TOWARD A BIOGRAPHY

Finding His Voice:
William Grant Still in Los Angeles

On May 22, 1934, a few days after his thirty-ninth birthday, William Grant Still arrived in Los Angeles, completing a cross-country trip that signaled a new departure in his career.^[1] Until then, he had pursued two parallel careers in music. He had established himself as a brilliant and facile commercial arranger and orchestrator who had quietly helped W. C. Handy shape the "classic" blues, contributed to a series of Broadway musicals such as Runnin' Wild, Rain or Shine, and Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1928, then worked on radio shows like Paul Whiteman's "Old Gold Hour" and "Willard Robison and His Deep River Hour." There may have been as many as a thousand such arrangements.^[2] In the world of concert music, Still was among the most prominent and promising American composers of his generation. Three major works premiered over fifteen months in 1930 and 1931 convincingly demonstrated three ingenious new ways to express his African American heritage. "Africa was [a] sensation," he wrote of its first performance for full orchestra in Rochester in late 1930,^[3] and the critics agreed. The ballet Sahdji and then the Afro-American Symphony, now his best-known and most widely performed composition, followed in 1931. This achievement, which drew on what he had absorbed from each of his two professional paths, was significant both for the history of American music and for his own career. It marked a major step in his emergence from the world of Broadway and early radio into the rarefied but less lucrative world of concert music, a difficult transition that he was among the

first of any race to negotiate. Indeed, the informal title, Dean of Afro-American Composers, was both a recognition of the wide appeal his art had attained and an intimation of the racial barriers he challenged but never fully overcame.^[4]

When he left Wilberforce University in 1915, Still's prospects for any sort of career in music seemed gloomy. A connection, possibly through his late father, with the well-known Memphis-based bandmaster W. C. Handy helped him along. Handy hired him for the summer of 1916 and published at least ten early Still songs and arrangements.^[5] Through his work with Handy, Still absorbed the blues tradition that the black elites of his boyhood had largely rejected; his playing and his arrangements for Handy in turn contributed something to the blues' widespread commercial appeal.

After his year of navy service Handy rehired him, this time in New York, for about two years (1919–1921). There, after World War I, Still became part of the blossoming world of black music and theater. He was soon working with such musicians as Eubie Blake, Luckeyth Roberts, Will Vodery, and other members of the Clef Club, a combination union/ booking agency for African Americans organized in 1914 by the late James Reese Europe.^[6] In 1921–1922 Still was an orchestral musician in Sissle and Blake's landmark all-African American revue, Shuffle Along, featuring the African American blackface entertainers Miller and Lyles.^[7]

Will Vodery, an early African American orchestrator of Broadway shows, musical director at the Plantation Club, and later the first African American to work as an arranger and orchestrator in Hollywood, gave Still's commercial career a major boost by introducing him to the bandleader Donald Voorhees.^[8] Through Voorhees, Still found himself orchestrating Earl Carroll's Vanities and, presently, the radio shows that confirmed his reputation as an innovator in the commercial field. The "Personal Notes" show him to have been as active and arguably as influential an arranger as Don Redman or Ferde Grofé, both now much better known in that capacity. By early 1925 he was described in the New York Times as "orchestrator of much of the music for negro revues and other theatrical attractions."^[9] Still may well have contributed the arrangements that drew this comment from the Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson in his review of the Vanities of 1928: "Stung by the jazzy lash of Dan [sic ] Voorhees and his squealing band, the music sweeps like a breaking wave."^[10] The distinctive and widely admired style of arrang-

ing Still developed in the course of this apprenticeship is audible in a few surviving aluminum recordings of the "Deep River Hour."^[11] There is much more to be learned about Still's influence on popular music in the 1920s, hinted at in Sigmund Spaeth's 1948 comment that "he continues to command respect as a creative musician, and it is impossible to estimate the extent of his anonymous contributions to the lighter music of America."^[12]

At the same time that Still was leaving his imprint on commercial music, he was finding entrées into the exclusive world of concert music. Even in 1923, as he was muSical director, arranging and conducting for the short-lived Black Swan record label, orchestrating shows, and composing commercial songs like "Brown Baby" to suggestive lyrics over the pen name "Willy M. Grant," Still was going against the grain by studying composition in the European-based tradition. While he played in Shuffle Along during its Boston run, he studied with George Whitefield Chadwick, a prominent composer at the time and director of the New England Conservatory. Chadwick imparted the ideal of a "characteristic" American concert music to complement the ideas Still was already forming.^[13] Later, in between Clef Club gigs and summer stands in Atlantic City, Still studied with Edgard Varèse. Varèse gave him the tools to express his musical ideas with greater freedom and introduced him to the avant-garde composers of the day and to conductors who would champion his concert works, then and in later years.^[14]

After his two-year apprenticeship with Varèse, and after several of his concert works had been performed, Still came to understand that (1) he wanted to write concert music whose African American character was clearly recognizable to white audiences and (2) a "serious" African American style could not, by its nature, use much of the ultramodern dissonance to which Varèse had introduced him and at the same time reach the audience with which he sought to communicate. Still therefore decided to limit his use of "modernist" techniques to those that contributed to his own goals as a composer, an important step in developing his distinctive musical speech. The most important of the techniques imparted by Varèse to hiS further development was more subtle—the creative use of musical form.^[15] The three works completed or revised after his 1930 visit to Los Angeles (the ballet Sahdji, the Afro-American Symphony, and the suite for orchestra Africa ) exemplify his racial style, as do the operas Blue Steel and Troubled Island . The shift away from Varèse's more obvious influences implied an eventual break with the insurgent white modernists of the day, a break based on culturally derived

aesthetic considerations and one with heavy long-term consequences. Still was clearly influenced in this move by the New Negro movement, even though his association with it was often more a matter of geographic and social proximity than direct, self-conscious intellectual participation.

In 1929, the bandleader Paul Whiteman sought out several African American arrangers for his enormously popular band.^[16] Still, whom Whiteman judged the most successful of these, was signed as the band departed for Hollywood to make King of Jazz (released 1930). Still was hired, not to work on the movie, but to provide orchestrations for Whiteman's regular weekly radio broadcasts.^[17] While the band was in Los Angeles, the broadcasts originated from the studios of Earl C. Anthony's KFI, the local NBC affiliate. Under the terms of his employment, he was expected to produce three arrangements—about thirty pages of orchestrated score—for each broadcast. He considered that rather substantial amount a light load. "Since I am a pretty fast worker, that gave me a great deal of time to myself," he said later.^[18]

On his 1930 trip to Los Angeles, Still revived his friendship with Harold Bruce Forsythe, whom he had met in New York several years earlier, and met Verna Arvey for the first time, probably when Forsythe recruited her to read Still's music at the piano. Forsythe was already an enthusiastic advocate of Still's work; he played an important role in stimulating Still to complete the majoR works of his racial period. Soon after Still returned to New York City, the twenty-two-year-old Forsythe wrote about Still's early tone poem Darker America in some detail in "A Study in Contradictions"; his slightly later monograph on the ballet Sahdji is the product of considerable thought about contemporary literary treatments of African myth as well as familiarity with Still's score. It seems likely that Forsythe's ideas about the representation of Africa and of African Americans were especially valuable to Still, not so much because Still had not thought about them before (he clearly had) or because he agreed with FoRsythe (he didn't, especially about the "dark-heart"), but because with Forsythe he could talk about how these cultural issues might be represented in the technical language of music. Considering Forsythe's loquacity and Still's usual reserve, one imagines Forsythe doing a lot of the talking and Still sifting Forsythe's ideas in keeping with his own experience, his artistic sensibility, and his goals as a composer—including both the projects at hand and future projects, such as opera. Verna Arvey's role expanded as Forsythe withdrew after

the completion of Blue Steel; their separate contributions and Still's relationship with each is considered more fully in their separate chapters.

The short-term sojourn in Los Angeles while he worked for Whiteman was a productive one, as it turned out. Still planned out his ballet Sahdji, on an African subject by Richard Bruce (Nugent) that Alain Locke had proposed to him two or three years earlier.^[19] He decided to add a prologue to be written by Forsythe, even creating a title page acknowledging his friend's contribution.^[20] Still may also have thought about the Afro-American Symphony . The conception of a trilogy of symphonic works, portraying first the African roots, then the voices of African Americans, and finally the integrated, equal society for which he hoped, seems to have emerged here. Africa (1930), the Afro-American Symphony (1931), and finally, the second symphony, Song of a New Race (1937), eventually became the trilogy. At first Still had thought of Darker America (composed in 1924) as its first element. By the time Forsythe completed "A Study in Contradictions," though, Still had developed doubts about the work.^[21] Though he disagreed with Forsythe on Darker America 's aesthetic value, Still remained interested in his friend's potential as an opera librettist.

Away from the tumult of New York and the turmoil of a failing marriage, Still found the time and the serenity in those months to think about his future as a composer. As one considers later developments in his career, it is clear that Still's early visit to Los Angeles affected him profoundly and that he hoped to return after his contract with Whiteman ended. Even as he worked on Sahdji and thought about the Afro-American Symphony and searched for operatic subjects, he was moving toward what became the next step in his stylistic development. He came to the conclusion that he would retain the range of characteristically African American expressions but that these would henceforth be among the wider variety of styles he might use, depending on the specific circumstances of a given composition. This developing "universal" aesthetic represented a further step, an understanding that he could compose with integrity without being self-consciously "racial." This was neither a retreat from his modernist experiments of the 1920s nor a rapprochement with the white modernists. It was, rather, a statement of his mastery of the musical language. He wanted his musical utterance to become one of many possible authentic American voices, and to write music that would communicate with all Americans. In his universal style, he asserted his freedom to speak in his music as the individual he was.

He settled into this style, or rather cluster of styles, after he returned to Los Angeles permanently.

One later example of his universal style is the music he composed for the New York World's Fair of 1939. His private response to winning the World's Fair commission reflected his pleasure in not feeling obligated to deal in stereotypically racial expression: "It seems to me that this must be the first time, musically speaking, that a colored man has ever been asked to write something extremely important that does not necessarily have to be Negroid, and I must admit that I can't help but be proud of the distinction."^[22] In that same year, of course, his major compositional energies were directed toward a much larger African American-oriented project, his collaboration with Langston Hughes on the opera Troubled Island, based on a story from the revolution that ended slavery in Haiti.

Still understood that his first California stay coincided with his artistic maturity: "I think 1930 marked my real entry into serious composing. . . . [M]ost of the major works began in 1930 with that ballet, Sahdji, and the Afro-American Symphony ."^[23] He wrote in his successful Guggenheim application of 1934, "I should like to go to California . . . for there I find an atmosphere conducive to creative effort."^[24] In the later interview he remarked, "After I went back to New York from here, I was never satisfied. . . . California did something to me. . . . When I came here, it was like coming home."^[25] No wonder, then, that Still sought an opportunity to return to Los Angeles to pursue his chosen goals.

Still apparently made two attempts to provide music for Verna Arvey to perform after his 1930 visit to L.A. and before his return in 1934. A two-piano version of Africa (the first movement only) exists in the Still-Arvey collection, with "Verna," "Arvey," "Bruce," and "Forsythe" used to label certain repeated measures. Still attempted to adapt another work for Arvey to perform. Four Negro Dances, for solo piano and large dance orchestra, was commissioned by Paul Whiteman, most likely while Still was under contract with him or soon afterward.^[26] The same work, under the title "The Black Man Dances: Four Negro Dances for Piano and Orchestra," exists in a pencil draft score in the Still-Arvey Archive. At the start of the pencil score is pasted in: "Acknowledging with gratitude the helpful suggestions of Miss Verna Arvey concerning

the preparation of the piano part." At the head of each dance is pasted a four-line stanza, each one signed "Bruce Forsythe."^[27] The pasted-in texts appear to be an afterthought. Still's longhand note at the end of the score, "He can't dance any more," probably reflects his frustration that Whiteman would not release the work for Arvey to perform.^[28]

From the time he turned away from the self-consciously "modern" in the interests of his creative integrity as an African American, Still characterized himself as "conservative," although his urge to work the various aspects of his life and his music into a coherent strand made him an innovator in spite of himself. The decision to leave New York was agonizingly personal as well, for he was under considerable pressure to emigrate to France. A letter from his wife, Grace Bundy Still, to Countee Cullen, dated December 9, 1929 (while Still was in Los Angeles with Whiteman), remarks, "I am eagerly awaiting the summer to make my first visit to France. I feel quite as you do about letting the children grow up there and as soon as possible after this proposed visit plan to begin looking about for permanent quarters for the family."^[29] June 1930 found Still back in New York, unemployed and determined to use his time to carry out the projects he had developed in the course of his Whiteman contract. There is no evidence that he made a move toward a visit abroad. The declaration in his letter to Irving Schwerké of January 9, 1931, after six months without steady work and (ironically) just a few days after the Afro-American Symphony was completed, that he must soon either abandon music or "go where such conditions [of racial discrimination] do not exist" reflects his ambivalence about which geographic direction to take. The truncated journal of 1930 demonstrates that his marriage to Grace Bundy was very severely stressed after his return. We cannot follow this thread, for Still's journals over the next few years have not been found. We do know that before Bundy emigrated to Canada in September 1932 with their four children, Still had made his first application for a Guggenheim fellowship—to work in Los Angeles, not Paris.

Still's choice of Los Angeles over Paris carried implications that, whatever their personal dimension might have been, relate to the aesthetic choice embodied in his achievement of a racial style and his determination to develop it further, into a more universal speech. In large measure, the modernists had sought the "new" and learned their trade abroad; he had learned his trade with Handy in Memphis and on Broadway. The "new" he sought was developed from the African American

folk traditions he had set out to absorb and fuse into an "American" concert voice. From this point of view, his exodus to Los Angeles, grounded in an aesthetic choice, was a form of expatriation, not across the Atlantic, but westward, within his own country. In Los Angeles he intensified his efforts to bridge the gap that had developed between high modernism, based in New York City, and the traditional concert audience, which he wanted to expand across lines of race and class. Thus Still bucked a trend of stratification by genre through much of his career.^[30] His decision may also have predisposed his critics to dismiss his work thereafter as no longer modern but merely commercial. To be sure, the commercial opportunities there made his personal decision easier.

