WILLIAM DAWSON, "THE NEW NEGRO," AND HIS FOLK IDIOM.

William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is characteristically American because of the manner in which it fuses previously established sociocultural hierarchies: so-called high-brow and low-brow, black and white, American and European, sacred and secular, to name only the most Prominent.(1) These conflicts will be readily apparent in the discussion below (as well as in even the quickest perusal of the work itself), but these conflicts do not fully explain the aesthetic crux of this composition or the situation of its composer, for the same list of cultural codes can be found quite similarly in countless other works of American 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 the enormously rich and elsewhere fabulously productive cultural dogma of its time (the Negro cultural renaissance(3) of the 1920s), so well crafted, and so well received at its first performances failed to enter the living repertory of "great American music" 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 the (musical) fittest. While that may be true, before embarking down the slippery slope of subjectivity, one should examine the more objective reasons that the 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 the 1920s and 1930s were not afforded the 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 the one hand from a white audience skeptical about such "uppity blacks" who were writing art music and, at the same time, from voices within the black community who perceived as the "Uncle Tom"-isms their choice of predominately white venues, Western concert music genres, and ironically, the 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 the end, his work stood out more than it came to stand for the movement, despite the fact that none other than Alain Locke (1969, 114) recognized in his work the "hope" for "symphonic music in Negro idiom."(5) But by 1934, with the 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 the 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 the backdrop of a tradition of white accomplishments. The lineage of American art music--from the Yankee tune-smiths through the second New England school to Charles Ives--was not yet resurrected, and only isolated examples (Edward MacDowell and the so-called "Indianists") provided this benchmark. Thus, at the same time that George Gershwin (1926) and other whites were constantly commenting on "the voice of the 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 the profile in the public consciousness as an improvisational instrumental art that would delineate it from other forms of black vernacular musics, namely spirituals and the blues.(8)

Today, musicians bristle at such divisions, since the rich interrelationship between African-American musics is among their most compelling features. They are of the same tongue, or, as Langston Hughes so aptly put it, "The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs" (quoted in Floyd 1995, 133). But not so in the 1930s; each form carried aesthetic baggage resulting from both the popularization of these genres and their aestheticization. It is in this milieu that Dawson's "folk" idiom needs to be appreciated, for this explains both the success and the failure of arguably his greatest work, certainly one of the most important, or at least instructive, American concert works of the inter-war period, a time when Copland (1941, 137) famously found that "contemporary music as an organized movement in the U.S.A. was born."(9)

The story of Dawson's career and the genesis of his symphony has been told several times previously, so a thorough recounting is not necessary here (see Southern 1986; de Lerma 1990; Spady 1981); rather, only a few key facts need to be understood. Born in the Deep South just before the start of the twentieth century, following early tutelage at the famed Tuskegee Institute, Dawson traveled north through Kansas City as part of the "great migration" toward Chicago, where he eventually settled by the mid-1920s; at that time, cultural activity in the city was becoming a Midwestern analog for the more well-known renaissance in Harlem (see Floyd 1995, 118 ff). Concurrent with the appearance of his first compositions, musical studies at the Horner Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, were followed with graduate work at the American Conservatory in Chicago. It was during this time that he encountered Dvorak's Symphony no. 9 ("From the New World"), a piece that perhaps served as a kind of model for his own later effort. While there is nothing to confirm that Dvorak's work was a direct influence on Dawson when he set about composing his Negro Folk Symphony, he surely was aware of the 1893 work and its intents. When the first recording of Dawson's symphony was produced in 1964, with the composer's oversight, George Jellinek, in a commentary that reads as though it were derived from discussions with Dawson, began his remarks by quoting a passage from a New York Herald (May 23, 1893) interview with Dvorak that, out of context, smacks of similarity to some of the tenets of the much later Renaissance: "In the great Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music" (quoted in Jellinek 1964). The Czech composer was not talking about an African-American "school of music," however, but about a general, national style. So Jellinek's subsequent remark that Dawson's "long-cherished ambition was to write a symphony in the Negro folk idiom, based on authentic Negro folk music but in the same symphonic form used by the composers of the romantic-nationalist school: Brahms, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky," while perhaps true on one level, conflates musical and aesthetic homage, amounting to a type of creative integration that Dawson's work does not really represent.

The Negro Folk Symphony was some five years in the composing, and its completion in 1932 (see Jellinek 1964) came just as Dawson's composing career seemed to be blossoming with his winning two successive Wanamaker Prizes in 1930 and 1931. But although the premiere of his work came in the influential venue of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra with Leopold Stokowski at the helm, it had taken about two years to secure this first performance on November 14, 1934. Stokowski performed the work three times in Philadelphia that fall season (on November 14, 15, and 17) and once more a few days later in Carnegie Hall (November 20); one of these performances was broadcast to a national radio audience.(10) Following this auspicious start, however, with the exception of an important commission in 1940,(11) Dawson the composer receded from the headlines. He had already assumed the important post of director of the School of Music at Tuskegee in 1931, which he would hold for the next twenty-five years. While this certainly afforded him a prominent position in American musical life and brought with it many enriching opportunities, it coincided with the stalling of his career as a composer of large-scale concert music. Rather than composing, he spent the bulk of his professional life teaching, conducting, and arranging.(12)

