Classical Music by African Americans
Classical music has stood as a concurrent and often interconnected tradition to the popular music genres we commonly associate with African American music. Among its earliest composers, Harry T. Burleigh and R. Nathaniel Dett found inspiration in spirituals and brought this idiom into their art songs and oratorios. Among the first symphonists of the 1930s, Florence Price and William Levi Dawson maintained these connections to spirituals and other folk music, while William Grant Still, who had played with W.C. Handy's band, looked primarily to urban blues for inspiration. More recent composers like George Walker, Olly Wilson, and Indiana's own David Baker have engaged with Modernist trends including serialism, electronics, and the third stream. Meanwhile performers—and especially vocalists like Paul Robeson, Leontyne Price, and Jessye Norman—have challenged racial expectations to become prominent musicians in their field. Explore the resources below to learn more about African Americans creating and performing classical music.
Recommended Books
The recommended books below include print reference sources and books on African American composers and performers. Bibliographies on African American music are classified in ML 128.B45. Biographies can be found in ML 385 to 429, although there is not one location for African Americans. Instead run the subject searches African American Composers and African American Musicians to find more nuanced results. Histories of African American music can be found in ML 3556. The books below are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Hover over the info icon to see a description.
International Dictionary of Black Composers by
Worldwide in scope, this handsome two-volume set profiles composers of African heritage on several continents. Both those who composed for the concert hall as well as composers of popular and vernacular forms are included. The preface lays out the criteria for inclusion: classical and theater composers are covered if they have a substantial body of work that has been published or recorded. Composers of vernacular or popular music are included if they have composed music that has "circulated within performing repertories and had a substantial impact on the elaboration of the traditions of blues, ragtime, jazz, gospel" and other popular genres. Although all genres of music are represented, close to half of the 185 entries are on classical composers. This is one of the strengths of the set because black composers of popular forms are more widely represented elsewhere.
Call Number: ML105 .I5 1999 V.1-2 (Music Reference)Publication Date: 1999
Dvořák's Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music by
A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"- how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvořák prophesied a "great and noble school" of American classical music based on the "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while BLack music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvořák's lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures--Emerson, Melville, and Twain--to ponder how American music can connect with a "usable past." The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvořák's Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America--a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitals and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, "We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful."
Call Number: ML200 .H798 2022Publication Date: 2022
From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music by
African-American women composers remain largely unknown despite their important musical contributions. Active in the United States since the late-19th century, several gained national and international recognition during their lifetimes, only to have their work neglected after their deaths. From Spirituals to Symphonies is a unique, extensively researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African-American women, focusing on the implications of race, gender, and class for their musical creativity, and demonstrating how this important, underappreciated category of American art was shaped by the unique individual personalities of its participants. Their particular times, communities, families, racial heritages, economic circumstances, education, and musical training were all brought to bear on their music, and author Helen Walker-Hill challenges the assumption that Black women's only important musical contributions have been in folk, jazz, and pop. With unprecedented detail, she charts the lives and the output of a group of artists whose work has gone unnoticed for too many years.
Call Number: ML390 .W16 2002Publication Date: 2002
Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance by
Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other Black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with Antonín Dvořák, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other America luminaries. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.
Call Number: ML410.B97 S69 2016Publication Date: 2016
American Composer Zenobia Powell Perry: Race and Gender in the 20th Century by
Zenobia Powell Perry (1908-1993) was a composer whose life provides insight to a special time in the 1920s and '30s when Black American composers were finally being recognized for their unique contributions to the country's music. Born in Boley, Oklahoma to a Black father and a Black Creek Indian mother, Zenobia was influenced by both Black American and native American folklore, music, language, and poetry. In American Composer Zenobia Powell Perry: Race and Gender in the 20th Century, Jeannie Gayle Pool examines the life of this talented individual who faced tremendous challenges as a female, as an African American, and as a woman of mixed heritage. Based on interviews conducted by the author, as well as Perry's personal papers, correspondence, and scores, Pool provides a rich portrait of this unique composer. Pool also provides an analysis of Perry's musical style, a chronology, a complete list of works, and several appendixes. Raising many complex and unresolved issues related to American Blacks with Native American heritage, Perry's life story bears witness to a century in which tremendous strides were made toward equality for all.
Call Number: ML410.P29533 P66 2009Publication Date: 2009
The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by
The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works. Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples.