"Serious" New York-based white composers often came to work in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s (Copland is but one example). They tended, however, to separate this financially necessary movie work from their concert vocations geographically as well as aesthetically, marking the "seriousness" of their purpose by retaining their eastern residences. (That many of them had spent time in Paris and elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s was a further geographic credential.) European composers came to America, and to Los Angeles, to escape the horrors of Hitler's Europe and to carry on as best they could. Although the racial situation in Los Angeles had deteriorated after 1920, as it had elsewhere, members of the race nevertheless came to take advantage of the relatively less oppressive racial climate and the availability of commercial work, both factors in Still's decision to relocate there.^[31]

In addition, Still had personal connections with some of the area musicians, some of whom were probably members of the segregated Los Angeles Musicians' Association, Local 767.^[32] Before she joined the Fisk Jubilee Singers and eventually settled in Los Angeles, Sadie Cole had sung in a pageant written by Still's mother, back in Little Rock. Still may have heard Cole's daughter, Florence Cole Talbert, when she concertized in New York City (sometimes with Roland Hayes) in his Harlem years.^[33] The success of Will Vodery, who had given Still arranging opportunities in New York and who had already broken the color barrier for arrangers in the movie studios, must have encouraged Still. There were family associations as well. Still's first residence in Los Angeles when he returned was on Thirty-fifth Street, where his near neighbors included both his cousin Charles Lawrence, a part-time musician whose music Still had

orchestrated some years earlier, and Harold Bruce Forsythe, who was Lawrence's tenant for many years.^[34]

Once in Los Angeles permanently, Still reached out to the African American music community and beyond.^[35] A gift of fifty scores and books on music to the Gray Conservatory and a talk, "Writing Music for Films," followed a concert at the Twelfth Street YWCA in which John A. Gray accompanied Leola Longress, soprano, in a group of Still songs, and Verna Arvey, the future second Mrs. William Grant Still, played piano reductions of Africa, Kaintuck', and La Guiablesse .^[36] Kaintuck' was soon repeated for a predominantly white audience at a Pro Musica concert. Arvey, a diligent publicist, succeeded well in calling the attention of local white composers and regional music journals to Still's ability; Mary Carr Moore, for example, wrote of Kaintuck' as a work of "real power and splendid proportions" and became a regular at his performances.^[37] Still's work was clearly perceived by much of the preémigré European American musical community in Los Angeles as not strongly associated with musical modernism, a plus from their point of view. The (mainly) white composers of the first Los Angeles school partook of the community's embedded racism but were nevertheless far more receptive to Still's aesthetic orientation than were the better-known modernists, many of the film composers, or the famous émigrés who began to arrive shortly after him.^[38]

Still's first appearance at the Hollywood Bowl was at the head of the all-white, all-male Los Angeles Philharmonic on July 23, 1936. The Bowl had been a Los Angeles landmark since its founding in 1919 by an idealistic group of Theosophists, community activists, and real estate developers.^[39] So it was appropriate that when Still became the first of the race to conduct a major symphony orchestra, it should have been there. As it turned out, his share of the program was relatively small. The unusually long first half of the concert consisted of standard European fare, an overture by Weber and a Brahms symphony, conducted by Fabien Sevitzky. After a late intermission, the advertised "American Music Night" began. Still conducted two excerpts from his own works: "Land of Romance" from Africa and the Scherzo from the Afro-American Symphony . His old friend and sometime rival Hall Johnson then led his own choir, the Hall Johnson Singers, in fourteen numbers, divided into three groups: songs from The Green Pastures, secular songs, and spirituals.^[40] The fullest review, which appeared in the weekly Los Angeles Saturday Night, recognized that Still's share of the evening represented something less than half of the proverbial loaf:

Mr. Still very clearly demonstrated his ability as a composer in the two numbers which he conducted. The works are sincere, dignified utterances, written in a straightforward style. They present "an American Negro's concept of the land of his ancestors, based largely on African folklore, and influenced by his contact with American civilization." His orchestration is colorful, yet trickery has not been employed to achieve it. One cannot escape the feeling that the merit of these compositions warranted a performance in their entirety. As it turned out, we heard only "Land of Romance" from the Africa Suite, and "Scherzo" from the Afro-American Symphony .^[41]

Forsythe subsequently wrote an essay on Hall Johnson and Still in which he celebrated the importance of this concert as a breakthrough for race relations in the concert music field.^[42]

Still's music soon reached an even wider audience than that provided by the Bowl's popular concerts. Appropriately for a composer who had earlier contributed to the developing art of arranging for radio orchestra, schoolchildren and home audiences began to hear Still's serious music over the radio, thanks to the Standard School Broadcasts (sponsored by Standard Oil of California) that originated in Los Angeles. Between 1939 and 1955, more than thirty performances of Still's music, including perhaps twenty different works, were given on the Standard broadcasts. This led to broadcasts of music by other African American composers and, presently, to programs devoted to discussions and performances of jazz. These school broadcasts of jazz were said to be "the first radio-sponsored attempt to grant jazz a serious place in the musical world."^[43]

More quietly, Henry Cowell's New Music Edition published the orchestra score of Still's tone poem Dismal Swamp, one of the early works composed in Los Angeles, thus giving him the imprimatur of at least one branch of the "ultramodern" movement.^[44] The publication was supervised by the young Gerald Strang, then one of Schoenberg's composition students. There is no formal record of Still meeting Arnold Schoenberg, but if he did, it would have been at the symposium of new music organized by Arvey at the Norma Gould Studio in 1935.^[45]

A vignette of Still and his family a few years after his arrival is given by Pauline Alderman, a member of the University of Southern California's music faculty. In 1942, her musicology seminar met every other week in her home.

Since three of the class members were working on American music projects, I had invited William Grant Still to come and lead an informal discussion on what he thought were the present needs of the American composer. . . . The

Stills came promptly, bringing their two small children whom they put to bed in my bedroom and we had just settled down for his introductory lecture when there were sounds of a siren and shouts along the street—"Lights out. An air raid." After the shock of the first moment we hurriedly blacked out the room, as all householders had been instructed to do, and Mr. Still went on with his well-prepared lecture.^[46]

Although Still had lectured at Eastman at Howard Hanson's invitation in 1932, this would appear to be one of the few times he spoke at a southern California university. Later on, in the 1960s, there were numerous presentations at middle schools and high schools, both public and private.

Still had hoped to put his radio and theater arranging skills to work in Los Angeles, and he presently got his opportunity in Hollywood. In 1936, after the first Guggenheim stipend had run out, Still was signed to a six-month contract as a composer-orchestrator for Columbia Pictures by Howard Jackson, the studio's music director. With this chance for a good income came some in-house manipulations that unsettled Still. Jackson was fired on the day the contract was signed; Morris Stoloff was hired in his place. Still said of the incident, "That was some of the unclean practices in the studio, . . . politics and so on that got him out. . . . Stoloff, who was not a composer at all, . . . had never conducted."^[47] Nevertheless, things went well for a time. He worked on several films, including Theodora Goes Wild and Pennies from Heaven, then produced a series of "sketches for the catalog." These consisted of short bits of music composed to support stock situations and kept on file to be used as needed. As was the case for film composers in general, Still himself did not have any way to know what was done with his sketches after he left the studio, but to judge from his ASCAP list, quite a few of them found their way into films.^[48]

Columbia was best known for the numerous "B" movies that were its stock-in-trade. A prominent exception to its usual policy, the main feature Lost Horizon (released 1937) was filmed during Still's tenure there. Frank Capra, the director, hired Dimitri Tiomkin to compose the music; then, bypassing the inexperienced Stoloff, he hired a second experienced film composer, Max Steiner, to conduct and back up Tiomkin. Eight outside orchestrators were brought in to work alongside Still to speed up the project.^[49] Still had seen nothing remotely like this musical overkill in his radio days. Given the lack of confidence in his skills that

Figure 1
Still at the piano, probably at Columbia Pictures. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

this extravagance implied, he was sure that his contract would not be renewed once his six months were over. As a sort of desperate joke, he penciled into a section of quiet background music an inappropriate trumpet solo, "The Music Goes Round and Round," intending that it be erased after the rehearsal. The studio moguls, who wanted their swollen musical forces to work at white heat to keep their costs down and were doubtless worried about the change in policy represented by Lost Horizon, did not see anything funny about it. Later, Still said, "I was let go . . . [because] it doesn't look well to have a composer in the organization [and then] to go out and bring in people."^[50] Columbia may have fired Still, but both Steiner and Tiomkin recognized his talent. Soon after leaving Columbia, Still completed a short job for Steiner at Warner's. Tiomkin sent orchestrations his way several times later on.

A few years after his stint at Columbia, Still took part in a published symposium about music in films, along with such composers as Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Hanns Eisler, Karol Rathaus, Lev Schwartz, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Virgil Thomson. The symposium was conducted by mail;

Still's increasing conservatism would likely have led him to avoid a gathering of these liberal-to-leftist men, several of whom he had come to distrust. The remarks he wrote for this symposium constitute his most extensive statements about composing for film. What he had to say also reflects his short and tenuous relationship with the studios, his awareness of his position as the only African American in the group, and, indirectly, his grasp of the possibilities of film music. The unpretentious directness of his remarks contrasts sharply with the posturing of some of the other respondents. Unlike his fellow composers, who claimed compositional autonomy for their film music, Still wrote that he had worked only on the music director's orders, from the completed film sequences, thus frankly admitting that he never had any control over the overall product:

I never took into account the level of musical understanding of the film audience, but from the instructions given me by the musical director it was my opinion that he did. . . .

The difference in the music for a film and for any other dramatic medium is great; in the former, quality does not count so much as cleverness and perfection of the time-element. . . . Yes, the future cutting of a film makes it more difficult to write good music for films, as one is never sure whether or not a carefully worked out form or balance will be destroyed in the final cutting. . . . There are no more special facilities of sound-recording for films than there are in radio; personally, the resources in modern radio appeal to me more. . . . I have long felt the need for drastic changes in the conditions under which most film music is composed, and most other serious composers who have been momentarily attracted to this work agree with me, but such changes would involve changing the film industry itself, and this is impossible. . . . [T]he serious composers therefore have no recourse but to adapt themselves to Hollywood—they early learn that they cannot expect an industry to adapt itself to them.^[51]

Still's best opportunity in films came late in 1942, when he was asked to be music director on a film with an all-African American cast, Stormy Weather, at Twentieth Century Fox. It was his biggest contract ever, for $3,000, but he walked out on it a few weeks after he was hired, apparently over the issue of how African Americans and their music should be represented in film. Although Still was never able to persuade the studios to use his concert music, it appears that, probably in the early 1950s, he produced a "Laredo Suite" from which excerpts were used as fillers in television series such as "Gunsmoke" and "Perry Mason."^[52]

One of Still's projects after completing Blue Steel was a musical portrayal of Central Avenue, the center of African American life in Los

Angeles, probably intended for a film production.^[53] Something of a mystery surrounds this score. Forsythe agreed to provide a scenario in 1935; the original idea was very likely his.^[54] Still offered it to Howard Hanson for a ballet production at Eastman and then withdrew it. Not long after this, Still became one of six composers commissioned by the CBS radio network to compose a work specifically designed for radio orchestra.^[55]Central Avenue was quickly revised into a suite specifically for broadcast, becoming New York's Lenox Avenue and scoring one of a series of national successes that came to Still in the first fifteen years of his Los Angeles residence. Later, Lenox Avenue became a ballet, with a new scenario by Arvey.^[56]

Still applied for the Guggenheim and moved to Los Angeles to compose an opera, or possibly two of them. By the time he stopped composing in the late 1960s, he had completed eight operas. Only the second, Troubled Island, had a major production in his lifetime. That disappointment did not prevent him from continuing to compose them. Still's commitment to opera went back to his days as a teenager in Arkansas when he was enthralled by the early Victor Red Seal opera recordings his stepfather brought home. Donald Dorr details several of his unsuccessful early attempts to find or develop a libretto, the most serious (discussed above) involving an unpublished novel by Grace Bundy Still, his first wife, and Countee Cullen.^[57] One result of the 1930 visit to Los Angeles was that Still was able to complete several symphonic works; a second result was that he began to seek out the long-term financial support necessary to compose an opera. In 1931–1932 he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation: "I am planning two operas. The scene of the first is to be laid in Africa, and its music will, in as far as artistically possible, reflect the primitive and barbaric nature of the African savage. The scene of the second opera is to be laid in the United States, and its musical idiom will be that of the American Negro."^[58] This first proposal was not funded, but a second application two years later was successful. Thus his drive to become an opera composer was what enabled him to make the move away from New York City. A single scene by Forsythe, "The Sorcerer: A Symbolic Play for Music," which Still set as a ballet in 1933 and discarded later, may have been intended as part of the "primitive," "barbaric" African opera. By the time of his second application, he had chosen the second of his two ideas as the primary project and proposed a third as his backup.^[59] ? He chose to set Blue Steel, a short story

on an American Negro subject by his friend Carlton Moss, a writer just getting started in radio.^[60] From the story, he developed his own very detailed dramatic outline for his setting, almost a libretto in itself, for Forsythe, his inexperienced librettist, to work from. Still intended his outline to present "roughly and concisely the gist of the lines which are to be given each character, and the stage directions.^[61] Forsythe apparently accepted Still's working conditions, making his own notes on the outline and supplying language to suit the composer's specifications. Still annotated the libretto liberally, writing down motives and their variants. After Blue Steel was finished in 1935, Forsythe signed a contract to write a libretto for a full-length "Sorcerer," but he probably never completed it, and the second opera was not composed.^[62]

Although both Arvey and Judith Anne Still came to regard the occasionally dissonant musical language of Blue Steel as the reason the composer rejected this first opera, it was not withdrawn until several years after it was completed, when Still, who was unable to convince the country's major opera companies to look seriously at it, had a newer one to promote.^[63] Sadly, Blue Steel remains unperformed. The next opera, Troubled Island, set in Haiti to a libretto by Langston Hughes (with additions by Verna Arvey), eventually achieved a pinnacle of success for an American opera, a professional production by the New York City Opera. This production and its aftermath formed a major turning point in Still's life; so troubled was it, and so troubling for students of Still's life and works, that it will be treated at some length in another chapter.

Still did not allow his unhappiness over the treatment of Troubled Island to interfere with his commitment to opera; in fact, he continued to complete them at a remarkable rate. A Bayou Legend and A Southern Interlude were completed before the New York production of Troubled Island ever came about. Another opera, perhaps his best work, was composed entirely in 1949, the traumatic year of the Troubled Island production. Still worked out the outline for Costaso in the two weeks before he went East for the rehearsals and premiere of Troubled Island . Within a year he completed the entire score, down to extracting the orchestral and choral parts, then proceeded without a pause to the next project, Mota, on which he worked just as expeditiously. Once he was well settled in Los Angeles in his quiet domestic life with Arvey, it appears that Still purposefully embarked on a long-term project to use the various cultures of the Americas that were a part of his racially mixed background and his life in the Southwest as settings for operas. Arvey became his librettist for this project mainly by default, after Forsythe

Figure 2.
Page from Forsythe's libretto to Blue Steel, with Still's annotations.
Library of Congress.
 From the collections of the Music Division, Library of
Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

and Langston Hughes (for different reasons) dropped out of the picture. (Still had always wanted his librettists close at hand, where they could write words to fit his music rather than the other way around.^[64] ) A Bayou Legend (1941) and Minette Fontaine (1958) are set in Louisiana and draw on voodoo practices. Costaso (1950), reportedly Still's own favorite, is set in a Hispanic town in an isolated, austere southwestern desert. Mota (1951) is set in Central Africa; The Pillar (1955), in a Native American pueblo; and Highway 1, U.S.A . (begun in 1941 as A Southern Interlude and revised into a one-act opera in 1963), in the eastern United States, where it portrays a family whose culture is generally "American" but not racially specific.

Since the 1949 production of Troubled Island, none of Still's operas has been produced by a major company, although most have had regional productions of varying quality. By the late 1960s, when regional opera companies and university opera departments began to produce new American works more frequently, Still was no longer in a position to take much advantage of this new and fruitful trend. At this writing, Mota and The Pillar, like his first opera, Blue Steel, remain entirely unknown to operatic audiences.

Los Angeles gave Still a relatively relaxed racial climate, a friendly aesthetic atmosphere, and just enough support so he could pursue his career as a composer. His choice to remain there, away from the center of things musical, represents a going against the grain for composers of symphony and opera. His decision to turn down the opportunity (in 1941) to become a "university composer" at Howard University (at Alain Locke's urging) affirmed his decision to turn away from the worlds of both the modernists and the Harlem Renaissance, a kind of expatriation in his own country. Over the years the defeats added up alongside the successes, partly because Still aimed so high and attempted so much: his firing from Columbia Pictures, the summary dismissals of Blue Steel and Troubled Island by the Metropolitan Opera, the years of struggle before Troubled Island was produced at the New York City Opera and then its equivocal reception, the debacle at Fox Studios over Stormy Weather, the lapse of fifteen years before another opera got a hearing (Highway 1, U.S.A., 1964, on public television), the obscurity and poverty of the 1950s and 1960s. The quiet domesticity of his second marriage gave him extraordinary freedom to compose, a freedom he used for almost unceasing work, but the relative isolation it brought may have stimulated the feelings of suspicion and distrust that he displayed in his

later years. One remembers Carlton Moss's description of him as a dinner partner at the Harlem YMCA in his youthful New York days:

This was as I saw it, Still's personality. The only time I saw him was at the dinner table at the YMCA in Harlem, which was the only really decent place to eat. He would sit there, and he had this habit of tapping his foot. He never talked about anything else but that music. Later on I always felt that, I was just an interlude. That I never talked to him about this lynching, or this problem, or what the NAACP was doing. I just listened to his loyalty to his music, and I got the impression that when he left me, wherever he went, he'd sit down and mess with that music. . . . [He was] very attractive. But he was always off, in another world.^[65]

On his first visit to Los Angeles, Forsythe described him as "the most original and gifted negro composer ever to be in circulation," and wrote "there are few artistic paradoxes to compare with the artless simplicity of his personality and the uncanny complexity of his art creations."^[66]

In the late 1920s and especially in the 1930s, Still had attracted substantial attention as a composer of art music, with numerous readings of his works by major symphony orchestras. This continued for some fifteen years and more after he moved to southern California. For example, Still's concert music had no fewer than ninety-eight performances nationwide in 1942.^[67] A succession of commissions and first performances by major symphony orchestras around the country, the Hollywood Bowl appearance conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the CBS broadcast of Lenox Avenue, the Perisphere commission, were more than most composers could hope for in a lifetime. Many of these works seem to be the product of the repeated challenges, personal and cultural, that he had faced in his early years, that confronted him anew as he made his way in New York, and that led him to leave New York for Los Angeles. To some extent, these challenges changed as he moved from his early struggles to his successes in commercial music, to his career as a "classical" composer, and to the conflicts of his later years. But the underlying themes remained and can be followed in his best-known work, the Afro-American Symphony, in his relationships with Forsythe and Arvey, and even in the development of his late political activism.