This was surely not what anyone expected, given the reception of the first performance of his symphony, the scene of which one critic described as follows: "It was no wonder Stokowski put his `Negro Symphony' [sic] last on the program, and no wonder the audience heralded the end of each movement with spontaneous applause and stood to cheer the young composer" (quoted in Roach 1992, 127). Other critics agreed, but one wonders why, if the work demonstrated a "sumptuous orchestral dress" and contained music "vivid with imagination, warmth, [and] drama," apparently so few were "eager to hear it again and again" (Jellinek 1964). Dawson's compositional prowess was clearly wounded by this quickly dying enthusiasm, but he did not dismiss his work; rather, two decades later, following a trip to seven countries in West Africa, he revised the symphony, "infusing it with a rhythmic foundation strongly inspired by African influences" (Dawson 1965); this revision of 1934 was never published. Stokowski, now with his Symphony of the Air, revived this new version of the work in the early 1960s, including a recording that has been in and out of print since.(13) But Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony has remained largely an often-cited, prominent example or historical relic, rather than a living work of art. The deep reasons why this is so afford the best sort of criticism--not merely of the work itself but also of the environment that both helped to produce it and left it behind.

Freed, for the moment, from the sociology around it, Dawson's work is masterful on many levels. Each of its three movements, while cast in a traditional form, is ultimately not controlled by these predetermined structures; rather, a continuous process of variation and development shapes its course. Further, the close relationship and deep affinities of the thematic material both within and across the movements yield what is at once a dense yet highly unified whole. Both of these features, together with the work's programmatic messages (supported in part by the folk material that is used), yield a work that is more a single, sustained utterance--in late nineteenth-century, post-Romantic parlance, a "plot" that is "processed"--than a simple string of three wholly self-contained sections. These basic features speak to the work's primary strengths and may intimate some musical sources of its eventual "weakness."

It is not difficult to locate a sonata form within the first movement, titled "The Bond of Africa." Here, a slow introduction (marked Adagio) gives way to an exposition (m. 37ff) that predictably shifts to a brighter tempo (Allegro con brio) and a new meter (from 4/4 to 2/2). A transition section (m. 133) separates the initial presentation of primary and secondary themes. At its beginning, the ensuing development section (m. 221) shifts back to the slower tempo and the 4/4 meter of the introduction but soon returns to the music (tempo and meter) of the exposition for an extended re-treatment of its main themes. The recapitulation (m. 396) is preceded by a mini-"false reprise" of material from the opening of the work, which helps to articulate the formal structure.

This general outline of the opening movement does not adequately describe the process of thematic events. First, not unlike Berlioz' famous idle fixe in his Symphonie fantastique, Dawson has constructed what he called a "missing link" motive, which represents the "link [that] was taken out of a human chain when the first African was take from the shores of his native land and sent to slavery (Dawson 1964).(14) As with Berlioz, this motive recurs throughout the symphony and at its reappearance is intended to revive this powerful idea. In the first movement, this motive also acts in two other ways. It is first heard at the very beginning of the slow introduction (see Ex. 1), returns at the transition (m. 133), reappears within the development (at m. 237) to separate the first two episodes on the primary theme, and comprises the material of the previously mentioned transition section between the end of the development and the reprise (m. 382). Its recurrence serves both to unify the movement and to provide contrasting diversion from the primary and secondary themes, throwing them into sharper relief.

[Example 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The two main themes are derived from spirituals but with an important distinction between them: the primary theme, what may be called "The Bond of Africa," is an original Dawson melody in the style of a spiritual, whereas the secondary theme quotes the traditional melody "Oh, M' Littl' Soul Gwine-a Shine." Most listeners, however, probably would not perceive this difference. Typical of the presentation of themes throughout the symphony, the primary theme first appears in a solo part (the first horn at m. 39) and is then taken up by the full orchestra for a restatement (m. 103). The more animated secondary theme is similarly presented, being first heard in the solo oboe at measure 145 and quickly taken up by the woodwind section.

An interesting contrasting section appears near the end of the exposition at measure 163. Here, Dawson clearly captures the rhythmic spirit of the juba in an orchestral countermelody that mimics the effect of hand-clapping and, by its lively character, concludes the exposition and makes the sharp change of mood at the beginning of the development that much more dramatic.

At its start (m. 221), the development retains the primary key of the symphony (E-flat major) but recalls the opening slow introduction by means of a shift back to a slower tempo (Adagio) and the original meter (4/4). The opening of the symphony is also recalled as the "missing link" motive is heard at two parallel moments (at mm. 221 and 237), introducing and separating two statement of the primary theme at the faster tempo of the exposition and at the beginning of the development. This produces a start-and-stop effect that creates a sense of pent-up energy that is eventually released once the pattern ends and the development proceeds toward treatment of the secondary theme and then a return of the primary idea. As at the end of the exposition, the juba countermelody, now in a more continuous motoric rhythm, is used to infuse the end of the development with a sense of heightening drama, pointing toward the fact that formal change is coming. A false reprise occurs at measure 382, before the recapitulation--a maestoso statement of the "missing link" motive in which Dawson again pulls back the tempo (now marked Andante).

