Parlando Breakdown #6: William Grant Still Symphony No. 1, "Afro-American"

William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony, performed by Paul Freeman and the Chicago Sinfonietta. The piece premiered in 1931, and it was the first piece by a Black composer to be performed by a major symphony orchestra. It’s filled with blues influences, and it was the most performed American symphony until 1950. However, though Still uses blues, the popular music of the time, he wrote he didn’t want to portray contemporary Black culture, but rather the “sons of the soil who still retain so many of the traits peculiar to their African forebears.”

It’s an interesting anachronism, using contemporary music to depict scenes and people who existed 50 years before, and it reflects on a tragic disconnect of the 1920s.

It was the Harlem Renaissance. Black art and culture flourished and was rabidly consumed by white audiences. However, this consumption of Black culture didn’t directly translate to Civil Rights. We talk about the Cotton Club as this Jazz Age institution where artists like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Adelaide Hall, and Cab Calloway launched their careers, but the Cotton Club was a white-only venue.

While white audiences rabidly consumed the music of Black Americans that gave the Jazz Age its name, there was an explosion of racial violence against Black Americans. From the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, where the most prosperous black neighborhood in the country was razed to the ground, to the resurgence of the KKK, which had between 4 and 6 million members in 1925, to the falsely accused Scottsboro Boys who were sentenced to death, there were countless instances of violence against Black Americans, all concurrent with the Harlem Renaissance.

It’s this disconnect between the consumption of Black art and the well-being of Black people that makes William Grant Still’s explicit connection of Black music to the history of Black people so important.

This first movement is based around WC Handy’s St Louis Blues, sung here by Bessie Smith. Still uses this contemporary blues tune throughout the movement, yet the epigraph for the movement is from a dialect poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar about the antebellum South. This use of modern music with historical themes puts the two in dialogue with each other, forcing the audience to consider the two as one. It’s the same concept that Hamilton would use in 2015. Historical themes, contemporary music. It gives the past a present immediacy, and shows, in Still’s case, that the current racial violence of the 20s is rooted in the history of slavery.

Still continues this linking of contemporary music to the past in the third movement. Listen to this countermelody played by the trombones in the opening. Sound familiar? Both were written in 1930, but many claim both tunes were based off a riff that Still himself played in the pit of the hit musical Shuffle Along in 1921. Either way, this sound was completely contemporary with the popular music of the time. However, the Paul Dunbar epigraph for this movement is, “an antebellum sermon.” It’s yet another example of Still linking the past to the present by overlaying a historical moment  with contemporary music. But beyond that, he shows how the music is inseparable from the history of the people who create it.

The disconnect between the consumption of Black art and the well-being of Black people is unfortunately all too prevalent throughout the history of music. Many popular artists have taken on this disconnect, from Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam to Childish Gambino’s This is America. When we consume art, we’re consuming history. Music always exists in time, and that’s what is so poignant about this symphony. That while the music of this symphony is so rooted in the time of the 1930s, the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism was and is just as much present as it is past. When we listen to this music today, written at the halfway point between the Civil War and the present day, we recognize that even though the music is firmly dated to 1930, the racist legacy of slavery unfortunately is far too contemporary.