An Unknown "New Negro"

Harold Bruce Forsythe's training as a musician made him both an enthusiast and a wonderfully insightful commentator on Still's concert works, which were generally ignored by better-known writers of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement. None of what eventually emerged from them comes close to matching the now-unknown Forsythe's vivid perceptions. I supplement his "Study in Contradictions" and "Plan for a Biography of Still" with this biographical study because of the quality of Forsythe's work, because of the significant artistic collaborations he undertook with Still, and because of his influence on Still's personal life.

Indeed, Forsythe's artistic and personal impacts on Still are not fully separable. To begin with, he was a powerful advocate and facilitator for the Africanist aesthetic position he read in Still's music. During Still's 1929–1930 sojourn in Los Angeles, Forsythe arguably served as a catalyst for several works Still produced at the end of his "African" period, immediately after his return to New York City. Forsythe played a role in stimulating Still to clarify his conceptions of the ballet Sahdji and the Afro-American Symphony, and probably also Africa, the suite for orchestra that Still completed in Hollywood in February 1930. An early title page for Sahdji in Still's hand acknowledges Forsythe as the author of a prologue, now missing.^[1] Forsythe's availability as a librettist was a major reason for Still's return to Los Angeles in 1934. Indeed, Forsythe wrote the libretto (to Still's detailed specifications) for Blue Steel, Still's first completed opera, and he provided the start for a second, which turned

into a ballet, The Sorcerer, later withdrawn. Moreover, it was Forsythe who introduced Still to his future wife and later artistic collaborator, Verna Arvey. The romantic triangle that developed in 1934—discussed below—was the immediate cause of his estrangement from Still and Arvey, although there were underlying aesthetic issues as well. The complications of these personal relationships probably influenced the way in which Still's "universal" aesthetic developed, and possibly its timing. More concretely, they may have affected Still's decisions to withdraw or alter certain of his works composed around 1935.^[2] Forsythe's importance may thus be even greater than "A Study in Contradictions" suggests. Before the gifted, vulnerable librettist/ scenarist/ poet disappeared from view he had played a major role in the lives of both Still and Arvey.

Forsythe was born in Georgia (July 14, 1908) and taken to the Los Angeles area when he was about five years old, possibly earlier.^[3] He attended Manual Arts High School, where he was an older contemporary of Verna Arvey. The two established a friendship that lasted almost fifteen years, longer than his association with Still. Several years before he went to New York City to study, Arvey wrote about him in the Manual Arts weekly paper:

Harold Forsythe . . . not only composed one piece of music, but many. Music was his natural mode of expression; and as Miss Rankin says, "His music is beautiful thoughts, lovely ideas. While he is able to speak and write in exquisite language, he has also the happy faculty of explaining himself in music." His compositions, on first sight, have an almost disarming simplicity. One imagines that they are easy to perform, but in reality they are most difficult. He is indeed a sensitive soul, responsive to all musical impressions.

Although he has composed many songs, short piano pieces, a string quartet and a fantasia for violin and piano, he is remembered in particular here for several of his works which were performed in assembly.^[4]

About a decade after Arvey's article, Forsythe wrote this self-description for the Hamitic Review, a short-lived Los Angeles literary magazine:

Whether I'm a writer-musician or a musician-writer is a matter that doesn't trouble me. I've always kept the two functions in separate psychic compartments. My musical education was received from Prof. C[harles] E. Pemberton of U.S.C., and Dr. Rubin Goldmark of the Juilliard in New York. Since one disastrous venture into public taste, my music has been held in reserve. Have composed an opera, a symphonic poem, a monody and various works for small orchestra, string quartet and voice. Adolf Tandler, Nicolas Slonimsky, Leonard Walker, Fannie Dillon and others have spoken of this music. Be-

Figure 3.
Harold Bruce Forsythe. 
Courtesy of Harold Sumner Forsythe.

ing a peculiar cuss, Verna Arvey and Gladys Mathonican alone play and sing it. My literary studies have been entirely independent and secretive. I have written about a dozen books covering the field of novel, biography, poetry, drama, scenario, libretto, metaphysics and criticism. Much interested in Negro history, art, religion, magic. Associated with the composer, William Grant Still in an effort to articulate the subtler currents of ethnic sentience. First published stuff in W. Thurman's old Outlet, and his Looking Glass . Did some bad articles for the California Eagle . Wrote during its lifetime for the stormy Flash, a sharp little publication. Am more than happy to be associated with the Hamitic Review, and have in mind a series of articles that might be of interest.^[5]

His sensitivity in response to a rather well-received recital and the "secretive " character of his writing suggest, at least in hindsight, his extreme shyness and vulnerability.^[6] The references in this biographical sketch and other of his writings also suggest a chronicle of the African American intellectual connections he made in his midteens. Wallace Thurman, later a prominent Harlem Renaissance literary figure, attended the University of Southern California in about 1922, then published his Outlet, to which Forsythe contributed, while working in the post office alongside Forsythe's uncle around 1922–1923.^[7] Thurman boarded with Forsythe's family for a time and was at least indirectly a mentor. Forsythe later wrote, "You see although never a 'friend' he's closely bound up in my life. He was a friend of my brother and boarded in our house when i [sic] was a stripling. Nietzsche, Hearn, Flaubert, all came into my life from the books Thurman left about the house."^[8] Arna Bontemps, later a poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, was in Los Angeles at roughly the same time; it is very likely that Forsythe knew Bontemps as well.

Bontemps's 1941 letter to Arvey, giving biographical information for one of her articles, describes his own Los Angeles background and gives a rationale for his family's westward migration that very likely parallels Forsythe's:

When I was three, my parents moved to Los Angeles [ca. 1905, from Louisiana; 1912. or 1913 for Forsythe]. The following year they entered me in the kindergarten of the Ascot Avenue school. I believe I was the only colored child in the room (and perhaps in the whole school at that time), and I still remember how amused and pleased my mother seemed when she visited the school and found me completely integrated into the group. . . . Kindergarten turned out to be an epitome of all my schooling. I am a product of neighborhoods in which relatively few Negroes lived and of schools in which we were always greatly in the minority. The same is true, I believe, of a good

many Negroes who grew up in Los Angeles in those days. . . . My parents were always anxious to put the South (and the past) as far behind as possible. . . . One by one, however, our relatives migrated to Southern California during my childhood, and a link with the past was established for me in spite of all efforts to the contrary.^[9]

Coming to Los Angeles was in fact an old tradition for African American musicians, who were visiting regularly by the 1890s and often performing to mixed audiences in white-run theaters. Flora Batson, the Original Nashville Students, and Sissieretta Jones were among those who had concertized there before the turn of the century.^[10] Forsythe might have heard Will Marion Cook's American Syncopated Orchestra in Los Angeles shortly after World War I. In Forsythe's teen years, the city was the launching point for bands of both races that formed in the West and traveled East as well, contributing to the development of jazz. Freddie Keppard played in Los Angeles just before his successful move East, as Paul Whiteman also had. Keppard's Olympia Orchestra, including New Orleans bassist Bill Johnson, later became "the first black dance band, and the first from New Orleans, to make transcontinental tours, as the Original Creole Band. . . . It was this band . . . that carried the jazz of New Orleans to the rest of the nation."^[11]

Many African American musicians had come to Los Angeles to live before Forsythe arrived. The vigorous classical music activities of the African American community are chronicled most fully in the weekly California Eagle to which Forsythe briefly contributed. Music making in African American churches was very well established.^[12] Forsythe may well have heard groups like the choir of one hundred white-clad African American women, choral singers from local churches, who joined several hundred more of their white sisters in a formal greeting to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, as he campaigned in Los Angeles for election on his third-party Bull Moose ticket and women prepared to vote for the first time.^[13] The African American community was relatively small but well educated. John A. Gray operated a conservatory and wrote a weekly column in the Eagle . Arkansas-born and Los Angeles-trained William T. Wilkins, in whose conservatory Forsythe first studied piano, began presenting his students in recitals in 1914. Forsythe, according to his son, hung out at Wilkins's conservatory. His piano teacher there was Nada McCullough, a graduate of the University of Southern California.^[14] After several decades of teaching, Wilkins's and Gray's students

would number well into the thousands.^[15] Thanks to the work of Gray, Wilkins, and others, many of L.A.'s jazz musicians were, like Forsythe, classically trained, which means that they did more reading from arrangements and less improvising than was done in New Orleans or Chicago.^[16] Later, Charles Mingus was among the products of this tradition.^[17]

Forsythe must have known about Still from an early age, for a Still cousin, Charles Lawrence, also a musician, lived in the same close-knit African American neighborhood around West Jefferson and Thirty-fifth Street in Los Angeles where Forsythe spent part of his childhood. Still had orchestrated a piece by Lawrence in the early 1920s.^[18] (Later on, Forsythe and Lawrence shared living quarters in New York City.) It is quite likely that Forsythe had begun to learn about the possibilities of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro" by then and that he introduced Arvey to its new intellectual currents while they were high school students. (Perhaps they read Alain Locke's 1925 The New Negro together, discovering among its treasures the first sketch of Richard Bruce Nugent's "Sahdji.")^[19] Their friendship suggests the likelihood that Arvey became aware of Still and his work much earlier than she might have otherwise and that her meeting with Still in 1930 carried more weight than one might think from her later statement that she had barely met him in 1930. It is at least likely that Arvey is the "'not much praised but altogether satisfactory lady'" of Forsythe's essay who already in late 1930 "has become sweet on him [i.e., Still]." The chronology as well as the dynamic of Still and Arvey's relationship began earlier than previously thought because of this friendship, a matter of considerable import. This hypothesis is strengthened by H. S. Forsythe's report that his father's friendship and working relationship with Still ultimately foundered over Arvey.

Forsythe was a gifted pianist, as Arvey recognized and as is confirmed elsewhere.^[20] He may have been among the student pianists that Arvey, whose own skill is well documented, recognized as a superior performer. His training in piano and composition was in the European concert music tradition, a background he shared with Still as well as with many other African American musicians of his time. The training in composition he received (after leaving Manual Arts High School and the Wilkins Conservatory) from Charles E. Pemberton, who had been a working musician in Los Angeles since the late 1890s, would have been very much in a conservative nineteenth-century German tradition. Forsythe's

relatively early short piano compositions at William Grant Still Music, his graduation gifts to Arvey, are in the European tradition (characterized by him as French-influenced) and testify to his pianistic ability. Many songs now among the Forsythe papers reflect his conservative training in Pemberton's hands.^[21] However, Forsythe later made arrangements of one or more spirituals "with a jazz flavor," according to the report of his and Arvey's friend Harry Hay, who sang the arrangements on several occasions in Los Angeles. Forsythe lists other now-lost compositions, including an opera and a lengthy symphonic poem. He wrote to Arvey about them,

I have been looking over my long Symphonic Poem, the Opera and a small pile of songs. All done three or four years ago. I THINK MY BEST WORK IS BEHIND ME. So I've another balm. Deaf like Beethoven and Franz, stoop shouldered like Mencken, I do my best stuff early, like Mendelssohn, Poe. (Don't tell me that's the only resemblance with such guys. Ah knows!!!)

But art is Not technique, knowledge, . . . it is inspiration. And as I look at the pages of the Symphonic Poem, a work NOBODY has read and studied but me mahsehf I get broody and sad as the devil. That Spring was gorgeous . . . the months of its composition. Each morning I awakened with music bubbling and trembling in the head . . . could hardly get dressed before dashing for pencil and paper . . . Never will forget the glorious day the climactic section was written . . . and that strange passage where the theme rises, like a phoenix from fire, in the trumpets from a rumbling chaos of polytonal trombones, cellos and contrabassi and fiddles, sul. G portamento.^[22]

Forsythe's impulsiveness seemingly contrasts with his interest in neoclassicism, his general distrust of the modernism of which neoclassicism was a major aspect, and his respect for the training he received at the hands of the German-trained Pemberton. With some of his contemporaries, he formed a club whose sole remnant is a letterhead bearing the heading, "The Iconoclasts: 'Down With Tradition,'" dating from the 1920s.^[23] In the early 1930s he produced a lengthy novel, "Frailest Leaves," which contains a short and highly imaginative lecture on the historical values of counterpoint. His profound ambivalence about modernism is clear from this extract. The lecturer, a gifted but floundering young artist trying his hand at teaching younger students indifferent to both his brilliance and the expressive power of music—transparently Forsythe himself, perceives the ambivalence of modernism's claims to objectivity. A few excerpts:

The perfectly worked contrapuntal exercise was the nearest thing to absolute communism we will ever witness. That is true, but it is at the same time the

more aristocratic of the arts. Everything is part of the whole, yet nothing is subordinated to it. Its parts have all the characteristics of the best among men. They have character, charm, purpose. They must vary their tendencies, yet remain true to their own destiny, they must be strong, yet not inflexible. And most important, and this is where most of us fail, in life as well as in art; the parts conduct themselves with courtesy, respect and regard, each for the other. This is the most stringent note in our art. We admit here no percussive discords, no appoggiaturas, but only prepared discords of suspensions.[ . . . ]

[ . . . ] It is not my purpose to denounce contemporary music, but to encourage you in a fuller understanding of it by drinking deep of these purer, more intellectual fountains. The intellectualism of modern music is more psychopathic than has been generally understood.[ . . . ] Above all, do not regard this as the study of a dead language.^[24]

The unreconciled, conflicting currents in Forsythe's thought are complicated by his anger about the race barrier. He was acutely aware of his distance from his white friends, including Arvey, but did not hesitate to tackle prominent African Americans who did not agree with his opinions, including Clarence Muse, the prominent actor, singer, and composer, then a Hollywood fixture:

So darned mad at a Negro that for the moment I hate all of them. Clarence Muse. The most blankety-blankest idiot the Devil ever tossed upon the poor, long suffering Nig.[ . . . ]

Tomorrow I will be calm and contemptuous again. Today I'm rip snorting, and hating, and furious.[ . . . ] I could whoop for the Ku Klux Klan, if an equally asinine white man hadn't irritated me before C.M. got started.^[25]

On recommendations from both Pemberton and Wallace Thurman, Forsythe was awarded a fellowship to the Juilliard Graduate School in New York City for 1927–1928.^[26] There he studied composition briefly with Rubin Goldmark and theory with another, unidentified teacher. He withdrew from Juilliard on March 18, 1928, before completing a full year of study.^[27] Harold S. Forsythe reports that Forsythe wrote to his mother from New York that he was having trouble with his hearing, something that he seems to have kept from his friends. Whether he was in New York City before the fellowship began and how long he was able to remain in New York City afterward are not known; his mother's letters to him reflect her taking on extra work and making other sacrifices to send him money. The fictional but autobiographical hero of his "Frailest Leaves" describes a brief, disastrous affair with the woman

designated by Goldmark to teach him; one of the few letters from his New York sojourn confirms a brief engagement.^[28] His later letters from New York used as their return address the location of Thurman's Fire commune on 135th Street, suggesting both that he lived or worked there and that he had some association with Harlem Renaissance literary activity. Yet his self-descriptions listing a lengthy series of short-term jobs do not include a connection with the short-lived, flamboyant Fire . Likewise, his claim in the sketch quoted above to have studied with Varèse—Still's teacher—has not been verified and is not repeated in other places.