Throughout the first movement, however, beyond the rigidity of the sonata form, Dawson tends toward manipulation and variation of his themes--a rhetorical presentation of his ideas rather than merely musical architecture. In the end, the formal framework is subverted by the interrelationship of the thematic materials (the "missing link" introductory gesture and juba countermelody being akin to the lyrical primary theme and more animated secondary theme, respectively), along with the overriding attempt to draw out call-and-response patterns within the themes (an effect that is heightened by Dawson's fastidious attention to orchestration). As the movement unfolds, it is difficult to predict what will happen next, since nothing returns verbatim and change is omnipresent. The whole of the movement, then, is a kind of development; however, it is not a neat, modulatory process of departure and return but rather rhetorical reflection upon the huge concept of the program ("The Bond of Africa"). The movement's continual flux between ecstatic joy and somber introspection thus paints a powerful picture, but one that may be as difficult to comprehend as the deep psychological issues are to resolve concisely. Like the rest of the symphony, this opening movement is a highly personal utterance perhaps lost in the highly public forum of an American symphony in the 1930s. This obviously begs further attention and is addressed below.

Predictably, the second movement is generally in a three-part, ABA' form, yet, as with the first movement, this does not adequately describe the processing or presentation of material. It is easy enough to recognize that two Andante sections (at mm. 1 and 76) frame a quicker center section (m. 41) marked Allegretto (Alla Scherzando). This middle movement of the symphony thus compresses the second and third movements of the four-movement symphonic paradigm.

On this very simple level, the structure is clear, even traditional. But a closer look reveals that Dawson's utterance is considerably more complex. On one level, the second movement is easier to follow than the first, since he is more explicit about the program. The movement (titled "Hope in the Night") begins with three tolling chimes (a "symbol of the Trinity that guides the destiny of man") that once again sets an introspective scene (Dawson 1964). The theme of the Andante (see Ex. 2), a variant of the "missing link" idea (now ascending rather than descending), is accompanied by pizzicato strings that the composer described as "suggesting the monotonous life of the people who were held in bondage for 250 years" (Dawson 1964). Through repetition, Dawson broods upon this theme toward the full orchestral statement at measure 25. The theme is again more a personal reflection upon an idea so charged with conflicting psychological dimensions that it cannot adequately be expressed, rather than a systematic presentation and development of purely musical matter. Dawson seeks to use the power of music to express the inexpressible.

[Example 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A relief from this brooding occurs with the new section at measure 41, a lively theme akin to the secondary theme of the first movement that "symbolizes the merry play of children yet unaware of the hopelessness beclouding their future" (Dawson 1964). Depiction of the program here, like the juba of the first movement, is explicit. It is not hard to conjure up an image of children at play while hearing the sounds. But the continuum of the symphony as a whole, a response to the situation of the "Negro folk," demands a return of the larger, inexpressible "beclouding" at the root of the work. In the middle section, this return comes in the form of interruptions of the playful atmosphere of the children's theme by altered restatements of the "missing link" motive, either as found in the first movement (m. 102) or in the motive used to begin the second movement (mm. 105 and 118). The Allegretto returns at measure 125, but intimations of the "missing link" continue to resurface in the accompanying lines. The closing Andante section (m. 76) is more developmental in nature than the first and seems to direct its wandering energy toward the highly dramatic closing gesture, where the tolling chimes of the introduction return and final repeated chords give way to a purposefully monotonous beating tom-tom. "Hope in the Night" thus ultimately bespeaks the "hopelessness" of the day.

The final movement of the symphony, like the first, is in a sonata form, but again the message of the movement, and the thematic content of the work as a whole, subverts any sort of insistent presence of this formal structure. Unlike the previous two movements, which are nearly equal in length, the finale is roughly one-third shorter, and thus the pace of presentation is considerably quicker.(15)

There is no slow introduction preceding the exposition of the finale; rather, a three-measure bedding of tonic chords played by tremolo strings precedes the appearance of the primary theme (see Ex. 3). Derived from the traditional spiritual melody "O Le' Me Shine, (Shine) Lik' a Mornin' Star," which serves as the title of this movement, the first theme is first presented by the oboe, then bassoon and clarinet respectively, before being taken up by the woodwinds (m. 25). Given the melodic similarities of their heads, shown in Examples 1-3, it seems likely that this tune served as some sort of source for the "missing link" idea. This suggests large-scale thematic planning by Dawson, which helps to explain the overall melodic affinity found throughout the symphony.

