Ten years ago, a music professor at Columbia College came up with a far-fetched idea.
His dream was to establish, for the first time anywhere, an institution devoted exclusively to digging up, documenting, performing and preserving music by the most tragically neglected of composers-blacks.
Because America’s symphony orchestras routinely ignored scores by such black masters as William Grant Still, Robert Nathaniel Dett and Ulysses Kay, because libraries didn’t store their works, because listeners were missing out on such sublime pieces as Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” and James P. Johnson’s “Yamecraw,” the Columbia professor decided to take matters into his own hands.
Ten years later, Samuel A. Floyd Jr. has not quite succeeded, at least by his own standards. Yet to anyone who has noted the wide-ranging activities of Columbia’s Center for Black Music Research, which recently marked its 10th anniversary, Floyd has done plenty in promoting music by black composers from across the Americas.
The library of rare recordings and precious scores housed at the center (on the sixth floor of Columbia College, 623 S. Wabash Ave.), the revelatory performances by the Black Music Repertory Ensemble (the performing arm of the center), the illuminating articles that appear in the center’s Black Music Research Journal (a scholarly publication) all derive from an institution unlike any other.
“But 10 years ago, I thought that, by now, the center would be fully funded, that the library would be huge and definitive, that the ensemble would be endowed (which would ensure its future), that we wouldn’t have to spend so much of our time just getting the money to survive,” says Floyd, expressing a lament common to small arts organizations across the country.
Amid the inevitable pain and distraction of chasing grants and donations, Floyd clearly is reluctant to count up the accomplishments of the institution he created. Others are not so reticent.
“I would say that in the present day, the Center for Black Music Research is the central repository of information regarding the musical contributions of African-Americans,” says Hale Smith, the distinguished composer whose work has been performed by the Black Music Repertory Ensemble.
“Of course, there are other independent organizations here and there, but this one is the most important.”
Observers unaffiliated with the center have agreed, the New York Times saluting “the large, ethnically diverse, enthusiastic audience” that the center’s Black Music Repertory Ensemble draws, Ebony magazine applauding the center for its mission: “to uncover, document and share with everyone a vast body of Black music that has been hidden far too long.”
For Floyd and the seven-person staff that administers the center, the last 10 years have been marked by equal parts pain, pleasure, triumph, defeat, recognition and humiliation.
“When I began trying to promote it as a scholarly center,” Floyd told the New York Times a few years ago, “there were those who wondered why they should give money to support segregation. That really distressed and frightened me. Here I was trying to raise money for something people thought was not viable or even legitimate.
“I finally countered by saying that our end goal was to put ourselves out of business. When there was no longer any need to do this, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
In other words, an institution devoted exclusively to music by black artists would become obsolete when scores by black composers of the past and present were routinely performed by musical ensembles across the country; when the names of Still, Johnson and Ellington were carved on auditorium facades alongside the names of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
Obviously, that’s not yet the case, considering that scores by African-Americans remain rarities on major symphony and chamber-music programs. Indeed, from the first day of the center to the present one, Floyd and friends have faced considerable resistance.
“Recently,” says Floyd, “we were invited to attend next year’s conference of the American Musicological Society. But I can tell you for a fact that there are people who do not appreciate that fact. But we’re going anyway.
“And most major orchestras still don’t play many works by black composers.
“So it’s a constant struggle, has been from the beginning. Getting money to support our activities has been extremely difficult, although we’ve been fortunate to get grants from some groups (such as the Joyce, Link and Fry foundations).”
But if the accomplishments of the center are so widely admired, if its work is so badly needed, why has the going been so rough?
In part, the answer concerns the very nature of the music that the center promotes. Though some of the scores fall easily within standard classical genres (symphonies, violin concertos, etc.), many do not.
A dance tune such as J.W. Postelwaite’s “St. Louis Grey’s Quick Step” (written in 1852, while the composer was still a slave) or a ragtime piece such as Will Marion Cook’s “On Emancipation Day” (penned in 1903) falls somewhere between strict classical forms and a uniquely African-American musical vernacular.
As such, this repertoire raises problems and issues that Beethoven’s Fifth, for instance, does not. For one, it requires the rare musician who can read a classically notated manuscript but also knows how to “swing” a rhythm. It requires an audience unperturbed by a music that is not fully classical nor jazz nor blues nor folk but a mixture of them all.
Above all, it requires a music world in which skin color is not held against a composer.
“I hate to use the word racism, because it’s such a red flag, but there are certain attitudes that are ingrained in America,” Smith once told the Tribune.
“Several years ago, for instance, there was a concert in New York City featuring black American composers and performers, and a major reviewer wrote that although blacks obviously had succeeded in the area of jazz and had produced some very outstanding singers, such as Marian Anderson, blacks had yet to learn the basic skills for writing symphonic compositions!”
Clearly, the reviewer never had encountered the symphonies of Chevalier de Saint-Georges (born in 1739 in Guadeloupe), Jose Silvestre White (the 19th Century, Cuban-born composer whose violin concertos equaled Paganini’s in technical difficulty), Scott Joplin (the turn-of-the-century ragtime master whose opera “Treemonisha” proved that he could write effectively in long forms) and William Grant Still (whose early 20th Century symphonies and ballets fused classical and jazz idioms much as Gershwin’s larger works did).
More than any other organization, the Center for Black Music Research has promoted these scores, and others, through musical performances and publications. That it has done so on a budget of $250,000 to $400,000 a year (small change in a multimillion-dollar music world) underscores the achievement.
Along the way, the Black Music Repertory Ensemble has created several indelible moments: In 1988, its debut concert offered revelatory performances of music by 19th Century band leader Frank Johnson (whose innovations laid the groundwork for Sousa’s marches); in 1990, the ensemble made its New York debut with an unabashed merging of street marches, theater songs, ragtime tunes and avant-garde compositions; in 1991, the ensemble played the first concert in the auditorium of the Harold Washington Library, offering the world premiere of Muhal Richard Abrams’ musical tribute to Washington, “What a Man.”
Still to come is an Orchestra Hall appearance on April 4 featuring the Black Music Repertory Ensemble with the Barrett Sisters and other guest performers, and a four-part series to be broadcast nationally next February on American Public Radio (a Chicago airdate has yet to be announced).
And yet, 10 years after the center was created, its goal of bringing black composers into the American mainstream has not been realized. Four years ago, for instance, a study of culture bias in American education documented that “none of the history texts (used in music schools) contained any basic information on black composers,” Sam Perlman, who authored the study at Grinnell (Ia.) College, told the Tribune at the time.
Has the center really made any difference?
“I’ll put it this way,” says composer Smith. “Where 20 years ago there was some excuse, 10 years ago there was less excuse, now there is no excuse for the ignorance proclaimed by some of these people (who claim to know of no worthy scores by black composers).
“In this day and age to say they don’t know the existence of this literature-after the work of the center-is inexcusable.”