Forsythe and Still renewed their acquaintance during Still's sojourn in Los Angeles in late 1929 and early 1930, just before "A Study in Contradictions" was written. The implication is very clear that they discussed future projects; perhaps Arvey even participated in some of the discussions about whether Forsythe and/or Still were really more "African" than "Afro-American," and if so, how that quality should be reflected in Still's compositions. The later evidence is that they talked about subjects for operas and that Still acted on some of these discussions. One of Forsythe's proposals that Still did not accept or even acknowledge (so far as is known) was Forsythe's offer to complete the libretto of Roshana, the project Still had begun in collaboration with his wife, Grace Bundy.^[29]

Forsythe had a hand in the sequence of events that brought Still back to Los Angeles permanently in 1934. In his first application to the Guggenheim Foundation for funding (rejected in 1932 but awarded for use in 1934), Still wrote that he planned two operas, one about black Africans set in Africa, the other about African Americans in the United States. He wrote, "The librettist has already completed a portion of the first act, and his work is well done."^[30] From this it is plain that Still had decided on the subjects of his operas and on his collaborator before he applied in 1931 and probably earlier, before he returned to New York in 1930. The first of the two operas was to be The Sorcerer, for which Forsythe produced a one-scene libretto. In 1933, while Still was in New York, he composed a ballet to The Sorcerer, whose scenario resembles the libretto scene and is attributed to Forsythe. Four years later, Still sent the manuscript to Howard Hanson for a possible reading at an American music symposium in Rochester, scheduled for fall 1937. After expressing doubts about its value, Still withdrew it, not even allowing an orchestral reading in a closed rehearsal, then sent his orchestrated

version of his song "Summerland" from Three Visions (for piano) instead.^[31] Still did not destroy this manuscript, which exists in the form of a seventeen-page piano score, but the orchestration is so far unlocated.^[32]

The second opera, on an American subject, was to be Blue Steel . The libretto fleshed out a short story by Carlton Moss.^[33] This is the project that Still chose to work on in Los Angeles. In keeping with the composer's manner of working on opera, Forsythe stayed obligingly close to hand, providing new or changed text as Still worked.^[34] It is likely that at this time (1935) he wrote the essay on Still's ballet, "The Significance of Still's Sahdji, " which appeared in the Hamitic Review, probably in the same April 1935 issue for which he provided the self-description given in full above. Forsythe's essays on Sahdji show that he became deeply involved with the work; in the longer essay he claimed to have suggested that Still rewrite the final dance, something that Still later seems to have done.

There seemed every intention of continuing the collaboration following the completion of Blue Steel .^[35] On May 21, 1935, Still and Forsythe contracted to collaborate on an opera called The Sorcerer and a ballet called Central Avenue .^[36] In the first case, Forsythe was to provide a libretto for a story already "invented" by Still, no doubt an expansion of the earlier sketch/ballet or a movie short. In the second, Forsythe was to complete the scenario, already partly "invented" by Still, for a ballet. There is no evidence that the opera The Sorcerer ever went forward beyond the ballet Still had composed in New York. Central Avenue was composed and, according to some sources, discarded. Much of it resurfaced as the suite for radio orchestra and later ballet, Lenox Avenue, for which Arvey supplied the scenario. Letters from Howard Hanson and Thelma Biracree, who had directed and choreographed performances of Sahdji and La Guiablesse at Eastman, indicate that Still sent them Central Avenue and that Biracree and Hanson were very eager to perform it. Before it could be produced, Still withdrew it in favor of Lenox Avenue, whose scenario Biracree regarded as much less satisfactory for the resources available at Eastman. Lenox Avenue remained unperformed at Eastman, and the mystery of Central/Lenox Avenue remains unresolved.^[37]

On the basis of their common interests in composition, the piano and its literature, and music criticism, Verna Arvey had maintained a longstanding, warm friendship with Forsythe that peaked in the eight or nine

months after Still's arrival. In August 1934 she wrote with unusual eloquence to Carl Van Vechten, a major patron and champion of the Harlem Renaissance, in behalf of Forsythe's literary production:

Aug 6, 1934

My dear Mr. Van Vechten:

. . . For the past ten years, I have known and written to Bruce Forsythe, a young Negro intellectual, writer and composer-friend of Langston Hughes, William Grant Still, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce, etc. His letters to me have been impersonal, yet filled with a most interesting view of the race situation in America today, various musical and literary thoughts which may or may not prove of value, comments on those famous colored people he has known and anecdotes, his own personal history, etc. Because they extend over a long period of time, the later letters are necessarily more mature. All of them are beautifully written.

I have compiled these letters into a book (with Forsythe's permission and approval)—and now I wonder whether you would be interested enough to read it, pass judgment and to suggest a possible outlet for it? For the last few years I have been writing articles and criticism of my own (mostly on music and dance subjects) for various and sundry publications.

If you are interested, may I call on you when I come to New York, or would you prefer that I mail it to you? . . . Sincerely yours, Verna Arvey^[38]

Given this prodding, Forsythe put aside his earlier opinion of Van Vechten (expressed in "A Study in Contradictions") as "a mere surface polisher and wise-cracker" and wrote his own letter describing something of his life and his work as a composer and writer. He revealed his own shyness and vulnerability in the process:

[August 24, 1934]

Mr. Carl Van Vechten

Dear Sir:

Letters of this sort, which assume an enormous amount of importance to the writer, are very difficult to write. But after having postponed the writing of this one for several years I have at last reached a sort of serenity and perspective; and from this little perch I do not feel so much of my former fear of thus addressing you.[ . . . ]

It is simply that having never mailed a book or a piece of music to a publisher; having never really contacted a first-rate critic, and having, at 26, lived a sufficiently peculiar life devoted to such pastimes as dish washing on a diner, office boying, elevator operating, night watchmaning, janiting, soda jerking, shipping clerking, private secretarying, ditch-digging, editing a tiny magazine, studying harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, composition, with Goldmark among others, piano pounding in sweet houses, ditto on a steamer, ditto in jazz bands, ditto in vaudeville, book reading, and having

found time during this to compose with a minimum of exhibitionism a symphonic poem, an opera, innumerable smaller stuffs, and having loved and studied the [European art] Song. Hallelujah to Wolf, Franz, Debussy, van Dieren and composed three volumes of it . . . as well as about fourteen literary slices, many of which have been burned by this hand. . . . At last comes the urge to a more practical view of things, and a genuine view of what I have done. Since it is an axiom about starting at the highest perch I approach you in this manner. . . .

In all seriousness now, I have now a book. . . . In some respects a biography of my dear friend William Grant Still, that most brilliant (Musically) of all Negro musicians. This is not a conventional biography, but one told through a figure of personal and ethnic experience. The book not only places an entirely fresh evaluation of the "Spiritual" but takes a somewhat strange view of Jazz. At the same time it serves to throw into relief the work of a man known by few (if any). He has composed beautiful music . . . music of a far deeper spiritual and mental significance than any other Negro composer ever heard of. I am a musician. I compose. I am a Negro composer. Yet I approached this book with a beating heart for at last a composer of my blood spoke with something other than bilgewater spiritual derivations or sloppy sentimentality.[ . . . ]But Still's music is rooted in the Dark-heart. How deeply I show in the book.[ . . . ]

Very sincerely yours, Bruce Forsythe^[39]

Within a few days, he wrote to Jean Toomer, expressing his great admiration ("you are not so much the finest but the only writer partaking of the Blood, in this country") for Toomer's novel Cane (1923) and its hero, Kabnis, and asking permission to quote from it in his own work.^[40]

Forsythe busied himself with revision of the material he had agreed to send to Van Vechten, while Arvey prepared for her lecture-recital at the New School in early December and the warm-up performance in Los Angeles a month earlier. Perhaps it was the growing tension as her travel date drew nearer that led to the warmth of his letter to her, following her Los Angeles recital:

And since you are going away I do want to step outside everything, Verna. And say a final word. You may imagine perhaps, that to have known one person for many years, and to value them highly, and to almost live looking forward to their brief visits, and then when a stranger comes to town, to have that old friend suddenly cease . . . bingo! Do you realize you haven't set foot in my house since Bill came to L.A. Do you wonder that this hurt me, and caused me to say and do rude things. For I say for the final time; I have no utilitarian bone in my body. I love a few people very strongly and

for themselves alone. And am acutely sensitive where they are concerned. But tho it now is a matter of no importance, I still think as highly of Verna as ever since M.A.H.S. and suppose I always will in years to come when the silly causes of my foolish losing of your friendship have vanished, and you move in an entirely different group.^[41]

Upon receiving a postcard reporting on her call on Van Vechten, Forsythe sent off not one manuscript but three, and enclosed a small snapshot of himself for good measure:

Dec 13, 1934

Dear Mr. Van Vechten:

[ . . . ]This novel, biography and romance are dear for several reasons, (none literary). They were largely composed in a fine old house in San Gabriel where I was attended to by my sister-in-law Irene, so lovely a person and so rare. I had no job then; and had only to write all day and drink and talk all night. At that time I had no thought of publication or of large minds. I wrote for the sheer love of it and because Irene wanted me to. There is no page in "Rising Sun" or "Maron-Mutra" that has not been discussed and rewritten, re-written and discussed by us for days on end. It was Verna A., however, who encouraged and insisted upon the revision of the novel when I disgustedly almost gave it up. . . . As in my first note to you I tried hard to explain my position and the peculiar way such colleagues as Wallace [Thurman] have always looked at me. I think that Still and I are a little more Negro than they are, a little more African . I do not remember ever showing anything to Langston Hughes who has had highballs with me several times. . . .

. . . Five feet eight, very thin, with an "agnostic stoop" (Moore?) Pale yellow face, . . . gray eyes, large mouth and heavy mustache (now). Much stronger than look. Played quarterback as kid and was handy with boxing gloves. Very shy at times and very pugnacious at others. Given to silence among strangers and wild monologues among friends. Like beer, port and scotch, and since 1928 have repudiated gaudy wearing and use only black from head to foot [ . . . ]

I praise heaven that my work on Still's opera is largely if not completely finished. . . .

Gratefully, Bruce Forsythe^[42]

Van Vechten's answer, unlocated, stunned him to the point of incoherence:

Jan 15, 1935

I come just this once again with much humility, for I thank you deeply for your courtesy. And yet although I have boasted that I could take it, the air

is very bleak from the hint of doom in your letter. A year or two ago it would have thrilled . . . or even a year ago, for then I felt bursting with books and music, and the suggestion that these things are yet thin, and Future yawned brighter would have been terribly encouraging. But now . . . Many more lonely years ahead, and those years no doubt filled with the errors and foolishness of the past ones. This letter shouldn't be written of course, for it is just after reading yours, but I think a man who fears his emotions, or better, fears his fear is in some ways a coward, and of all virtues that is the least.[ . . . ]

Sincerely yours, Bruce Forsythe

P.S. If it were possible to explain the real reason for this sudden passion, after years of indifference to opinion and publication, I'm sure you would agree that it is not all mere ego and self-seeking.^[43]

Van Vechten must have queried Arvey after receiving this letter, for she reported back to him:

2/5/35

When I returned, Harold seemed to be as he was, and showed me your letter. Strangely enough, and unlike the warlike old Harold, he seemed very meek and was constantly studying your suggestions to see where he could use them and thus help himself. More, he was very grateful to you for your frankness. He is going to revise "Frailest Leaves" now, according to your suggestions. In other words, (though this is small consolation for all the time and trouble you took in reading the mss., seeing me and writing to us) I think you have done Harold a far greater service by doing exactly what you did than if you had followed out your first idea, and, as a matter of fact, I think perhaps that is what I hoped for all along. Because a little personal triumph is relatively unimportant when it comes to making finer human beings of people! In the long run, I am sure Harold will profit more.^[44]

Although Arvey tried to put a good face on it, Forsythe must have been devastated by what he saw as his failure, especially in combination with the loss of Arvey's friendship after Still's arrival in Los Angeles. Even without the sexual aspects of this triangle, Arvey had supplied him with a one-person audience and with knowledgeable encouragement for his creative work; now she focused these attentions on Still and away from him. We cannot know more ramifications than this unless Still's diaries, missing for 1931–1937, the period of his collaboration with Forsythe, are recovered, and perhaps more of Forsythe's materials. Arvey's annual datebooks are likewise lost, subsumed into five-year summaries that do not give sufficient information to make things clearer. The loss of Forsythe's letters to her, except for the half dozen from late 1933 and

early 1934 (just before Still's arrival) that are quoted here, becomes even more poignant in this circumstance.

Still family tradition has it that Forsythe was unable to live up to his side of the contracts for The Sorcerer and Central Avenue because of his alcoholism and that Still's piano piece, "Quit Dat Fool'nish," was initially intended as a bit of unsolicited advice for Forsythe.^[45] We know now that the unusual contracts to supply librettos were somehow tied to the literary disaster that Arvey precipitated through her overture to Van Vechten as well as, perhaps, to the alcoholism. Arvey never lost her anger at what she perceived as Forsythe's self-destruction, and perhaps her guilt at having had a role in precipitating it. Later, in one of her "Scribblings," she acknowledged his early deafness (while he was studying with Pemberton, before he went to New York in 1927) and her belief that he had tuberculosis. In private, she summed him up this way:

HBF was a marvelous, strange character. He wrote wonderful letters. I admired them and compiled them into a book, only to discover afterward that he was a drunkard, that he lied about me, that he didn't like the book merely because I had arranged it Journalistically. He had whitewashed himself in his letters to make me know him as he wanted me to! One of the finest things in his life was his love for Irene, but even she grew disgusted after a time.^[46]

Irene Forsythe, the sister-in-law who had encouraged him to write and allowed him to live in her comfortable house in San Gabriel, died in 1938, another severe blow. One imagines Forsythe destroying his manuscripts as he retreated noisily from his literary and creative friendships into the grinding poverty that was his family's lot.^[47] Would he have continued as a musician? Although his name does not show up in the directories of Local 47, or in the surviving directories of Local 767, the segregated African American local that was abolished only in 1953,^[48] Forsythe had once found employment as pianist on Prohibition era gambling ships anchored outside the three-mile limit, where they were free to sell alcoholic beverages.

The denouement to Forsythe's story told by his son is different: Forsythe, the loser in a classic triangle, broke with Still over Arvey.^[49] He did not, and could not, continue his career as a musician. His deafness, apparently a congenital condition shared with other family members, advanced inexorably to the point that by 1940 he sought and received retraining from the county as a horticulturalist. Thereafter he learned the

botanical names for thousands of plant species and worked steadily, six days a week, at the Enchanted Way Nursery at La Tijera and Slauson. On the seventh day, he often got drunk. In 1945 he married the former Sara Turner, a onetime Cotton Club showgirl. Their two sons were born in 1947 and 1955. By 1950 the piano had disappeared, Forsythe being too deaf to play it. The family, which included Turner's daughter, lived in the cramped cottage Forsythe had first rented as a bachelor when he returned from New York. In the 1960s his health deteriorated further; the family subsisted on the earnings of the two older children. He died in 1976, within a few days of Paul Robeson, to whom he had a family connection. He is remembered by his son as an unhappy man, often depressed.

When he wrote to Van Vechten, Forsythe can hardly have imagined how thoroughly he would find himself "retreating to the shadows whence [he] came." Even in this rediscovery of his work, his initial importance lies in the manner in which his shadow throws the life of his role model, friend, and rival into a richer perspective.

The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo

He who develops his God-given gifts with [a] view to aiding humanity, manifests truth.
Afro-American Symphony (1930)

Most of this volume deals with the cultural, biographical, and aesthetic issues that surrounded Still's career. I have chosen to discuss only one work in any detail, the Afro-American Symphony, emphasizing specifically its third movement, the Scherzo, whose score is now included in the latest edition of a widely used anthology.^[1] The completion of the Afro-American Symphony in 1930 marks the crowning achievement of Still's self-consciously "racial" period. As Still's best-known work, it is the one most readily available on records, the one most likely to be heard on classical music stations, and the one that has drawn critical examination in any detail from more than one writer.^[2] Thus it is and has been the single most influential expression of his aesthetic of racial fusion. In it, he brought one genre, the symphony, to another, the blues, and transformed both in the process.^[3] The extreme polarization of these two genres in 1930—by musical language, medium of performance, presence or absence of text, social class, race, audience, implicit moral value, even, arguably, gender—reflects the societal polarizations that Still challenged in this symphony. Newly available sketch materials and notes on the symphony, along with Still's long-available diaries and other published writings, make it possible to reconsider the whole symphony and the Scherzo's pivotal role in it. The quotation of George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" and speculation on Still's reasons for citing it make the Scherzo all the more attractive as the locus for a discussion that moves in a concrete way toward an increased understanding of the cultural

interactions that pervade Still's boundary-blurring enterprise. As one follows the composer in his choice of materials and his handling of them, one may detect the voice of the satirist in the Gershwin quotation, or perhaps the fabled West African trickster figure who practiced irony or misdirection to make his point. One may also perceive the cold and merciless logic on which Still, along with other modernists of his time, depended.^[4] All three are arguably present in the Scherzo, although only the third of these attitudes is suggested in his several written descriptions of the work, three of them included in the Sources section of this book.

