Daily Classical Music Post

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/iRYQhfFDuOM Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004) composed songs, orchestral music, chamber works, an opera, and piano pieces. As a child, she studied the piano with a student of R. Nathaniel Dett, and went on to study with Dett privately before attending the Tuskegee Institute to study education and music. After graduating, as Jeannie Gayle Pool says, “she headed a black teacher-training program, supervised in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a friend, ally and mentor. . . . Additional studies in composition were with French composer Darius Milhaud, Allan Willman, and Charles Jones.” Perry did not begin composing seriously until she was well into her 30s. She was more interested in teaching and composing for her students and for the ensembles at the i...

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/EPRNWXsdb90 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was named for the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Originally, his name was not hyphenated, but apparently a printer inserted one by accident so the composer decided to keep it. Coleridge-Taylor studied composition at the Royal College of Music, studying with Charles Villiers Stanford. He was a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and the conductor of the Croydon Conservatoire Orchestra. In his early 20s, he was mentored by Edward Elgar, who referred to Coleridge-Taylor as “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men.” Coleridge-Taylor’s music was a great success both in Europe and in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed him to the White House in 1904, and p...

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/HwkYktHFgeE Until I started researching composers for this month’s posts, I’d never heard of Dorothy Rudd Moore (born 4 June 1940), and I didn’t know any of her music. I have missed out on so much. And there is a lot of music of Moore’s to discover: song cycles, chamber works, orchestral pieces, and an opera based on the life of Frederick Douglass. Moore grew up in Delaware and went to Philadelphia Orchestra concerts from a young age. She was fascinated by the sounds that she heard and also was intrigued by the fact that almost everyone in the orchestra appeared to be male and white. Interestingly, all that made her feel was, “Hey, I can write this kind of music!” Moore won a scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and she has talked about ...

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/tZ54dddRI08 Florence Price (1887–1953) was the first Black woman composer to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra. Her Symphony in e minor, which won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards in 1932, received its premiere in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although she won many awards and did have some works published and performed in her lifetime, she still faced discrimination and was unable to get most of her compositions performed. In 1943, she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, “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. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on em...

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 ...

  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/uhQ9jBNK91g Scott Joplin (c. 1868–1917), known as the King of Ragtime, was so much more than that. He had a gift for combining classical music with music local to his childhood home in Texarkana. Joplin’s opera Treemonisha (composed in 1911) was actually his second opera. The first, A Guest of Honor , which reportedly was based on the White House dinner that Teddy Roosevelt held in 1901 for Booker T. Washington, was performed on a national tour organized by Joplin himself. Some time during the tour, the box office receipts were stolen. In order to cover the payroll and tour expenses, the score for A Guest of Honor was confiscated and was never seen again. Joplin’s three-act opera Treemonisha is not a ragtime opera, although there are some dance ...

  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/xMJhaGhYrYc Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) was one of the first Black composers to be recognized in the United States. She studied at Northwestern and Juilliard, and frequently collaborated with the poet Langston Hughes. In 1933, she was the first Black soloist to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra. In an interview in 1971, Bonds talked about her time at Northwestern, where she was allowed to study but not allowed to live or use any facilities: “I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place–I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ an...