William Dawson, "The New Negro," and His Folk Idiom

Abstract

William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is characteristically because of manner in which it fuses previously established sociocultural hierarchies: so-called high-brow and low-brow, black and white, and European, sacred and secular, to name only most Prominent.(1) These conflicts will be readily apparent in discussion below (as well as in even quickest perusal of work itself), but these conflicts do not fully explain aesthetic crux of this composition or situation of its composer, for same list of cultural codes can be found quite similarly in countless other works of art music.(2) The more pressing issue that Dawson's symphony poses today is best put as a question: Why has a work so seemingly consistent with enormously rich and elsewhere fabulously productive cultural dogma of its time (the Negro cultural renaissance(3) of 1920s), so well crafted, and so well received at its first performances failed to enter living repertory of great through performances and recordings (see Crawford 1975), while others that are similar have done so? Some may say that this is a simple matter of survival of (musical) fittest. While that may be true, before embarking down slippery slope of subjectivity, one should examine more objective reasons that concert works of composers such as Dawson, James P. Johnson, and Florence Price are largely forgotten now (except as they are discussed in history books), while those of Copland, Gershwin, and even William Grant Still continue to be performed. A thoroughly truthful but largely reactionary answer is simply that African-American composers of 1920s and 1930s were not afforded sort of widespread pre- and post-premiere publicity campaigns that would promote their careers and works. In this light, these black composers were severely handicapped, struggling to win favor on one hand from a white audience skeptical about such uppity blacks who were writing art music and, at same time, from voices within black community who perceived as Uncle Tom-isms their choice of predominately white venues, Western concert music genres, and ironically, use of black folk material--a choice seen by some as a failure to embrace integration unabashedly.(4) Dawson, however, seemed both ideally placed and well suited to accomplish Renaissance goals; but in end, his work stood out more than it came to stand for movement, despite fact that none other than Alain Locke (1969, 114) recognized in his work for symphonic music in Negro idiom.(5) But by 1934, with Negro Renaissance more than a decade old, mere hope was no longer adequate. The Harmon award-winning artists--writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, performers such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, and popular musicians such as Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, and many others--had already found a way to make their mark and elevate themselves.(6) For creation of concert music, however, things were rather different, namely because whites too were struggling to define an American art music.(7) One may surmise that black precedents were fine, provided that they were judged against backdrop of a tradition of white accomplishments. The lineage of art music--from Yankee tune-smiths through second New England school to Charles Ives--was not yet resurrected, and only isolated examples (Edward MacDowell and so-called Indianists) provided this benchmark. Thus, at same time that George Gershwin (1926) and other whites were constantly commenting on the voice of American, Still, Dawson, and others were likewise searching for musical identity. The mainstream solution came to be found first and foremost in jazz, which, although a concept (as term and musical practice) several decades old, had yet to achieve profile in public consciousness as an improvisational instrumental art that would delineate it from other forms of black vernacular musics, namely spirituals and blues. …