One analytical study, written four decades after the symphony, provides musical detail but no overview.^[5] Four more recent discussions deal significantly with the symphony's cultural and historical context. In "'New Music' and the 'New Negro,'" Carol J. Oja insists on the work's double life: "Alongside its preeminent position among black concert works of the early twentieth century, the Afro-American Symphony belongs with a group of pivotal pieces by white composers written in 1930 and 1931, especially Aaron Copland's Piano Variations, Ruth Crawford's String Quartet, and Edgard Varèse's Ionisation . . . . Still led a dual existence, part of which involved treading the same path as young white concert composers of his day and part of which kept him in step with his own people." She points out that his "ideological link" with the white modernists was "fraught with powerful tensions" and that it became "increasingly more tenuous" as he pursued his career as a concert composer. She discusses two concert works (Levee Land and Darker America ) that preceded the Afro-American Symphony as formal experiments leading to various "imaginative" solutions to "the conflict between a more dissonant—or 'ultramodern'—musical style and an identifiably black one." She shows that Levee Land is composed on two planes; one with "conventional blues-derived melodies and harmonies" and another with "chromatic-third relationships that play off a basic trait of the blues." Darker America, however, is sectional, moving between blues-derived harmonies and moments of "intense chromaticism." The contrasting affects are combined in the symphony's finale. Oja concludes that "in the Afro-American Symphony, conventional, blues-derived harmonic practices prevail" and that, overall, "no other composer, either black or white, claimed quite the same turf [as Still]."^[6]

Rae Linda Brown takes up the Afro-American as one of three symphonies dating from the early 1930s by three different African American composers. She says, "Although Still was not a conscious participant in the Negro renaissance, his music speaks of the essence of the New

Figure 4.
One-page outline of the  Afro-American Symphony , "Rashana" sketchbook. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

Negro." She points out that the primary theme of the first movement of the Afro-American Symphony is accompanied by a "typical blues progression" in a standard twelve-bar blues pattern and that the second movement is built on a related theme in a spiritual style. The third movement's "syncopated cross rhythms [are] clearly rooted in Afro-American dance."^[7] Orin Moe's contribution is to begin exploring the nature of the "tension" in the symphony between its "black musical characteristics and those from the Euro-American tradition." His discussion of the symphony amplifies those of Brown and Oja because of his observation that "the black materials fundamentally alter the inherited shape of the symphony" and that "Still juggles . . . with considerable success" the confrontation he has created between the historical symphonic structure and "the stanzaic variation structure of the blues." Oja speaks of the Afro-American Symphony 's aesthetic conservatism from the perspective of contemporary white modernism. Moe remarks further that its "surface conservatism" has prevented it from being seriously considered by critics and prompted its exclusion from surveys of twentieth-century music.^[8] Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., develops Moe's ideas and explores the symphony in terms of recent black cultural criticism. He points out that Still's thematic treatment may be heard as employing the practices of African-derived call-and-response and "signifying" as well as European compositional techniques. He argues that Still participated in three contemporary movements, adding nationalism to the avant-garde and the Harlem Renaissance in which the others place him. Floyd correctly identifies Still's avant-garde style as neoclassical. "After rejecting the avant-garde, Still eventually triumphed in the nationalist and Harlem Renaissance realism with the Afro-American Symphony, a work that blended African-American and European elements more successfully, in my opinion, than those of any other composer of the period."^[9]

In hindsight, late 1930 was the right moment for Still to attempt his first symphony.^[10] He had learned something new, it seems, with each of the new works of the previous fifteen years. Still's earliest-known multi-movement work for orchestra is an early American Suite recently located in the archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was composed no later than early 1916. Not until that summer, when he first worked for W. C. Handy, was Still immersed in African American popular music and converted to its advocacy; at that point he apparently also achieved basic technical competence as an arranger.^[11] Given Still's later interests, this suite is remarkable for its lack of reference to African

American popular music making. Its Native American reference ("Indian Love Song") hints of the turn-of-the-century Indianist movement, widespread among American composers; this may be suggestive of MacDowell or even of Dvorak^[*] , whose sojourn in the United States in the 1890s acted as a catalyst for the nationalist movement in American music. These are the other known multimovement instrumental works that preceded the Afro-American Symphony, with their dates of composition:

American Suite (1916 or earlier)

Three Negro Songs (1921) (orchestral despite its title)

From the Land of Dreams (1924) (includes three voices used "instrumentally")^[12]

From the Journal of a Wanderer (1925)

From the Black Belt (1925)

Log Cabin Ballads (1926)

Africa (1928–1930)

Like the single-movement Darker America (1924; discussed at length by Harold Bruce Forsythe elsewhere in this volume), all of these works after the American Suite used African American musical materials, and all received performances, with generally increasing success. (Three Negro Songs was probably performed for an African American audience in Brooklyn; the others were heard by generally white audiences in New York or elsewhere. From the Land of Dreams, believed lost for decades, is discussed briefly in the introduction.)

On the basis of this achievement and of a generally supportive critical response, couched in stereotyped language though it was, Still's confidence in his skill as a composer was at a high point. His diary gives not only a time frame for the composition of the Afro-America Symphony but also a sense of Still's state of mind, his manner of working, and his other activities. When he began it, he had just returned from Rochester, New York, where he heard the first stunning performance of Africa with full orchestra on October 24, 1930. His diary entry reports the performance: "God sent me success today. Africa was a sensation."^[13] On the same trip, Still conferred with Harry Barnhart, a well-known choral conductor then at Rochester, about his ballet Sahdji, completed three months earlier and scheduled for its premiere in Rochester the following spring.^[14] His yearlong contract with Paul Whiteman had expired four months earlier, and Whiteman was not in a financial position to re-

hire him. Although he had no steady job, a well-received new orchestration for the "Deep River Hour" radio show a few weeks earlier (October 9) may have encouraged him in his search for regular work and suggested that the window of opportunity to work on another large-scale composition might not last too long.^[15] As we shall see, the opening of Gershwin's show Girl Crazy on October 14 may also have triggered a sense of urgency about this long-contemplated project.

In spite of all this, the diary shows that Still started work on his new symphony in a mood of discouragement. Both the difficulty of finding regular work as an arranger and domestic problems outweighed the satisfactions of his compositional achievements, even the recent triumph of Africa . These are the entries that record his work on the symphony, complete for the days in which he reports such work:

Oct. 30. Start working on Afro-American Symphony. Things look dark. I pray for strength that I may do just as God would have me. Would that I never did anything to displease him. I believe that he will straighten out conditions. I must not lose faith. I must not complain.

Nov. 5. Raining. Gloomy. Thanks to God I received some splendid ideas for the Afro-American Symphony last night.

Nov. 20. Rehearsal. My arrangement did not sound well. But who knows how it will sound on the air [;] tonight tells the tale. God's will be done.

Completed sketch of Afro-American Symphony's first movement. May God grant it succeeds.

Nov. 28. Praise God. Well along in 3rd movement of Symphony. Call from Willard Robison.^[16]

Dance of Wilberforce Univ. Club.^[17]

Dec. 2. Cold today. Worked on Symphony. Thank God for the inspiration He gives me. I am so unworthy. To think that God in His majesty would take thought of such as me! Let me seek to draw closer to Him. Let my greatest desire be that of doing His will in all things.

Dec. 5. Was able to accomplish much today in scoring of "Afro-American Symphony."

Dec. 6. Completed scoring 3rd Movement of Afro-American Symphony today.

Dec. 26. Nothing of unusual interest. Symphony progressing rapidly.^[18]

As several of these and other entries suggest, Still was heavily involved in seeking paying work as the symphony progressed. Given that distrac-

tion, the speed with which he worked on the new symphony is even more impressive. In a letter to Irving Schwerké dated January 9, 1931, Still remarked the completion of the entire project shortly after New Year's, about ten weeks after he had begun.^[19] (Other remarks in that letter—his most forthright discussion of the racial obstacles he faced, and his only known mention of leaving the United States as a serious possibility—reinforce the notion that this was a period of great personal stress.)

Two early notebooks in Still's hand at William Grant Still Music give a great deal more information concerning the creation of the symphony than has previously been available. I will describe them here and return to them as needed later in this chapter. The first, its front cover decorated with cigar bands, is actually a theme book. It is labeled on the cover "Still 1924," one of the years when Still was studying with Varèse. Its thirty-eight unpaged leaves contain 444 numbered themes, many of them labeled with one-word "affect" suggestions (e.g., "voodoo," "lament," "spiritual"). The first forty-three appear in a consistent fair hand, in ink, seemingly copied all at once from an earlier source. Thereafter the themes are written in a less consistent script and sometimes in pencil; these are most often in the hand that Still used for the fragmentary sketches that fill blank pages and margins in many drafts and fair copies of his own scores. Some earlier themes (as late as #178) are marked "good" or "better" in Still's hand. Sketches having to do with the uncompleted opera from the late 1920s, "Rasbana," fill much blank space to the right of the shorter themes. That Still returned to this theme book for some time after it was begun in 1924 is evident, for the composer took themes from it for many works of the late 1920s and early 1930s (such as Africa and Blue Steel ); one was used as late as 1938 or 1939, when he was working on the opera Troubled Island . Several themes used in the Afro-American Symphony (only one of them so labeled) are among them. Several that suggest Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" raise the old question about the ultimate source of Gershwin's melody, to be discussed below. In the last few pages are sketches of other works either destroyed or not completed. There are unlabeled, partially harmonized sketches on three staves, a numbered group of "chords," a verbal outline of "Ode to the American Negro: For the Oppressed" (very likely a program sketch for Darker America, composed in 1924), a

pasted-in, typed sketch for the ballet La Guiablesse (dated 1927 in the thematic catalog), and a page too damaged to read labeled "Material for From the Black Belt " (dated 1926 in the composer's thematic catalog). "From the Land of Blues," labeled a "melodic outline" and filling about a half-page, is one item to which I will return. While it is likely that Still began to use the theme book during his study with Varèse, it is not at all clear when he stopped using it as a place to notate his melodic ideas. Nineteen twenty-seven, the last year for a work known and completed that is referred to by name, may be a reasonable cutoff date.

The other notebook bears the label "Material for Rashana" on the cover and is stamped "DEC 1926" on the inside.^[20] It is somewhat shorter than the 1924 theme book. After a sketch of Africa, it is paginated in Roman numerals by the composer. A series of numbered themes, now classified by affect (e.g., "Passionate Themes"), some with references to numbered themes in the 1924 theme book, follow. These seem to have been organized with a view toward the aborted opera. Some notes on orchestration suggest that this book, too, was started during Still's study with Varèse. Most of this book was left blank at that time. Still returned to it to sketch out the Afro-American Symphony in late October or early November 1930, as noted in the diary. Starting approximately in the middle of the book, he began with a one-page outline of the symphony (see fig. 4), then an outline of the first movement, from which he methodically began to compose, writing out a series of "treatments" of his thematic material for each movement. The first two movements occupy the last part of the book; then Still returned to his starting point and worked steadily forward as he composed the last two movements. From the diary entries cited above, these sketches can be dated quite accurately as between October 30 and early December, when the diary shows him occupied with scoring the work. The "Rashana" sketchbook includes Still's draft foreword to the symphony (see fig. 5):

I harbor no delusions as to the triviality of Blues, the secular folk music of the American Negro, despite their lowly origin and the homely sentiment of their texts. The pathos of their melodic content bespeaks the anguish of human hearts and belies the banality of their lyrics. What is more, they, unlike many Spirituals, do not exhibit the influence of Caucasian music. The Afro-American Symphony, as its title implies, is representative of the American Negro. In it I have placed stress on a motif in Blues idiom. It is employed originally as the principal theme of the first movement. It appears also in various forms in the succeeding movements, where I have sought to present it in a characteristic (style) manner.

Greatly I acknowledge and humbly I thank God, the source of my inspiration.

Wm. Still^[21]

Both Still and (later) Arvey provided a series of typed, undated descriptions and program notes for the work, one of them in the Arvey monograph later in this volume, that address his intentions in composing the symphony.^[22] One of these begins, "The 'Afro-American Symphony' is based on an original theme in the 'Blues' idiom, employed as the principal theme of the first movement, and reappearing in different forms in the course of the composition." After a sizable quotation from the draft foreword (see above), these continue:

I seek in the 'Afro-American Symphony' to portray not the higher type of colored American, but the sons of the soil, who still retain so many of the traits peculiar to their African forebears; who have not responded completely to the transforming effect of progress. Therefore, the employment of a decidedly characteristic idiom is not only logical but also necessary. . . . In a general sense, one may apply to the movements the following titles:

1. Longing

2. Sorrow

3. Humor (expressed through religious fervor)

4. Aspiration.

When judged by the laws of musical form the A.A.S. is somewhat irregular in its form.^[23]

Example 2 shows Still's blues theme as it appears in the "Rashana" sketchbook and as it is used at the opening of the first movement in the finished score, both as the introductory figure and as the principal theme. The introductory figure, played by the English horn without accompaniment and in an improvisatory style, suggests the early folk blues that became the basis for the twelve-bar "classic" blues of the 1920s. Still's main theme, as many commentators have noted, is a "classic" blues, and is harmonized as such. Frequently varied in the first two movements, it is radically transformed in the third, as I will show.

At the end of the sketches in the "Rashana" notebook is the poetry Still copied out from the work of the turn-of-the-century dialect poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), one excerpt for each of the four movements. Still did not identify the excerpts by title in the sketchbook or in either edition of the published score. Like many a nineteenth-century tone poet and even some of his modernist contemporaries who wanted

Figure 5.
Still's draft foreword for the Afro-American Symphony, "Rashana" sketchbook.
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.
From top to bottom the sketches are Still, Donald Vorhees, Paul Whiteman, Still,
and the Li'l Scamps (popular cartoon characters of the day).

Example 2.
Still's blues theme as it appears (a) in the initial outline of the
symphony ("Rashana" sketchbook) "depicting pathos and power"; (b) in the
sketchbook under "Form of 1st Movement," assigned to the oboe; (c) in the
completed score as a free, unaccompanied English horn solo at the opening of
the first movement; and (d) in the completed score as the primary theme in
the first movement, a twelve-bar "classic" blues played by the solo trumpet.
(Compare with the themes in "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké.")
Courtesy William Grant Still Music. Used by permission.

their music to stand on its own, he later downplayed the significance of these quotations. Nevertheless, the excerpts were carefully selected from four different poems, and they appear in both published versions of the score. In fact, they serve as a guide to Still's intentions in this symphony. Although the single words he chose to characterize the affects of three of the four movements seem to reflect the meaning of the poetry directly, the couplet and the affect word he chose ("Humor") for the Scherzo movement have a far richer meaning than an audience unfamiliar with Dunbar's poetry (as white concert audiences would generally have been) might have supposed.

Consider, then, all four of the excerpts Still selected for epigraphs in

the context of longer quotations from Dunbar's poems. The poems used as epigraphs for the first two movements refer to the dreams and sorrows of the former slaves. The opening stanza of "Twell de Night Is Pas'," prefacing the opening movement with its blues theme, reads:

All de night long twell de moon goes down,
Lovin' I set at huh feet,
Den fu' de long jou'ney back f'om de town,
Ha'd, but de dreams mek it sweet.

Still quotes the close:

"All my life long twell de night has pas'
Let de wo'k come ez it will,
So dat I fin' you, my honey, at last,
Somewhaih des ovah de hill."

The first stanza of "W'en I Gits Home" is attached to the slow movement, with its spiritual-like melody:

It's moughty tiahsome layin' 'roun'
Dis sorrer-laden erfly groun',
An' oftentimes I thinks, thinks I,
'T would be a sweet t'ing des to die,
An go 'long home.

The final movement, with its hymnlike, modal opening hardly changed from the initial one-page outline in figure 5 and its lively finale, was first assigned the final stanza from Dunbar's "Ode to Ethiopia":

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's Glory.

Both printed editions of the score bear this rather better known stanza from the same poem:

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul,
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky,
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.

The only quotation not in dialect, either stanza is appropriate to the apotheosis of the finale that follows the final transformation of the blues theme in the Scherzo.

For the Scherzo movement, the situation is more complicated. The poem, "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," from which the quoted couplet is drawn, signals that the movement is about much more than "humor (expressed through religious fervor)." It plays on the meaning of the word "scherzo" as a joke, revealing Still in the role of Trickster. The whole of Dunbar's poem shows how effectively Still used the "minstrel mask" to reflect his sense of racial doubleness. However trivial the lines quoted, the poem is in fact about Emancipation and citizenship, matters not at all trivial, thus pointing to the Scherzo as the crux of the symphony. Here are some longer excerpts from the poem; the quotation used by Still appears in italics.