[Example 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A short transition section leads into the secondary theme (m. 89ff), which is also based on a traditional spiritual melody, "Hallelujah, Lord I Been Down into the Sea," heard first in the solo oboe and then taken up by the strings and woodwinds. While this idea is of a more sprightly character than the first theme--and in that way mirrors the contrast between primary and secondary themes in the first movement, as well as between andante and scherzo ideas in the second--it may also be seen as similar to its predecessor in this movement as an ascending variant of the "missing link" (seen primarily in the shared syncopated eighth-note downbeat in the second measure of the figure). In this way, it is not unlike the ascending variation of the "missing link" seen in the second movement. All of this points toward an attempt to unify the composition across its course, with the "missing link" a thematic germ distilled from what will follow, and toward Dawson's fundamental development-, variation-, or process-based approach to generating the large-scale utterance of a symphony.

The development section of the last movement, briefer than that found in the first, dispenses with reintroductions of the "missing link" and devotes itself to juxtaposition of primary and secondary ideas from its beginning. Already by measure 157, this process of development begins to solve the overriding compositional problem of moving toward the symphony's closure. This is achieved as a less rhythmically active version of the secondary theme is combined with a restatement of the primary theme from the first movement (along with a return of the juba countermelody in the strings at m. 191), and this thematic complex is then combined with fragments of the material that will comprise the coda (new statements of the primary and secondary themes). Like the first movement, a false reprise occurs at measure 273 as the primary theme returns in the woodwinds and brass. As previously, the listener is not fooled, since the return of the idea is not literal. In this case, Dawson presents the idea in augmentation, again demonstrating his penchant for variation.

The recapitulation proper (mm. 295ff) contains the requisite elements (the secondary theme returns at m. 381), but such a formal view seems superfluous. The work is by now an overflowing continuum of constantly changing, contrasting ideas evoking previous moments from across the symphony; therefore, the final coda does not come as a "breakthrough" typical of this formal device. Its exact location is difficult to pinpoint (m. 471ff seems the most convincing spot) since it grows directly from the ongoing development or summation. New material here consists of a fresh statement of the primary theme--underscoring the program of the movement ("O Le' Me Shine")--"in bold relief" in the brass (Dawson 1964). The work closes with the full orchestra in unison: a half cadence presented in four eighth notes, perhaps recalling the juba, which by its aggressive quality complements the languid nature of the work's opening, thereby encasing the work within the extremes of its thematic characters.

Despite its obvious thematic coherence and overall logical construction, Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is somehow not convincing, at least to this contemporary ear. The work behaves well beyond the constraints of the traditional symphonic forms upon which it is constructed. It imposes a richly meaningful, extra-musical program reflecting on the past and its present; and it uses powerful themes, culled from that past and cultivated in that present, to depict it. Why has its meaning not translated well in the decades since it was written? Why is its musical argument not as compelling as it apparently was at the time of its first performances? These are two very different questions; answers to the latter are driven by musical criticism and analysis, and to the former, more by cultural history. Still, in the example of the work, considered both as one piece by one composer and as a cultural artifact, an explanation may be found that sheds light on both Dawson's remarkable effort and the rich time in which it was produced.

In his history of black music, Hildred Roach (1992, 127) made a very telling observation regarding William Dawson: "Dawson's reputation developed early in his career." Not only the future of this work but also Dawson's future career as a composer depended upon an accomplishment in the Negro Folk Symphony that would wear well. But its aesthetic was quickly forced to answer to two ultimately conflicting cultural agendas: the theory of the future as laid out by the aestheticians of the Negro Renaissance, on the one hand, and the actual cultural predicament of that later age as experienced by those who worked in it, on the other hand. Floyd (1995, 132) recognized the latter point regarding Dawson's development: "Dawson's ambitions were thwarted and redirected because of racial discrimination and because of the turn that the social, intellectual, and artistic climate took ... in the 1940s and 1950s." But this is simply a matter of seeing history and imposing that story upon what has happened with a work written decades ago. It is truthful, and explains much, but it only tells the story from a later perspective.(16) The past must also be seen as having been, at one time, the present with its own (immediate) past.

Here Renaissance ideology provides a context for Dawson's work that intimates a context for the symphony beyond its musical notes. It was written in the tidewaters of the Negro Renaissance, whose currents were clearest and strongest in the 1920s; Dawson appears to have been trapped between what Floyd (1995, 133) termed "myth" and "ideology": the former, an honest, indispensable part of any successful piece of "concert" music; the latter, a cultural peer pressure with which all artists have had to grapple. But Dawson's predicament was tempered by the special situation of the "New Negro" in the United States since the 1930s, a process of social changes that, by the decades they have taken to unfold and the countless new turns (for good and ill) they have taken, dwarf the modest half-hour of this symphony. Dawson's work speaks powerfully from its age but not in the manner that later generations came to expect; moreover, it sounds old-fashioned compared to what has come since. In short, it is lost in the past.

But finding it there is well worth the search, if not for musical gratification. Like the work of his great and more successful--as evidenced by the appellation the "dean of African-American composers"--contemporary, William Grant Still, Dawson's work grew from three overlapping, yet not always complementary, trends: musical modernism, American musical nationalism, and the philosophy of the Negro Renaissance.(17) Taken in reverse order, tracing these will provide the explanation promised above.

