hearing of the opening of his Negro Folk Symphony and it becomes obvious that he was a composer of extraordinary power. The premiere of what Dawson had at one time thought of as his “Symphony No. 1,” given by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, was a triumph, as was the performance Stokowski and the orchestra gave four days later in New York. One reviewer said of the symphony that it was “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.” In 2012, Gwynne Kuhner Brown wrote, “the tumultuous approbation [Dawson’s symphony] received from critics and audiences alike set it apart—not only from contemporaneous works by African Americans, but also from most new classical music of the period.”


But none of this saved the work, and its composer, from relative obscurity. Why? As Joseph Horowitz has written, “What if Dawson had composed another half-dozen symphonic works? What if he could have realized his aspiration to become a symphonic conductor? Might American classical music have canonized, in parallel with jazz, an ‘American school’ privileging the black vernacular?”


“Blue” Gene Tyranny says of the Negro Folk Symphony, “No mere pastiche of Americana, this grand work is by a composer fully conversant with the subtleties of technique and possibilities of expression in the symphonic form.” It is a beautiful and extremely moving work.


My classical music post for today is William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony.

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