We is gathahed hyeah, my brothahs,
In dis howlin' wildaness,
Fu' to speak some words of comfo't
To each othah in distress.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So you see de Lawd's intention,
Evah sence de worl' began,
Was dat His almighty freedom
Should belong to evah man,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But when Moses wif his powah
Comes an' sets us chillun free,
We will praise de gracious Mastah
Dat has gin us liberty;
An' we'll shout ouah halleluyahs,
On dat mighty reck'nin' day,
When we'se reco'nised ez citiz'—

Hun un! Chillun, let us pray!^[24]

This "Ante-Bellum Sermon" is delivered in the voice of a black preacher, himself a slave. As the sermon proceeds, the biblical references allude more and more pointedly to his and his listeners' intolerable situation. Asserting that "de Lawd will sen' some Moses / Fu' to set his chillun free," he cautions "I'm still a-preachin' ancient, I ain't talkin' 'bout today," and admonishes his listeners "Now don't run an' tell yo' mastahs / Dat I's preachin' discontent." He further reminds them "Dat I'm talkin'

'bout ouah freedom / In a Bibleistic way." At the climax of the poem, which includes the couplet Still uses as his epigraph, the full contemporary application of the sermon comes out, only to be stopped in mid-word—"citizens"—one imagines by fear of being overheard.

The "Rashana" sketchbook contains Still's working plan for the entire symphony (see fig. 5). His original plan calls for a key scheme from movement to movement of A-flat to F to A-flat and to G-flat for the fourth movement, which would presumably have finished either in A-flat or in F minor. In fact he followed this plan until the final movement:

Movement 1 ("Longing"): A-flat major tonal center. The blues theme introduces modal chromatic alterations. An excursion to G major in a slower section provides a contrast in tempo that elaborates on the blues theme but is not confrontational, as formulaic nineteenth-century prescriptions for first movements of symphonies often require.

Movement 2 ("Sorrow"): F major tonal center, with many chromatic alterations in keeping with the blues theme.

Movement 3 ("Humor"): A-flat major tonal center, moving toward and mixing with A-flat Dorian.

Movement 4 ("Aspiration"): F minor tonal center. The movement begins with a lengthy slow section that establishes E major from an unlikely modal beginning on C-sharp minor before moving triumphantly to its jubilant ending in F minor.

In the Afro-American Symphony, Still uses simultaneous contrasting stylistic levels as well as alternation and blending of contrasting European- and African-derived styles, refined from his earlier experiments (described above by Oja) in Levee Land and Darker America . The "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois permeates the work.^[25]

To represent the European-derived style, Still chooses not the chromatic harmony of the modernists but a system of very clear if somewhat irregularly used key relationships. This choice is a technical reflection of his often-mentioned departure from the ultramodernist aesthetic of his teacher Varèse and others, made partly in reaction to his discovery (starting with From the Land of Dreams ) that audiences could not recognize his fusion practice if they were occupied with puzzling over ele-

ments: of European-derived modernist expressiveness. It also provides a framework in which Still can portray both his nominal subject—the "old" post-Civil War Negro (rather than the "New" one of the Harlem Renaissance)—and his underlying aesthetic purpose—to demonstrate through his music a "great truth," the profound and continuing influences and borrowings between two parallel but racially divided cultures.

Still uses the major-minor system to supply a modal framework rather than a rigidly functional harmonic one. He uses the major scale to represent the Euro-American culture, while the Dorian minor, built on the same tonic but using the minor third and the lowered seventh degree, serves for the African-derived blues scale. Such chromaticism and harmonic tension as arises comes most commonly from the interaction between the major and minor thirds (and less often the sevenths) that result from the simultaneous use of these scales. This interaction is clearest in the Scherzo, where A-flat major and its parallel Dorian are superimposed on each other; I will discuss it further below. This is of more than technical interest because it reverses the standard European symphonic practice, involving the progression from minor to major.^[26] In the course of all four movements, Still's symphony moves from A-flat major to its relative minor on F, something of a musical pun on the major-minor relationship of his third movement. The modal usages and the play on motion from major to minor are technical realizations of Still's purpose as he stated it in his draft foreword—to use the idiom of the blues specifically because "it does not exhibit the influence of Caucasian music."

The dominant-to-tonic (V-I) relationship, which permeates the European tradition as a way to define sections and set up rhetorical confrontations, is downplayed in Still's scheme, though it is not entirely absent. (For example, a dominant pedalpoint introduces both movements 1 and 3, and there is a contrasting section on the dominant key in the final F minor section of the last movement.) Leading tones and perfect authentic progressions (i.e., affirmations of dominant-to-tonic harmony) are relatively rare as elements of the work's macro-structure. They are abundant, however, within small melodic units, especially in the Scherzo. In the more "African" second movement with its strong blues coloring, the melodic and harmonic materials are both more chromatic and less functional, evading a commitment to a Western drive-to-cadence. The absence of formal authentic cadences and the avoidance of even a suggestion of modulation in the slow, spacious opening of the final movement create a strongly modal sense, leaving the listener with a certain

ambiguity about the tonic. (See fig. 4, the theme associated with movement 4.) In this movement, the slow section appears three times, each time followed by a contrasting section on F minor, the movement's destination and the overall tonal center of the symphony. The climactic final Allegro is remarkable not only for the absence of any dominant-to-tonic progression but also for the virtually complete absence of the leading tone, in this case, E natural. The earlier slow, modal sections centering on E (as a tonic) literally preempt that note from its leading-tone function, so essential for the traditional nineteenth-century Western sense of closure. In the coda, the bass line moves from F up a minor sixth to D-flat, avoiding the customary European move from V to I to the very end while at the same time providing (along with the English horn solo in the first movement) a subtle homage to the Dvorak^[*] of the New World Symphony .^[27]

Table 1 is a diagram of the Scherzo; example 3 shows its themes. As we saw from the poetry that Still chose as an epigraph for this movement, the Scherzo's "humor" is weighted with meaning; it supports the high seriousness of Still's privately stated comment to Forsythe about "presenting a great truth" through this symphony.^[28] This "Hallelujah" is no mere celebration of innocents mimicking their own "primitive" religion, as Still had initially intended and white audiences might have been led to assume. It wears the minstrel mask and bears the weight of the human comedy as fully as any other moment in the symphony, and perhaps in Still's entire output. No one can doubt that the poem's narrator intends the biblical assurances of freedom for Moses' people to apply to his own people as well. The meaning of the scherzo/joke is thus doubly played. The "clever fox trot" (as one hapless critic described the Scherzo)^[29] that began with a lighthearted minstrel tune (theme 1A) not only gains depth from its exposure to a more authentic African American influence, it is transformed by the declaration in theme 2A to imply a progression from superficial white minstrel representation to a statement of aesthetic and political emancipation.

Changes of tonal center are entirely missing from the Scherzo in Still's realization, a highly unusual procedure for any movement that pretends to be the product of the European tradition, and the only movement in this symphony for which this is true. This absence heightens the importance of the motion from major to Dorian minor that takes place

Table 1.
Afro-American Symphony
Form of the Scherzo

Example 3.
Themes from the Scherzo. Theme 1A, "Hallelujah!" is given as it appears the first and
last times. Three forms of theme 2A and two forms of theme 2B are given. 
Used by permission.

without any change of tonal center. (A brief barbershop passage in measures 51–53 is the one moment when there is any doubt at all about the key center.) Still outlined the Scherzo in multiple sections identified by their themes. The principal theme, labeled 1A, is transformed in the course of the movement from a straightforward, lively statement in the

major mode to a richer and more exuberant mix of major and minor. Theme 1B, which usually follows 1A, mixes the two modes from the start.

These two themes (especially 1A, with its tenor banjo afterbeats) carry the "minstrel show" affect. Theme 2A, orchestrated for trombones and other low-pitched instruments, contrasts sharply with themes 1A and 1B in its driving, fanfarelike affect, its off-beat accents, and its irregular length, different in each of its three statements. So different is the affect of 2A that it seems to appear on an expressive plane separate from the other themes in the movement. Appearing shortly before the midpoint of the movement, it provides a strong contrast to 1A, the "Hallelujah!" that Still intended in his initial description of this movement as portraying a "janny sect," the "old-time" African American religion in which motion is an essential part of worship.^[30] This theme, unequivocally in the Dorian (minor) mode, depends entirely on melodic action for its cadences. This interrupting, "Emancipation" theme (my characterization) is derived from the most clearly African-derived idea in the symphony, the haunting English horn solo that opens the first movement. (See examples 2c and 3 above.) Theme 2B, "Emancipation," is the one theme that is stated first on the tonic, then a fifth higher, on the dominant, and finally on the tonic, but its appearance on the dominant does not change the tonal center of the movement even temporarily. With its repeated high notes and emphasis on the descending fifth, theme 2A presents a radical transformation of the "classic" blues statement of the first two movements, a transformation that logically must accompany the disappearance of the minstrel mask.

The stanzalike "treatments" of themes that lead to the sectional contrasts-with-continuity characteristic of the work's individual movements are particularly clear in the third movement. The constantly changing statements, especially of themes 1A and 2A (see ex. 3 above) are reminiscent of both older New Orleans improvisatory practice associated with the beginnings of jazz and very long-standing European-derived variation practice.^[31] Figure 6 shows a series of such treatments in the sketchbook, and figure 7 is the beginning of Still's melodic outline for the movement, showing varied treatments of theme 1A. In his scheme, the "treatments" involve variations in instrumentation and accompaniment figures as well as small melodic decorations and changes.

The sectionality of this movement is strongly rooted in African-derived practice as well as in the theatricality of the minstrel show; its key structure is likewise, as Still said of the entire symphony, "somewhat irregular in form." Thus it is awkward to describe the Scherzo in Euro-

Figure 6.
Melodic "treatments" of theme 1A, Scherzo, "Rashana" sketchbook. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

pean-derived terms. Even though Still attached the term "development" to some of his "treatments," suggesting a sonata form of sorts, the Scherzo could just as well be characterized in several other ways. Although the detailed outline shows it as a ternary form, the movement could also be thought of as a large-scale barform suggestive of the aa¹ b form of the classic twelve-bar blues, as a rounded binary form, or

Figure 7
First page of Still's sketch for the Scherzo, "Rashana" sketchbook.
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

maybe even two rather simple ABA forms that happen in sequence. More simply, it might also be seen as revealing some formal, trickster-like sleight of hand.

The initial presentation of the minstrel tune (theme 1A) in the Scherzo is accompanied by a countermelody identical to the opening of the chorus of a hit pop tune of the day. Gershwin's show Girl Crazy, featuring the infectious "I Got Rhythm," opened October 14, 1930, as Still was preparing to travel to Rochester for the performance of Africa and just two weeks before he began to compose the Afro-American Symphony . The quotation appears once, immediately after the introduction, in the horns, in a spot where it is intended to be heard, meant to be a reference listeners would clearly understand. A second, following statement is broken up by octave displacements and changes in instrumentation; then the fragment of this catchy tune is heard no more. It seems entirely possible that Still changed his initial conception of this movement (as shown in fig. 4) specifically to accommodate this quotation. Indeed, he made more revisions from his original outline of the symphony in this movement than he did for any of the others, scrapping both the original main theme and his initial outline for the movement. He went back to his 1924 theme book to borrow an early tune he had labeled "Hallelujah!" years earlier.

Why does this current pop tune appear in the Scherzo of this symphony? The question puzzles modern performers, even seems to embarrass them; in one recent recording, the quotation is all but inaudible, seemingly deliberately made so.^[32] I believe that Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" reinforces the meaning of that first statement of theme 1A, in its major/minstrel form in which the African American presence is perceived solely through the eyes of white interpreters, thereby speaking to the meaning Still intended for the movement and for the symphony as a whole. We hear the start of "I Got Rhythm" intact only once; then the movement goes on to its real business, the transforming shift toward a black-influenced, modally inflected minstrel tune with the very political "Hallelujah" and "Emancipation" themes folded through it.

Why did Still choose this particular tune to make his point? Where did the "I Got Rhythm" melody come from in the first place? Here the answer grows more speculative. Modern listeners more familiar with Gershwin's song than Still's work assume that Still borrowed Gershwin's melody, but some older African American musicians believe it was Still's

Example 4
Scherzo, first statement of theme 1A, with countermelody in the
horns and afterbeats in the tenor banjo. 
Used by permission.

Figure 8
Theme 48, "Hallelujah," used as theme 1A of the Scherzo, "Rashana" sketchbook. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

to begin with. Evidence from the theme book supports them—partly. The story about Still, Gershwin, and "I Got Rhythm" also draws on anecdotal evidence, all collected well after the fact. There are several versions. Judith Anne Still tells of her father walking down a New York City street with Eubie Blake and hearing the tune as they walked past an open door. Blake asked wasn't that Still's tune from Shuffle Along days, and Still acknowledged that indeed it was. Blake expressed anger at the theft; Still's response was more sanguine. In a published interview from 1973, Blake went into much greater detail:

Do you know William Grant Still? . . . He's a personal friend of mine. [Eubie darts to the piano.] Do you know this tune? [He plays Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm."] . . . All of the fellows in my orchestra would be playing around, having a good time, but Still would be playing this little tune over and over. [Eubie hums the melody.] So I heard the darn thing so much that one day I said to him (not while we were playing in New York, but later when we were in Boston), "What's the tune you're playing?" Still answered me, "One day you'll hear it in a symphony, an American symphony!" . . .

Now, one day Dooley Wilson . . . comes up to me and says, "Boy, have I got some music; this is swell music!" I played the music for him—it was all Gershwin music—and when I got to the piece "I Got Rhythm," I didn't have to look at the music. I knew it! You know, once I hear a tune—if it's a good tune—I don't forget it. . . . Now, one day I was walking down 56th Street, and I saw Still standing in front of the Carnegie Hall entrance. . . . I said, "You know that tune you used to play?" I hummed it for him. "Is that your tune?" He looked at me but didn't answer. So I said, "I saw the music to 'I Got Rhythm' and it's the same as your tune." Still said, "Yeah? Well, I'll see you later." He would not say that Gershwin stole the tune; he is just that kind of man.

[Interviewer] How do you explain it?

Oh, that's easy. Still used to teach Gershwin orchestration. He had to go to Gershwin's place on Park Avenue to give the lessons, and while he was waiting for Gershwin to come down—Gershwin was always late—he would play this darn tune on his oboe. Gershwin heard the tune and took it. Now Gershwin probably didn't mean to take it or steal it because he didn't have to. The man was a genius! But that tune was Still's tune. It could happen to anyone.^[33]

Blake's version is demonstrably inaccurate on at least one point. In a section of the interview not cited here, he has Still conducting his own symphony at Carnegie Hall. Actually, the New York premiere of Still's symphony (which must have been the Afro-American ) took place in late 1935, long after Girl Crazy had closed. Still did not conduct, nor did he conduct any of his concert works in New York City. (He was living in Los Angeles by then and probably did not attend the perfor-

mance.) In fact, Blake's association of the theme with the Boston run of Shuffle Along argues against Gershwin having heard it in the theater, for Gershwin is much less likely to have attended performances outside of New York.^[34]

In October 1996, Dominique-René De Lerma wrote of interviewing Still about this when the two met in 1969:

Still told me (I was also an oboist) that he doodled from the pit before Shuffle Along performances [i.e., in 1921 or 1922] with this little figure—. . . and knew that Gershwin was in the audience. The figure, of course, generates the Gershwin tune. . . . The same figure with the same rhythm appears in the third movement of the Afro-American Symphony in the horns, with the statement of the theme. Still had an expression on his face when we talked about this which clearly suggested he felt Gershwin had appropriated his doodle. I don't think it is extended enough to justify a copyright violation, but it is a strange coincidence and Still's reaction might be symptomatic of his vigilance.^[35]

Gershwin was well known to seek out performances by black musicians, and Shuffle Along would have been an obvious show for him to have attended, maybe more than the one time Still mentioned to De Lerma.^[36] Affirming once more that Gershwin was interested in Still's work, Verna Arvey notes that Gershwin attended the performance of Still's Levee Land at a concert presented by the International Composers' Guild at Aeolian Hall, January 24, 1926. In the same essay, probably from the late 1960s, she wrote of Gershwin's attendance at a performance of Shuffle Along .