Shortly after Dawson's work experienced its intitial successes in Philadelphia and New York, Shirley Graham (1935, 691) used the phrase "spirituals to symphonies in less than fifty years" to characterize the development of African-American "cultivated" music since the time of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s.(18) Published in Etude magazine, one of the mouthpieces (perhaps the definitive one) of the mainstream (or "white") American musical establishment, Graham's summary is charged with a certain type of Renaissance ideology. It assumes a hierarchy in which the learned genre of the symphony is "higher" than the comparatively lowly spiritual. Developing spirituals into symphonies, of course, was precisely the sort of cultural advancement (or "elevation" toward something "new") that the aestheticians of the Renaissance, and no one more than Alain Locke, were preaching. Remaining dependent on African-American folk idioms while cultivating or competing within the Euro-American "high art" mainstream would thus ensure that the new work followed "the more rewarding path of racialism" as opposed to merely "classicism," which would be "neither racial nor national, but universal" (Locke 1969, 115). While the universal is usually the artistic ideal, within the special concerns of the Renaissance, such a step is premature. Locke's ideology clearly says race first, albeit in such a way that the old is remade anew or "its distinctive elements [organized] in a formal way" (Locke 1925, 209).(19) Problems arise in deciding upon what constitutes "distinctive" and how that is formalized. At this crossroads stands composer-arranger Dawson.

In his Negro Folk Symphony, Dawson chooses spirituals as the primary source material for achieving a distinctive, "racial" sound. His compositional process of arranging them, however, demonstrates two conflicting (at least in the 1930s) ways of formalizing his material. On the one hand, stratified by the added commentary provided by the accompanying program, the appearance of the spirituals helps to mythologize the situation of the "Negro folk" depicted here. In this light, they act as incidental music to the drama of actual African-American life. But this is also a complex kind of ritual within which spirituals had long performed important, "double-voiced" functions. In the literal sense, the texts of traditional spirituals spoke differently to slave and slave-owner. "Home" in "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," for instance, signifies heaven for the placated white master, confirming his hope that the slaves are safely converted. But for the slave, his "hope in the night" is that "home" shall be a freedom from bondage that he will live to see. Later on, after the work of the Fisk Singers and subsequent groups, spirituals served as a purified (both in their religious content and in the "white" manner of performance) antidote for what was perceived (mostly by whites, but by blacks, too) as the more hedonistic type of African-American popular music (from minstrelsy through early jazz) that was fast becoming very influential in American cultural life. Well versed in the traditions of his material, Dawson was surely communicating through this semiotic prism.

On the other hand, Dawson formalizes the spirituals by fitting them into the formal frame(s) of the European symphonic paradigm. They behave as primary and secondary themes. They are developed and recapitulated. Motives are derived from them. Slow introductions precede them. The fundamental elements of contrast and return (despite the fact that call-and-response is present as well) are beholden to European models.

The crux of Dawson's grand arrangement, then, rests in how the immediate meaning of the folk material speaks against the ongoing saga of the symphony. This dialogue is resolved in the Negro Folk Symphony, but in a rather progressive way. Even in its earlier version, without the infusion of West African elements, the work strove to be not merely African-American but, as the composer himself called it, "Negro," or, as Floyd (1982, 83) succinctly generalized, "black":

   When it [a work] successfully communicates essentials of the
   African-American experience, in spite of its European basis, it becomes
   something more than either European or Afro-American. It becomes, to some
   extent, at least, black music.

Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is thus greater than the sum of its parts, and in this way it is a remarkable accomplishment. But it is how that whole unfolds, moment to moment, that shapes and determines the success of the aesthetic experience. According to conceptions of just what a "Negro folk symphony" should sound like, Dawson's work does not deliver. While it "communicates essentials ... in spite of its European basis," its musico-dramatic language never persuasively resolves the underlying conflict between the dictates of the symphony and the spirit of the spiritual. It strives to be faithful to each, and in so doing becomes highly personal, not public.

American art music in the 1930s, however, was all about rapport with the American public, which meant speaking in a national language that everyone could understand. Of course, this singular ideal was never reached, since Americans have never been able to truly see themselves as "omni-Americans" (Murray 1970) or agree on a single American music. American culture has always been a union rather than a true melding of diverse elements, and this latter metaphor describes the style of Dawson's work perfectly.

The musical nationalism of the 1930s, as seen now, really wanted something different from Dawson than he delivered. It wanted to be set securely in a religious world, as in Hall Johnson's work. It wanted to hear the syncopation of jazz and the color of the blues from African-American composers. It wanted a work like Still's Afro-American Symphony, in which "nationalism was a backdrop from which the New Negro adapted old artistic forms into self-consciously racial idioms" (Brown 1990, 71).

