"Harlem Renaissance Man" Revisited: The Politics of Race and Class in William Grant Still's Late Career

Abstract

William Grant Still reached his artistic maturity as a versatile, innovative commercial musician and composer of concert music in Harlem in the 1920s. Aesthetically, he sought new ways to break down race-based limitations on the mixing of African American and European techniques, forms, and styles, as well as to blur class-based boundaries between the popular and serious in his concert music. Over a quarter-century-long period his audience grew steadily. Yet his music often drew ambivalent critical responses that were permeated with stereotypically race-based expectations. The 1949 production of Troubled Island by the New York City Opera formed the apex of Still's rise as a composer. In its aftermath, Still came to believe that he was the target of a communist conspiracy. In several articles and one speech, he went public with what I shall call his theory. I propose that, far from being a frivolous position dismissible as mere individual paranoia, Still's acceptance of the plot theory is associated with the racial typecasting that was both his and his music's lot.