One Negro musical show which took New York by storm in the early Twenties was Shuffle Along. George and Ira Gershwin and most of the other Broadway celebrities attended it, some more than once. . . . As the show went on and on, the players in the orchestra began to get tired of playing the same thing over and over again, so very often they would improvise. Most of them had a special little figure that they added, as they felt so inclined. Still's figure was melodic. Later, when he was composing the Afro-American Symphony, he used the small little figure, wedded to a distinctive rhythm which he had originated in the orchestration for a soft-shoe dance in the show, Rain or shine.^[37]

Arvey was reporting what Still had told her. The awkwardness of her telling betrays her unfamiliarity with a milieu outside her own experience, but it also reflects a struggle to get the story as Still remembered it. Her words seem to amplify De Lerma's report about what happened. Later, Still wrote generally about musical borrowings in American music, though not in detail about his own experiences. In "The Men Behind

Example 5
Numbered themes from the 1924 theme book suggestive of the
"I Got Rhythm" motif. All are lightly crossed out, meaning that Still had used
them. Themes 249 and 251 are marked "Good—Negroid"; 260 is marked
"Good for Land of Blues." 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

American Music" (1944), Still writes with a certain ambivalence, mainly about plagiarism in commercial music:

As for George Gershwin, who wrote so much in the Negroid idiom, there are many Negro musicians who now claim to have done work for him, arranging or composing. I have no way of knowing whether any of these claims are justified. I do know that Gershwin did a great deal of unconscious borrowing from several sources (not always the Negro) and that he did some conscious borrowing which he apparently was generous enough to acknowledge, for he gave W. C. Handy a copy of the "Rhapsody in Blue," autographed to the effect that he recognized Handy's work as the forerunner of his own. . . .

Quite often colored musicians claim to have had their creations or their styles stolen from them by white artists. In many cases these tales may be dismissed as baseless rantings. But there have been so many instances in which they are justified that one cannot ignore all of them. I have learned this from my own experience and from the experiences of my friends in the world of music.^[38]

In support of his statement, he describes hearing an arrangement of his own over the radio that was ascribed to another arranger.^[39]

Still never claimed "I Got Rhythm" for himself, at least in writing. Yet the 1924 theme book and the 1926 "Rashana" sketchbook offer evidence that partly supports the claims to precedence made in his behalf. The theme book shows several themes that begin with the tune's opening four pitches, sol, la, do, re (see ex. 5). In every case, the opening melodic contour is similar, but the tempos are slower, syncopation is not notated, and the melodies go off in other directions rather than (or before) turning back on themselves. Most memorable is its use as shown in figure 9, "From the Land of Blues," the "melodic sketch" in the "Rashana" sketchbook not otherwise identifiable.

Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" depends for its impact on three musical elements in addition to its text: a four-note gap-scale figure that turns back on itself, a syncopated rhythmic pattern, and a drive to a cadence that rounds it off. Still's themes, as they are notated in the examples we have, all lack the syncopation that is associated with Gershwin's tune. A handwritten notation on a draft of the Arvey essay quoted above, very likely made at Still's behest, reinforces Arvey's reference to the 1928 musical Rain or Shine as the place where Still, in one of his orchestrations, used both the melodic pattern and the syncopated rhythmic figure.^[40] At least for now, this clue leads to a dead end. Only two songs from Rain or Shine are deposited in the Library of Congress; six more were returned to the claimant several years after they were deposited for copy-right, and another six were never deposited.^[41] One cannot know which (if any) of the fourteen might have quoted the "soft-shoe dance" to which Arvey refers, or whether the pattern occurred only in a section that never reached print or copyright. We are left with what appears to be Still's word—which is reliable in other cases but which cannot be verified in this one. Blake, who seems to have embroidered his story in order to make his broad point about unacknowledged borrowing, went out of his way to acknowledge that Gershwin's use of Still's idea was inadvertent: "it could happen to anybody."

It is obvious that the ascending gap-scale figure (sol, la, do, re, or do, re, fa, sol ) fascinated Still. How Still improvised on it from the orchestra pit during the run of Shuffle Along (or in Gershwin's living room), we cannot know. Comparison of Still's and Gershwin's treatments of it shows both their similarity and where they parted company. Still's failure to claim the song as his own may simply represent his acknowledgment

Figure 9
Melodic sketch,  From the Land of Blues,  1924 theme book.
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

Example 6
Still's and Gershwin's themes compared. Used by permission.

that he used it differently from the way Gershwin did, and/or that the distinction between something improvised and something written down was very important to him. Perhaps he feared that any serious claim on his part would be dismissed as "baseless ranting." Since the melodic motive we know about is not used in the same way by both composers, at least in the surviving written versions, the question of primacy becomes less relevant. The difference in their use of the same basic melodic material seems far more interesting than the similarity. For Still, it was a brief blues gesture to be extended at will; for Gershwin, a snappy, open-and-closed eight-bar song-and-dance phrase. The contrast points to the operation of different sensibilities powerfully influenced by the cultural position of each composer, the specific tasks in which each was involved, and the unpredictable vagaries of individual talents and predilections.

Despite his lack of action, Still must have known that, one way or another, he had helped Gershwin reach that melody. Perhaps Still could see

the interaction on a broader scale. For him the melodic figure belonged to the blues, and to the African American past. By quoting Gershwin's version where he did, as part of the whites-in-blackface minstrel representation with which the Scherzo begins, he suggested where Gershwin's tune fitted into his fusion aesthetic with a subtlety appropriate to the mythical Trickster. Moreover, the appearance of "I Got Rhythm" along with Girl Crazy in mid-October 1930—assuming that dates when Still first heard it—must have pushed Still to begin writing the symphony he had contemplated for so long.^[42] It might even have provoked him to rethink the Scherzo, to abandon for something far richer his initial idea of portraying the "janny sect" that he had laughed at when his mother had taken him along during the summers she taught rural African Americans without access to regular schools. One imagines his thought that Gershwin's use of that material aptly demonstrates the "minstrel mask" of the past, the one imposed from "outside." His own treatment pointedly addresses the "real" past: slavery, Emancipation, the blues. He felt secure, perhaps, in his own sense of the "authenticity" of his own application, with the scale, with his constantly changing thematic "treatments" that modern commentators may think of as "signifying." If Still stimulated Gershwin from the pit in the Shuffle Along production or as the orchestrator of Rain or Shine, Gershwin's commercial adaptation in turn provoked Still to sit down and compose the symphony he had contemplated for so long, and even to add this tricksterish layer of meaning.

In one of her "Scribblings," Verna Arvey records an anecdote about Still's friend Harold Bruce Forsythe and the Afro-American Symphony . She writes that when Forsythe heard about Stokowski's telegram announcing that the fourth movement would be performed on a lengthy 1936 Philadelphia Orchestra tour, he visited Still's home and asked to see the score of the symphony, which was unfamiliar to him. He looked at it for a while and announced that he would write to Stokowski supporting the performance, remarking that he was the only one who knew what the symphony was about. Arvey took this as another symptom of Forsythe's insufferable arrogance; yet Forsythe may have been right in his judgment that most audiences would have listened to the symphony without seeing the complexity of the cultural message Still had inscribed in it, much less the topicality of the Gershwin reference, a seemingly minor point in the overall work.

It is clear enough that given the abyss that separated whites and blacks

in Still's America, no composer who identified as European-American or "white" would or could have composed with the sensibility revealed in this or others among Still's self-consciously racial works. Still's symphonically treated blues decentered the expected neat enclosure of the African by the European for white concert audiences.^[43] Whether his actual audiences were prepared to receive his work as he intended it to be interpreted is another question entirely, and may explain his own comment, "This symphony approaches but does not attain to the profound symphonic work I hope to write; a work presenting a great truth that will be of value to mankind in general."^[44]

While the symphony itself is successful as a work of art that continues to be performed regularly, neither it nor later works by Still had (or could have had, given the relatively small general audience for concert music in the United States) an impact comparable to that of the blues' entry into popular music with its mass audience. Moreover, the racial barrier in concert music remained higher than for popular music. Two decades after he composed the Afro-American Symphony, Still himself acknowledged that there was not yet parallel recognition for African Americans in concert music and opera, that "the serious Negro musician who is said to have 'arrived' today still is confronted with all sorts of preconceived notions."^[45] Certainly no single work could revitalize or restore in 1930 the black concert audiences that had existed in the early 1920s, nor could it create the genuinely integrated audience to which his fusion aesthetic ultimately looked forward.

Still conducted his quest to find a speaking subject position in concert music and opera with unique persistence and skill over his long creative career. Though his first concert works came almost sixty years after Abolition, the need to establish and redefine the status of African American musicians by composing in the elite genres of symphony and opera remained critical in a society where blacks were overwhelmingly confined to "popular," that is, "lower-class," music making. He went to great lengths to fight his way into the world of high musical literacy, to find a place as a speaking subject in the world of concert music. The Afro-American Symphony stands as a landmark in this project.

"They, Verna and Billy"

Verna Arvey would be known only as a minor figure in Los Angeles's pre-émigré world of music and dance were it not for her long association with William Grant Still. She learned of Still's work as early as the mid-1920s but met him only in 1930, when she came to his attention as a lively young musician and writer with commitments to both the "new" and the New Negro movement that in many ways paralleled his own. Her interest in musical modernism emerges clearly in January 1926, in a review for her school newspaper of a concert that included music by Henry Cowell.^[1] As will be seen, Cowell encouraged her career in several significant ways, as he did that of many others, including Still. Arvey's awareness of Still and the Harlem Renaissance (elsewhere the New Negro movement) came through Harold Bruce Forsythe, an older contemporary, longtime friend, and inspired correspondent since Manual Arts High School days. Forsythe's developing advocacy of an eclectic modernism influenced her strongly.^[2]

Arvey followed Forsythe's model in placing her skills in the service of Still's career. She began soon after Still's arrival in Los Angeles in 1934 by serving as his secretary, rehearsal pianist, publicist, and sometime performer of his music. After the break with Forsythe, which probably occurred in late 1935 or early 1936, she committed herself much more fully to Still, abandoning her own aspirations as a recitalist and turning down an offer of a teaching position in New York City. Thereafter she displaced Forsythe as Still's collaborator and friend, eventually becom-

Figure 10.
Verna Arvey. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

ing his librettist, editor, and archivist as well as, from 1939, his spouse. Arvey's early bohemian persona was so fully subsumed in her commitment to Still that one recent commentator, finding it virtually impossible to separate out her contribution, wrote that "in many respects, they, Verna and Billy, were William Grant Still."^[3]

The picture of Arvey in her teens and early twenties that emerges from her scrapbooks, five-year diaries, and other memorabilia is of someone almost unimaginably different from the later images. In particular, the forbidding self-image projected by In One Lifetime (1984), Arvey's late personal memoir/biography of Still, separates her from this early identity; it serves, if anything, to intensify the urgency of the questions about the nature and extent of her influence on Still.^[4] These questions tend to place a heavy burden on Arvey, in some cases diverting attention away from the difficult aesthetic issues that Still faced, even tending to shift responsibility for decisions that were clearly his. For example, Arvey's role in Still's increasing isolation after 1939 is challenged, and even Still's aesthetic approach indirectly questioned by the remarks of two of his acquaintances, who said in separate interviews that Arvey had "protected" Still from his proper source of inspiration, the

everyday lives of African Americans.^[5] The quality of Arvey's librettos for all of Still's operas after Troubled Island has been directly attacked, perhaps with more justification, by Donald Dorr.^[6] Beyond Arvey's private statement that she was the author of an anticommunist speech delivered by Still in 1951, questions have arisen about the extent of her influence as the typist or editor or perhaps even the writer of many of his letters, articles, and speeches, and as the "manager" of his domestic and professional life. It becomes important, then, to sort out something of Arvey's identity and to explore what her contributions to Still's career were.

Arvey was born in Los Angeles in 1910 of working-class Jewish parents, both of whom had emigrated as children from Russia to Chicago. She was the second of three children, the older of two sisters. She skipped two grades in elementary school, then was made to sit out a year to rest her eyes. That year she got interested in practicing the piano, learned to sight read music printed in old issues of the Etude, and worked as a volunteer reader in a kindergarten. Although the family identified themselves as Jewish, they were not observant. They were enthusiastic members of a spiritualist church while Verna was in middle school and high school. She served as the congregation's pianist, playing hymns and becoming thoroughly disillusioned as she observed some obvious fakery. Remembering this experience, she was disappointed to learn of Still's deep interest in the occult. Later, however, she accepted the integrity of his purpose and participated with him willingly in an informal spiritualist circle.^[7]

An inspiring middle school teacher helped Arvey become fluent in Spanish and stimulated her interest in Hispanic culture; later on she won a prize in a citywide high school competition for her skill. Her early desire to pursue journalism as a career led her to Manual Arts High School. There her extracurricular activities included Girls' Self-Government, Press Club, the debate squad, and a stint as feature writer for the Manual Arts High School Weekly: "I went out on my own and interviewed a lot of musical celebrities for the paper. In consequence, ours was one of the few high school papers carrying interviews with such artists as Joseph Lhevinne, Tito Schipa, Lucrezia Bori, Lawrence Tibbett (one of our own graduates) and others."^[8] Interviews remained a favored journalistic genre for her long after Manual Arts.

When Arvey graduated from high school in 1926, she was four months beyond her sixteenth birthday. In the same year, her parents divorced

and her mother became a chiropractor. Her older brother was already an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, studying zoology, but the teacher training course in music offered there did not appeal to her. She aspired, according to a graduation brochure, to attend a "musical conservatory or University of Southern California—music course."^[9] She continued her piano study for several years and developed a studio of her own, but her hopes and plans to go to college or to a conservatory never materialized.

Arvey's scrapbooks, assembled between about 1922 on, reflect her eclecticism, for they include her writings on film, theater, and dance as well as music.^[10] They also reveal her efforts to learn and write about concert music by composers of Latin American and African American heritage. Her ideas about the use of music in movies developed soon after she left high school. Finding it impossible to gain the access to the studios she sought, she asked for help from her paternal uncle, Jake Arvey, whose name occasionally surfaces in books on machine politics in Chicago, where he was already a prominent alderman. Uncle Jake's connections with the distribution side of the movie business were no help.^[11] Her interest in music for the movies continued, during this period of transition from silent to sound film, and eventually resulted in what is apparently the first "serious" magazine article about movie music, published in the Etude in January 1931.^[12] That article—the first of many for that magazine—reflects her journalistic approach, which continued to depend on interviewing prominent people and reporting their remarks. For it, she queried the heads of the music departments at RKO, MGM, Fox, and Universal, respectively, as well as Los Angeleno Lawrence Tibbett.^[13]

After leaving high school, Arvey found work accompanying dance classes (which she preferred to accompanying singers), and by the early 1930s she was well known locally as an accompanist for dance recitals. Los Angeles was a spawning ground for modern dance; Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn had begun their company there in 1913, presently giving Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey their early opportunities. These dancers had left by the time Arvey became active in the field, but there was still wide interest and a lot of activity in modern dance. (In Los Angeles, modern dance was said to have a quality of naïvaté that distinguished it from its New York counterpart.)^[14] She reported extensively for the American Dancer, founded locally by Ruth Howard in 1927, especially after Howard moved it to New York in 1932.^[15]

Arvey developed strong practical ideas about how to accompany the

dance: "In playing dance accompaniments, one follows the dancer, not the music . It is a new musical language. The accompanist must forget all he has learned about music and learn anew."^[16] At the end of her book, Choreographic Music: Music for the Dance (1941), she wrote:

A good accompanist for the dance will play the music just a little differently. . . . That is, there is a lift: a rise and fall in each phrase that is almost indescribable. At least, it is not possible of description with ordinary crescendo and diminuendo marks. A curve of the hand or a rising gesture will occasion this "lift." It follows that a successful composer for the dance will have in his music that indescribable something that gives to choreographic music, on the whole, that strange, unrigid, rhythmic, living character!^[17]

As for her music, especially her interest in the piano, Arvey told an interviewer, "My family was a music-loving family, although they were not performers in any way. I don't know where I got that from."^[18] At Manual Arts, she took courses in harmony, music history, and composition, at a time when such courses were widely available in Los Angeles high schools. She gave up her own interest in composition only after Still's arrival in 1934. Over the years, she worked with five different piano teachers, none of them especially prominent. She left the last one, Ann J. Eachus, a student of the locally illustrious Thilo Becker, some time after giving a recital in Eachus's studio in 1932.^[19]

What was she like as a pianist? Her one surviving recording, of Still's Seven Traceries, made for Co-Art Turntable in 1940 or 1941, is of rather poor quality. The written evidence, like the recording, is equivocal. There were positive reviews, mainly in connection with her work with dancers. For example: "A masterly accompaniment for the exacting program was supplied by Miss Verna Arvey at the piano. Her dynamic power and musical understanding not only afforded a flawless support for the dancer, but in five solos of diverse moods [she] proclaimed herself a young virtuoso of great promise."^[20] A 1933 radio performance by the Raymond Paige orchestra on the program "California Melodies," in which she was the soloist, was noted by the New York Daily News: "[Paige's] orchestra gave a brilliant performance of Gershwin's 'Concerto in F.' A Pacific Coast crew that should visit the East."^[21] Still heard the broadcast and reacted with surprising warmth:

I must pause in the midst of the mad rush to tell you of my reaction. . . . I was more than repaid for my eagerness. You are an artist; a soul through whom higher beings speak to mortals. Under your fingers the piano sang, then spoke

in caressing tones tinged with sorrow, and then spoke in more authoritative tones. . . . I hope I may hear you again, many times.^[22]

In her own estimate of her skill, Arvey was not so flattering. She wrote that she was chosen to play a piano solo at her high school commencement "despite the fact that I actually was not the best concert pianist then in school."^[23] For three consecutive years (1930–1932) she auditioned unsuccessfully for the position of pianist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "Musicians always thought I was a good writer; writers always thought I was an excellent pianist," she wrote in a "Scribbling." Eventually she took an empirical approach to exploiting her talents:

Countless times I decided I'd never try for anything again. Each time I changed my mind. For, on the instant, it seemed as if there was always an open life beyond, instead of a door closing off the life behind. . . .