Dawson's highly personal work asserts its lack of self-consciousness. It assumes that it is what a "Negro folk symphony" can be. It is liberated from relying upon the stereotypes of folk idioms. This is how it is progressive, not indicative of its time. In 1941, by which time Dawson's work was forgotten, John Tasker Howard (1941, 282) recognized the change that was to come--the composer's work predates Howard's comment--away from the use of folk song as a nationalistic "imperative." J. W. Henderson (1893) recognized the same thing when reviewing Dvorak's landmark piece nearly fifty years earlier, before the explosion of American musical nationalism: "Dr. Dvorak has shown his thorough mastership of symphonic writing by avoiding the pitfall which has invariably entrapped the American composer. He has not made any use whatever--except in one instance--of extant melodies." Perhaps this provides a useful way of thinking about Dawson's career. Born in a progressive era that saw the rise of musical nationalism in America, with Dvorak's work as a kind of fresh model, he reached maturity and produced his Negro Folk Symphony at about the same time that the previous experiment had run its course. He foresaw this change as he sought to develop something new, but, having been schooled in that previous age and unfortunately living only on the cusp of real change, he was in some sense caught historically.

In this way, one may begin to see Dawson's work as patently modern, even avant-garde. Aside from the appearance of the juba gestures, which can easily be seen as merely one of many rhythmic accompanying figurations (the others of which have no such readily apparent extra-musical associations), Dawson's themes do not shock the ear as self-conscious, forced combinations of opposites (the sound of the spiritual presented in the context of a symphony). Several of these ideas are original ("written in the style of spirituals" and thus perceptible as indicative of other genres, black or white), the traditional tunes that are used are not among the better known pieces from the repertory, and the melodies are only briefly excerpted, harmonized anew, fragmented, continually varied, and developed. This combination yields, as Floyd put it, "something more" than simply an attempt to depict the "Negro folk" experience in sound. Dawson's work is thus really a meta-work, showing how such a piece need not to be "blue" in order to be "black." The powerful messages of the program, as current as ever, agree.

Owing to his place in history as he wrote his Negro Folk Symphony, at the end of one age yet at only the beginning of another, Dawson was caught between ideals that ultimately yield the overriding question: How does one respect the past while seeking the future? His superb compositional hand and the highly personal, extra-musical content with which he infuses his work reveal his answers. He transfers the "missing" element of spontaneity from the comparatively narrow realm of musical practice to the much wider socio-dramatic moment when his work is performed. His meaning is constantly current, since it is always changing. Performances may change little, since the score is an explicit set of instructions, but the audience is always different; and in the notes of his score, reflections of his soul, Dawson never completely reveals himself. Like the contradiction in terms that his title now seems, in his Negro Folk Symphony, Dawson is at once a composer of the first rank and a teacher for the ages.

The possessive pronoun "his" in the title of this essay is purposefully ambiguous, which should become apparent below. No gender bias is intended. On the contrary, many of the greatest "new Negroes" were women.

(1.) For a now-standard general study of this multivalent topic, see Levine (1988).

(2.) Couching these observations in semiotic jargon by use of the term "code" is itself, borrowing from that theory, a type of scholastic "signifying" upon what is now very rich theory as applied to African-American culture (see especially Gates 1988). For applications of semiology to the history of African-American music specifically, see Floyd (1995).

(3.) The more general term Negro Renaissance is used throughout this paper since distinctions need to be made here between the Harlem Renaissance, related but independent activities in Chicago, and the diffusion of Renaissance ideology in general.

(4.) Writing some sixty years later, Hildred Roach (1992, 129) attacked the white skepticism surrounding Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony in a particularly heartfelt way: "At a time of high praise during the popularity of his Symphony, he was called upon to defend his style of writing, to which he responded that he had not tried to imitate any other composer. His Symphony was a reflection of the experiences which had fashioned the wisdom of his very soul. Its essence revealed his knowledge and love of Self, and of his roots, and showed his dedicated belief in the preservation of this unique American music. No one asked Milhaud and Ravel or anyone else to defend their music, as it was expected of them to compose art music in any style they chose. However, Dawson's composition was so beautifully constructed and well presented that his critics could not contain themselves." Roach's characterization of composition (or arrangement) as a process of preservation is significant and deserves further reflection. This summary of some opinions of black thinkers, pitting retention of folk material against integration, is admittedly a conflation for purposes of argument. Most writers of the Renaissance would not have seen these as mutually exclusive goals. The point here is that not everyone who believed in the preservation of African-American folk culture via its cultivation as "high art" endorsed integration.

(5.) Locke was referring to William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony along with Dawson's work when he said, "with the successful presentation of symphonies based on folk themes from each of these young composers in the last year, the hope for symphonic music in Negro idiom has risen notably" (Locke 1969, 114).