Call Number: ML410.P835 B76 2020Publication Date: 2020
My Life, My Words: The Autobiography of William Grant Still, American Master Composer by
Still wrote his autobiography at the age of 39, and it was misplaced in his archives until now. He offers a very personal and honest account of his life and music. Judith Anne Still, his daughter, adds comments and perspective where needed.
Call Number: ML410.S855 A3 2011Publication Date: 2011
Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist by
In 1996, George Walker became the first Black American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. This accolade, awarded for his composition "Lilacs," was just one of many Walker has received: Walker has been inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and has received six honorary doctoral degrees. Considered one of the most important American composers of the last century, Walker has produced works that rank among the finest in contemporary classical music. In Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist, Walker recounts the most significant events in his life and distinguished career as a composer and a musician. Beginning with his childhood in Washington, D.C., Walker reflects on pivotal moments that shaped his development as an artist. He recalls his early childhood, his professional debut as a concert pianist, his studies in Europe, and his connections with some of the world's most famous musicians. Along the way he includes analyses of some of his most important works.
Call Number: ML410.W278 A3 2009Publication Date: 2009
Stand up Straight and Sing! by
One of America's most admired and decorated artists tells her amazing story, from her childhood in the South to the world's greatest stages. Jessye Norman is not only one of the world's most admired and beloved singers, she is an American icon whose life story is as moving and dramatic as the great operatic roles she has performed on stage. In Stand Up Straight and Sing!, Jessye Norman recalls in rich detail the strong women who were her role models, from her ancestors to family friends, relatives, and teachers. She hails the importance of her parents in her early learning and experiences in the arts. And she describes coming face-to-face with racism, not just as a child living in the segregated South, but also as an adult out and about in the world.
Call Number: ML420.N736 A3 2014Publication Date: 2014
Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought by
"The American Negro," Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "must remake his past in order to make his future." Many Harlem Renaissance figures agreed that reframing the Black folk inheritance could play a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and artistic freedom. In Deep River Paul Allen Anderson focuses on the role of African American folk music in the Renaissance aesthetic and in political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. Deep River elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation during the Harlem Renaissance. Anderson traces the roots of this period's debates about music to the American and European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W. E. B. Du Bois's influential writings at the turn of the century about folk culture and its bearing on racial progress and national identity. He details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist cosmopolitanism in the works of Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to revisiting the place of music in the culture wars of the 1920s, Deep River provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary musicology. Deep River offers a sophisticated historical account of American racial ideologies and their function in music criticism and modernist thought. It will interest general readers as well as students of African American studies, American studies, intellectual history, musicology, and literature.
Call Number: ML3556 .A53 2001Publication Date: 2001
The New Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem Renaissance by
Boldly conceived and compellingly argued, this revisionist work offers a new interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on its music. Jon Michael Spencer challenges the emphasis of earlier historical studies - which have tended to bypass music in favor of literature - as well as their general conclusion that the Renaissance was a failure." "Spencer's discussion encompasses the music and writings of a wide range of important figures, including James Weldon Johnson, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Alain Locke, William Grant Still, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Dorothy Maynor. He argues that the singular accomplishment of the Harlem Renaissance composers and musicians was to achieve a "two-tiered mastery" promoted by Johnson, Locke, the Harmon award, and Crisis and Opportunity magazines. Their work, Spencer says, drew on the "mood and spirit" of African American folk music while mastering the forms and techniques of the European classical tradition in music." "Spencer also contends, with Locke, that the Harlem Renaissance had its roots in the turn of the century and extended for three decades beyond the 1920s. He thus contests assertions that the arrival of the Great Depression effectively ended the Renaissance, as issues of economic survival allegedly subsumed artistic aspirations. In positing a much longer period for the Renaissance and offering evidence for it, Spencer argues that this flowering of African American creative endeavor constitutes a major cultural legacy that can only be described as a resounding success.
Call Number: ML3556 .S77 1997Publication Date: 1997
Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays by
This work provides an in-depth look at the role of Black music within the Harlem Renaissance movement, suggesting its primacy to Renaissance philosophy and practice. Floyd holds that the music of this period was also the source of certain ambivalent attitudes on the part of the Black leadership. The book features essays on various subjects including musical theatre, Duke Ellington, Black music and musicians in England, concert singers, and the interrelationships between Black painters and music. It also includes a music bibliography of works composed during the period.
Call Number: ML3556.8.N5 B6 1993Publication Date: 1993
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by
In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.
Call Number: ML3917.G3 T58 2021Publication Date: 2021
Naxos Music Library Playlists: Black Composers
These two playlists curated by Naxos Music Library staff highlight important recordings by composers of the African diaspora:
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.