I had the honor of presenting a lecture accompanied by Harp music at the Lamond Riggs library in Washington,DC during Negro History Week. It was a short lecture to enlighten the audience about the impact of Negro Spirituals on American music at the intersection of the Classical and the Romantic era.
In 1893, the singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh was befriended by the famous Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. Dvorak who had been hired as the new director at the progressive National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Dvorak was a Czech composer who lived in Prague. He was hired by a rich socialite, Marie Thurber. She was a wealthy and philanthropic woman, who founded the Conservatory and opened it to women and black students as well as white men. This of course was unusual for the times.
Dvořák's main goal in America as the director was to help cultivate and truly establish "American Music" and engage in it. At the time, American concert music sounded a lot like Brahms and Beethoven but Dvorak heard something different.
Dvorak was inspired by Negro spirituals and was determined to convince the music community of the time, that Negro Spirituals were the future of American Music.
Born December 1866 and lived to the age of 77 in 1943, Mr. Harry T. Burleigh was a self-taught Baritone and a student at the Conservatory. He had learned many of the old plantation songs from the singing of his blind grandfather, Hamilton Waters, who in 1832 bought Harry’s freedom from slavery on a Maryland plantation.
Growing up in the aftermath of the civil war, Burleigh was primarily influenced by the teachings of his grandfather, who lived in slavery as a child. Mr. Burleigh’s experiences surrounded by music as a child led to his desire to become a musician, ultimately receiving a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music where Dvorak was the director. Dvořák saw in Harry Burleigh, a reflection of himself as a student and befriended him. Burleigh served as the orchestra librarian and copyist, and filled in on double bass and tympani. With the support of Dvorak, Burleigh had a prominent career in performing, and extraordinary success in putting African American spirituals in the Classical realm.
Dvorak challenged the prejudiced thinking of a generation of well-situated American composers with his statements. Dvořák believed that Black melodies should be the foundation of American music and knew that the African American body of music with Negro Spirituals broke open European conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm.
He said, "these beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil.
“They are the folk songs of America and composers Must Turn To Them.”
Dvorak said, “Negro Spirituals must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States."
Essentially, this was Dvorak telling European Americans that the future of their music resided in the people they had subjugated and killed. Dvorak wove African Negro Spirituals into his music to create his vast symphonic canvas. Inspired by Black spirituals, he came up with bittersweet melodies that would become spirituals of their own.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out what is great about a culture!
I also perfromed an arrangement by Samuel Colderidge Taylor, a British composer of African descent and also an admirer of Dvorak. It was titled " An Angel Changed My Name. He lived from 1875 to 1912. He is best known for his orchestral suite” Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” which was so popular he embarked on 3 tourns across the United States in spite of the Black community’s ongoing battle with racism. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as an Afro-British composer, was at the forefront of music composition in the late 19th and early 20thcentury and inspired generations of composers beyond the Harlem Renaissance. One of Taylors arrangements, Cameos for Piano Op.56#1 was used to create “What a Wonderful World” composed by Bob Theil in 1967, directly uses phrases from Taylors original composition. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Harry Burleigh met and toured together in the U.S. In 1908 and 1909 Burleigh visited London, singing for King Edward the 8th and other English nobility. Burleigh was given the accolade as “the greatest singer of my songs” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Unlike the rather brief career of Coleridge-Taylor, who died from pneumonia at 37, Harry Burleigh’s career was long and fruitful as composer and recitalist, earning honorary degrees from Atlanta and Howard University.
I also performed arrangements by Florence Price and Margaret Bond in addition to a modern arrangements by Brandee Younger .
I hope you enjoyed by tribute. Negro history week was created in 1926 in the United States when Carter Woodson Carter G. Woodson chose February for Negro History Week for reasons of tradition and reform. Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping Black history, Abraham Lincoln born February 12 and Frederick Douglass, whose birthday is circa Feb 1818. Since Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Black community had been celebrating the fallen president’s birthday and since the late 1890s, Black communities across the country had been celebrating Douglass’ birthday. He was asking the public to extend their study of Black history, not to create a new tradition. More importantly, Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by a great man. He envisioned the study and celebration of the Negro as a race, not simply as the producers of one or two great men and Lincoln however great had not alone freed the slaves. the Union Army, including hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers and sailors, Nurses and others had done that. Rather than focusing on two men, the Black community, he believed we should focus on the countless Black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization.