(6.) Locke's (1969, 114) characterization of the idiom as having "risen" is a prevalent ideological trope of the Renaissance worth noting. One may trace its immediate roots at least as far back as 1917, when James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson's choral piece "Lift Every Voice," commonly referred to as "The Negro National Anthem," appeared. The text reads in part: "Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring ... Of our new day begun, let us march on till victory is won" (Johnson and Johnson 1900 [emphasis added]). Clearly proto-Renaissance ideology is found here. In fact, as Floyd (1990b, 1) has already noted, Eileen Southern "sets the `official' beginning [of the Harlem Renaissance] in 1917, when James Weldon Johnson's Fifty Years and Other Poems [containing the lyrics of "Lift Every Voice"] was published." Southern (1983, 357) also uses the Johnsons' text as the epigraph for the last part of her book ("Part Four: Lift Every Voice, 1902-"). The famous collections of spirituals that the Johnson brothers produced in the 1920s are a direct descendent of the type of "successful presentation" (Locke 1969, 114) of the repertoire composed by Dawson and others, especially Hall Johnson, just a few years later (see Johnson and Johnson [1925 and 1926] 1969; Johnson 1930).

(7.) One could cite countless examples of this. Among the more pertinent and provocative, however, is perhaps George Gershwin's little-known essay (1929). For an overview of the issue, see Moore (1985).

(8.) Of course, spirituals and the blues involve improvisation, while little of the spirit of jazz depends entirely on this dynamic practice. One does find, however, a separation of text-based musics (spirituals and blues) from instrumental genres (early jazz) in both practice (e.g., Bessie Smith, a "blues singer," not a "jazz singer") and print (e.g., W. C. Handy's blues Anthropology [1990]).

(9.) Southern (1983, 415) reached a related conclusion regarding composers of the Renaissance: "After World War I the black composer began to come into his own."

(10.) There is some suspicion that there were two different broadcasts of Dawson's work. Brown (1990, 77) stated: "In November 1935 ... thousands of people heard the National Broadcasting Company's performance of William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski" (the year is apparently a typographical error for 1934). A few years after the performance, John Tasker Howard (1941, 279) provided some additional information: "Negro Folk Symphony No. 1 [sic] was played several times by Leopold Stokowski, and broadcast over the Columbia network." Brown's "National Broadcasting Company" (NBC) and Howard's "Columbia network" (CBS) are in direct conflict. Given the fact that Howard seems to be writing from firsthand experience, perhaps CBS is correct; in that case, it must have been the Carnegie Hall performance on November 20, 1934, that was broadcast. I have no record of broadcasts from Philadelphia at that time.

(11.) In 1940, the Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned Dawson's A Negro Work Song for Orchestra, his only post-Negro Folk Symphony commission for a concert work.

(12.) Along with the fresh arrangements of traditional spirituals like "I Wan' To Be Ready" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," Dawson's original setting of "Oh What a Beautiful City" (coincidentally produced in 1934, like the Negro Folk Symphony) proved to be among his more lasting compositional contributions during his long tenure at Tuskegee. One should probably add to this list his pre-Tuskegee spirituals "King Jesus Is A-Listening" (1925), "Talk about a Child That Do Love Jesus" (1927), and "Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley" (1927). For locations of extant copies of these works, see de Lerma (1990, 187-189). For a new recording of some of these works by the St. Olaf Choir trader the direction of Anton Armstrong, see The Spirituals of William L. Dawson (St. Olaf Records E-2159).

(13.) Stokowski's 1963 recording has been reissued on CD (MCA MCAD2-9826A1/B). No recordings of the 1934 version of the score are extant. In his liner notes for the reissue, Gary Starr, alone among the published accounts of the work, recognized the "missing link" motive (discussed below) as "a stark four-note descending figure that outlines the pentatonic or minor `blues' scale." While this is true, Dawson's themes do not play up the relationship between pentatonic and blues collections; rather, by not putting forth a patently "bluesy" idiom (i.e., "blue notes" are not prevalent), as in Still's Symphony or nearly everything by George Gershwin, for example, Dawson underscores the fact that, while many folk idioms are related owing to a shared non-diatonic basis, they are otherwise independent musical systems.

(14.) Dawson's notes, a typescript slipped inside the record jacket, appear to have been adapted (by, or at least with the approval of, the composer) from Jellinek's more formal notes on the record jacket. In comparing them, the reader will note some slight changes, mostly consisting of more detail in Dawson's.

(15.) The CD reissue of Stokowski's recording contains the following timings: first movement (13:36); second movement (13:22); third movement (8:35).

(16.) Of course, as discussed below, Floyd is equally sensitive to this and spends a considerable portion of his text masterfully untangling the aesthetic maze at the base of Renaissance thought before and during the time of Dawson's symphony.

(17.) These categories are adapted directly from those used by Floyd (1995, 153) to discuss Still's work, with the following changes: the first replaces "the avant-garde" and the third, "the Harlem Renaissance." The changes are slight but point to differences between the two composers. Still, by means of his studies with Varese and others, was clearly better versed in avant-garde trends, whereas Dawson's work appears to make more sense in the wider context of modernism. Dawson, unlike Still, was not active in New York during the Renaissance.

(18.) H. Wiley Hitchcock (1988, 53ff) has used the term "cultivated" to describe American art music and to distinguish it from popular (vernacular) and folk musics.

