"A Certain Strangeness": Harry T. Burleigh's Art Songs and Spiritual Arrangements

Abstract

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them, wrote poet Hilaire Belloc (1917, 6). Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) certainly enjoyed the best of both pursuits, combining a long, distinguished performing career with an equally productive life as a composer. Unfortunately, Burleigh never recorded while in his prime as a baritone soloist, and we must evaluate his singing through the reviews of others and the prestige of the venues in which he appeared. As a composer, however, Burleigh left a highly accessible legacy of spiritual arrangements and art songs. Many of the spiritual arrangements have remained in print and in repertoire since their initial publication in the first half of the twentieth century. The art songs have not fared so well; most are still out of print, and we are only now beginning to decide their place in the art-song canon. Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the American bicentennial celebration in 1976, music historians have mined the long-dormant riches of American music in earnest, at last acknowledging the contributions of African-American composers, women composers, and previously marginalized composers. Burleigh has proved to be one of the most important African-American composers of his generation; indeed, he produced the most widely admired spiritual arrangements of his time as well as a substantial body of lovely art songs. Burleigh and the American song composers of the early twentieth century deserve to be studied according to rigorous musicological standards so that their songs, having thus been scrutinized and analyzed, may find their proper place in indexes, on recordings, and in the concert hall. Academic communities frequently discuss analysis and argue how it is best done. Evaluation is serious business, and the criteria used to judge and compare should be well designed. For several decades, academic musicians have had a protracted debate about the canon, as the traditional European-centered curriculum has been infiltrated by many other musics, for example, world music, American popular music, and gender-identified music. In the deluge of new ideas and new music for our classrooms and concert halls, it is interesting to look at the comments of Virgil Thomson, a composer and influential critic of the twentieth century, who pondered how to evaluate music well before the historical investigations of the 1960s and 1970s had yielded the remarkable feast of American music now available to us. Speaking in 1947 at the Harvard Symposium on Music Criticism, Thomson (1968, 7) posited that a critical opinion of music depended on music being memorable, and that the phenomenon of music lodging in the listener's memory is due to certain attributes of the music: (1) the ability of a work to hold one's attention, (2) one's ability to remember it vividly, and (3) a certain strangeness in the musical texture, that is to say, the presence of technical invention, such as novelty of rhythm or counterpoint, harmonic, melodic, or instrumental device. A song composer or singer might well add a fourth point: quality of the text as well as how effectively it is set, for both the voice and the accompaniment. Bearing Thomson's advice in mind, I propose to turn to Burleigh's music and inquire how the composer meets the critic's challenges. I concentrate here on works produced between 1910 and 1940, the mature years when Burleigh had achieved an easy mastery of compositional technique. Jean E. Snyder (1992) has carefully described Burleigh's stylistic periods and various approaches to songwriting. She provides a detailed explanation of the contrapuntal and harmonic language that Burleigh employed and investigates the increasing chromaticism of the later songs as well as his occasional use of quotations from the works of composers. She also discusses his explorations of ballads, folk-song settings, and through-composed art songs, pointing out his use of declamatory style, orientalism, and African-American musical elements (135-137). …