(19.) Locke thus applauded Nathaniel Dett's slightly earlier efforts. It should be underscored, as Ryder (1990) does, that along with a figure such as Clarence Cameron White (1880-1960), Dett (1882-1962) represents a slightly younger group of African-American composers compared to Dawson (1899-1990) and his more immediate peers, including Hall Johnson (1888-1970), Florence Price (1888-1953), Edmund Jenkins (1894-1926), Still (1895-1978), and Edward Boatner (1898-1981). Not all of these composers devoted their compositional energies to "cultivating" spirituals (see Southern 1983 for discussions of their output). It is nonetheless interesting to compare Dawson's work to those who did--namely Dett and the real father of the practice, Henry T. Burleigh (1866-1949). Along with Locke's discussion (1925 and 1969) and the collections by the brothers Johnson ([1925 and 1926] 1969) and Hall Johnson (1930), see Burleigh ([1917] 1969) and especially the useful commentary in Dett (1936).

REFERENCES

Brown, Rae Linda. 1990. William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson: Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance. In Black music in the Harlem Renaissance: A collection of essays, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 71-86. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Burleigh, Henry T. [1917] 1969. Album of Negro spirituals. Melville, N.Y.: Belwin Mills.

Copland, Aaron. 1941. Our new music. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Crawford, Richard. 1975. American studies and American musicology: A point of view and a case in point. I.S.A.M. Monographs, no. 4. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in American Music.

Dawson, William. 1964. Liner notes, Negro folk symphony. Decca DL 71077.

--. 1965. Negro folk symphony. Delaware Water Gap, Pa.: Shawnee Press.

--. 1988. The spirituals of William L. Dawson. Performed by the St. Olaf Choir, Anton Armstrong, director St. Olaf Records E-2159.

De Lerma, Dominique-Rene. 1990. Bibliography of the music: The concert music of the Harlem Renaissance composers, 1919-1935. In Black music in the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 187-189. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Dett, R. Nathaniel. 1936. The development of the Negro spiritual. In The Dett collection of Negro spirituals, 4th group. Chicago: Hall and McCreary.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1982. Toward a philosophy of black music scholarship. Black Music Research Journal 2: 72-93.

--, ed. 1990a. Black music in the Harlem Renaissance. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

--. 1990b. Music in the Harlem Renaissance: An overview. In Black music in the Harlem Renaissance, 1-27. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

--. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gershwin, George. 1926. Jazz is the voice of the American soul. Theatre Magazine (June): 52B.

--. 1929. Fifty years of American music: Younger composers, freed from European influences, labor toward achieving a distinctive American musical idiom. American Hebrew (November): 47.

Graham, Shirley. 1935. Spirituals to symphonies. Etude (November): 691ff.

Handy, W. C., ed. 1990. Blues: An anthology. Introducation by Abbe Niles. Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press.

Henderson, J. W. 1893. Dr. Dvorak's latest work. New York Times December 17: C-1.

Hitchcock, H. Wiley. 1988. Music in the United States: A historical introduction. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Howard, John Tasker. 1941. Our contemporary composers: American music in the twentieth century. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Jellinek, George. 1964. Liner notes, Negro folk symphony. Decca DL 71077.

Johnson, Hall. 1930. The Green Pastures spirituals. New York: Carl Fisher.

Johnson, James Weldon, and J. Rosamond Johnson. [1925 and 1926] 1969. The books of American Negro spirituals. New York: Da Capo Press.

--. 1900. Lift every voice and sing. New York: Jos. W. Stern.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Lewis, David Levering. 1981. When Harlem was in vogue. New York: Knopf.

Locke, Alain. 1925. The new Negro: An interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.

--. 1969. The Negro and his music. Washington, D.C.: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. Reprint, New York: Arno Press.

Moore, Macdonald Smith. 1985. Yankee blues: Musical culture and American identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Murray, Albert. 1970. The omni-Americans: New perspectives on black experience and American culture. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey.

[Review of Dawson, Negro folk symphony.] 1934. Washington Daily News (November 157).

Roach, Hildred. 1992. Black American music: Past and present. 2nd ed. Malabar, Fla.: Krueger.

Ryder, Georgia A. 1990. Harlem Renaissance ideals in the music of Robert Nathaniel Dett. In Black music in the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 55-70. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Sandborn, Pitts. 1934. Review, Negro folk symphony by William Levi Dawson. New York World-Telegram (November 21).

Southern, Eileen. 1983. The music of black Americans: A history. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton.

--. 1986. Dawson, William Levi. New Grove dictionary of American music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 1:590. London: Macmillan.

Spady, James G., ed. 1981. William L. Dawson: A Umum tribute and a marvelous journey. Philadelphia: Creative Artists Workshop.

Starr, Gary. 1989. Liner notes, Negro folk symphony. MCA MCAD2-9826A.

JOHN ANDREW JOHNSON is assistant professor of musicology in the department of fine arts at Syracuse University. His dissertation, "Gershwin's `American Folk Opera': The Genesis, Style, and Reputation of Porgy and Bess (1935)," (Harvard University, 1996) is the basis for two forthcoming books exploring the musical and social significance of that controversial work.