There came a time when I resented being dubbed a dance accompanist forever, and wanted to strike out for myself in other lines, but luckily decided to capitalize on what knowledge I had and gave recitals of dance music and wrote books on the subject. ("Scribblings")

One of the few surviving letters from Forsythe gives another view of her thinking in early 1934:

Would like to hear a more detailed idea of what you will put into the projected "Without Bitterness." . . . I remember the poem you will base it on. It sounds like a good idea: but can it be done Without Bitterness? That's the problem! . . . I will wait impatiently for it, for it will be emmensely [sic ] interesting to see how you have reacted to this America . . . can't remember ever reading anything of the sort. . . . Africs are almost moaning in print on the subject, but the story of the young Jewish intellectual must be told in your book. . . . Do it well, and don't spare America!^[24]

While still at Manual Arts High School, Arvey demonstrated an interest in "the new" as it was developing in Los Angeles, shown both by the connection she cultivated with Cowell and by her work in behalf of modern dance. By the early 1930s, her "modernist" acquaintances in L.A. included John Cage and Harry Hay. Arvey was sufficiently interested in Cage's ideas that she arranged for him to perform at the Mary Carr Moore Manuscript Club.^[25] Forsythe was on the periphery of this circle, mainly through Hay. Whether Arvey had met Wallace Thurman or Arna Bontemps in her early high school days is unknown, but her "Scribblings" include a description of an inebriated Thurman at a party given by Still in his honor in 1930 and attended by Forsythe. Arvey's acquaintance with musical modernists expanded in the early thirties; in

late 1933 and early 1934, she spent some weeks in Mexico, interviewing composers and listening to as much music as she could. With help from Carlos Chávez, she gave a concert in Mexico City in January 1934.^[26] An unpublished novel, "Beware of Bandits, Señorita," also resulted from this trip.

After several seasons of increasing prominence, Arvey attempted her most ambitious public performances, beginning with a concert in Los Angeles on November 3, 1934, and continuing with a tour that took her to New York City, Cuba, and Colombia. The Los Angeles performance was sponsored by Norma Gould's Dance Theater Group, for which Arvey frequently played, and was given at Gould's dance school. It was labeled "A program of Idealized Dance Music" and included music by Galuppi, Bach, José Rolón, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Neupert, Chopin, Ravel, Friedman-Gaertner, Arvey, Smetana, Still, Milhaud, and Handy.^[27] A publicity item and a review give a picture of her.

Small, dark-eyed, nervous—they call Verna Arvey a revolutionary pianist. The night of Nov. 4 she will show Los Angeles a new approach to music, . . . piano idealizations of dance compositions.

"To go beyond the notes, clear through technique, to the spirit, to summon dancing images in the mind of each individual in an audience more true to the music than any interpretation by a flesh-and-blood dancer, that is my desire," she says.^[28]

Rob Wagner's Script, a local weekly, carried a review that gives a visual description of her playing:

When she gets to the piano she starts in with the serious business of playing and saves her calisthenics for the privacy of her bedroom, a very agreeable change! Her work with dancers has given Miss Arvey a sense of dramatic values not possessed by most pianists. At a concert, one not only hears, but sees as well, and her use of lights was sufficient to hold audience interest so that nothing marred the enjoyment of a nicely balanced program.^[29]

About the colored lights, a realization of the color-sound associations that were a feature of early modernism, Arvey commented in a "Scribbling": "My use of colored lights—perhaps superficial, when considered in the light of all those detailed treatises on color and sound combinations, but really more fundamental than all of them."

A few weeks later, she performed at a symposium sponsored by Henry Cowell at the New School in New York. No program survives, and there is no indication in Arvey's diary as to what she played. There

is very little evidence about her reception at that concert. Two months after the performance, Cowell wrote that she had "made good" at the New School.^[30] But no review has been located in any of the papers or journals listed by Cowell as having sent critics.^[31] A letter from Hedi [Korngold] Katz, the founder of the Music School of the Henry Street Settlement, becomes the most revealing report.^[32] It addresses Arvey as an artistic personality with teaching potential rather than as a pianist:

My dear Miss Arvey: I have heard you last Friday at Henry Cowell's forum at the New School. . . . What I would like to know is, do you plan to return to New York, and, if so, would you be interested in teaching at our school? Also, what subjects would you care to teach? I would like very much to have you connected with the Music School, after the impression I got that evening. Would you kindly let me know? Sincerely yours, . . .^[33]

No further comment about this trip has been found.

Influenced by the overall success of Cowell's New School symposia, Arvey determined to attempt something similar in Los Angeles. Her symposium differed from Cowell's model in several ways. It was held in a dance studio, reflecting not only what was readily available to Arvey but also her sense of what was appropriate. She invited both established and new composers, with the idea of seeking common ground between old and new. The established composers included Mary Carr Moore and Charles E. Pemberton. The "new" ones, including those new to Los Angeles, were Joseph Achron, Hugo Davise, Gilberto Isais, Richard Drake Saunders, Arnold Schoenberg, William Grant Still, and George Tremblay. Artie Mason Carter, the founder of the Hollywood Bowl (long departed from the Bowl's administration by 1935), remained an enthusiast of the "new," and was invited to moderate the discussion that was to follow. The event presented a Los Angeles-specific window on the "new," with its mix of local composers and teachers, film composers and émigrés. Several letters report the proceedings; they suggest that the event failed to create rapport among the factions and that "common ground" remained, to say the least, unlocated. Artie Mason Carter's sets the tone:

Dear Verna: I can't bear your great disappointment after all your sincere effort, altho I feel you are wrong to feel the evening was a failure. To me it was

truly interesting and I don't want you to promise never to attempt it again! We must have leaders for the cause of contemporary music and you are an excellent one. . . .

You played beautifully—gave a fine impression of a charming work—that and the Schoenberg songs (The Book of the Hanging Gardens ) were worth coming a long distance to hear. . . .

Don't be discouraged. You are too young and too valuable. Bless you my dear! Faithfully, A.M.C.^[34]

A fuller (and less positive) account comes from the shaky hand of another of the old guard. Charles E. Pemberton, once Forsythe's composition teacher, had been a Los Angeles resident for at least thirty-five years and was still active as a teacher at the University of Southern California in 1935.

My dear Miss Arvey:

. . . it was kind of you to think it necessary to apologize for the affair not turning out as you had planned. It was not your fault and you did everything you could to make it a success. . . .

I suffered horribly during those 15 Schoenberg songs. (Was it 15? they seemed endless.) I lost count, breaking out in a cold sweat. It was poor taste upon the part of this Rogers lady to sing all those songs upon a program of such a character. . . .

[When] I peeped behind the scenes, . . . I thought I heard this charming Arvey lady say, "My God what have I got into." . . .

It was of course to be regretted that the lateness of the hour the program closed left no time for discussion. But again, that was no fault of yours.

I expect you are going to think me "horrible" for writing so frankly, but it's just between us, and somehow it relieves my mind, like escaping steam from an engine relieving the pressure on the boiler.^[35]

Arvey reported further complications. The genial Cowell failed to appear at the last moment, although they delayed the start for him. The less genial Schoenberg did not receive his invitation in timely fashion, even though his songs were scheduled and he had coached the singer in advance. Calista Rogers, his singer, stretched out her part by reading English translations before each song, helpful in the absence of program notes but serving to prolong the agony of Professor Pemberton (and perhaps others).^[36]

Arvey did not repeat this experiment; in fact its failure seems to have encouraged her to withdraw from the battlefield between modernists and traditionalists entirely. Increasingly, she immersed herself in her work

on Still's behalf, although she continued to play for dancers and write about the dance. How fully she withdrew will become clearer presently.

Forsythe made a deep and lasting impression on the young Arvey, and she on him. His present for her high school graduation, manuscript copies of several of his own songs, is by far the most personal among the handful of modest presents she listed in her graduation program.^[37] He could hardly have resisted telling Arvey about Still well before he introduced them, given the unbridled enthusiasm and openness of his few surviving letters.^[38] She may well have read his "William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions" at the time it was written, or even helped him edit it, soon after Still returned to New York in the summer of 1930.^[39] Thus she was aware quite early of the contrast between Forsythe's zealous theorizing on racial matters and Still's methodical focus on practical applications in music.^[40] Her relationship with him was already strained before Still's arrival in 1934:

My dear friend Verna:

As I write to you now, all the years during which I loved you as a dear and cherished friend stand congealed on the pin-point of the moment.

Just how anything entered into our lives that could change this feeling a bit is extremely difficult to say, but ever since a few months ago I have felt that I was losing Verna . . . the Verna that had meant so much to me . . . the Verna who meant beauty . . . not so much piano playing, but the loveliness of music written for the piano. I don't think that I thought of Schumann's beautiful Fantasie, or Rachmaninov's 2nd Concerto, or Beethoven's Hammerclavier Sonata, or Mozart's C minor . . . without thinking of the Verna . . . MY Verna, as the executent [sic ], and the catalyst.^[41]

The melodramatic "farewell" with which this letter ends is defused by a postscript: "Next morning: Dear Verna: All is true, save the goodbye. Don't say goodbye, Verna! Hello is so much nicer a word!!!!!!!" An undated letter from Arvey to Forsythe, now known only in Arvey's transcription, may well have been in response to this letter:

It just occurred to me that you have a very wrong idea of me. I'm not deep or profound or intellectual. I may be intelligent, but not intellectual. And I don't like to read philosophic things. I want things with a human side. And I don't like to study technicalities and big words. And I don't like to write un-understandable stuff just because it is arty. And I don't want to be a famous artist, I want to do my work and do it well. . . . [And] anyway, the

adjectives you use in describing me aren't true. I'm just myself, that's all. Don't idealize me.^[42]

Even if the two letters are not directly connected, they reveal the developing conflict between Arvey and Forsythe that was exacerbated by Still's arrival.

The transition from the rather enterprising, adventuresome early Arvey and the Arvey of In One Lifetime is both remarkable and sad. At one point, probably later on, she commented on her decision to remain in southern California and not seek further education in this way:

I was born in a section of the country which has spawned some important creative minds, as well as some outstanding ideas. It has also routinely absorbed many of the "greats" from other parts of the nation and of the world at large. So many came to live and work in the friendly climate of Southern California that it was always a surprise to find that many Easterners still considered us "provincial" and still thought that we on the West Coast were in dire need of their superior "leadership"! . . .

At any rate, right at hand were so many big "names" in so many professions, so many interesting artistic projects and so much to absorb that I soon decided to cast down my bucket where I found myself. It came up loaded with nuggets of knowledge."^[43]

Likewise, she recognized the loss of further systematic study indirectly in one of her "Scribblings": "The transition from a bright youngster with exceptional promise to an artist in competition with all the mature minds of the artistic was terribly hard."

It seems that Arvey's public means of maintaining her equilibrium during those "exasperating years" was humor. One of the dancers she accompanied wrote about her:

She whose humor unfailing
Strips our leaden-weighted woes
Of their well-forged armor
And with ruthless, Puckish foot
Kicks over the cup of dignified Care
And holds the mirror of Ridicule
Before wry-faced misfortune. . .^[44]

These comments add poignancy to a recollection from a member of Arvey's circle in the early 1930s. Fifteen years later, following World War II, its writer returned to Los Angeles, where he renewed his friendship with some dancers from the old Norma Gould studio, where Arvey

had often played and where she had presented her New Music Symposium in 1935. He writes,

I asked [people] like Waldeen Falkenstein or Teru [Izumida; both dancers for whom Arvey had once played] about Verna, and was told "Oh, she's absolutely changed since her marriage: all that laughter and sparkle has totally disappeared. D'ya remember how—at times—she could be almost winsome? That's all gone." Lester [Horton] even said "if you can believe it, she's even pushy and sort of tiresome now."^[45]

How does one account for this transformation? Several events must be considered, though none really explains it. The resolution of the triangle with Forsythe and Still may have been traumatic for Arvey, as it was clearly devastating for Forsythe. She had resisted Forsythe's formulation of a triangle to begin with, writing to him, "There is one Billy and one Harold. They each have their particular niche. I have never been able to confine myself to one particular friend. . . . That should not alter a friendship as old as ours has been. Why can't we all three be together, instead of two . . . or two? I am always your friend whether you like it or not." She also may have precipitated the crisis through what seems her heartfelt advocacy of Forsythe's writing. She had introduced herself by mail to Carl Van Vechten, a major patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and represented Forsythe to him with an eloquence notably missing from much of her writing about Still. The letters from Forsythe to Van Vechten, first informative and assertive, then crushed, along with Arvey's rather stiff reply to Van Vechten's obviously worried query ("I think you have done Harold a far greater service by doing exactly what you did. . . . [A] little personal triumph is relatively unimportant when it comes to making finer human beings of people!"),^[46] are quoted in the chapter on Forsythe above. The undated "Scribbling" that identifies him as a "drunkard" who "lied" about her probably dates from 1935, at about the same time. She had known of Forsythe's deafness earlier, though she seemed unaware of its progressive nature, and she believed he had tuberculosis. What looks like his accelerating physical deterioration at this time, combined with her helplessness and perhaps even guilt about it, must have been painful.

Both Arvey and Forsythe had worked with Still; now Forsythe's working relationship with Still was broken off and Arvey's began to replace it. Presently Forsythe's poem for the score of Dismal Swamp, just in preparation in 1935 for the New Music Edition, was removed in favor of another, inferior one by Arvey. (See the appendix to this chapter for

both texts.) The ballet Central Avenue, for which Forsythe had provided the scenario, was eventually listed as withdrawn, replaced by the similar Lenox Avenue, to a scenario by Arvey. (Here the reasons for the switch are not so clear.)^[47] Of the music from this relatively short period, only the score to Blue Steel continued to circulate to conductors. Arvey continued to write about it enthusiastically in her 1938 monograph. It was withdrawn only when Troubled Island was completed several years later, probably to give the new score a clearer field.

Having drawn closer to Still, Arvey now had to face public opprobrium over the interracial relationship. Still's 1938 suit for divorce was front-page news in the Negro press. The harassment Arvey sustained from a handful of African American women when her relationship with Still became known was intimidating and unexpected:

Dear Langston,

. . . We have had a barrage of the dirtiest, lousiest, most malicious anonymous letters you can imagine. They even sent them to newspapers, in an effort to turn people against Billy on my account.^[48]

In response, the couple kept their address as secret as they could and maintained an unlisted telephone number; Arvey even hired a private detective on one occasion.

The change in their lifestyle after their marriage may have been much more difficult for Arvey than is suggested by a fragmentary "autobiography" of Still, which she undertook to write in his voice rather than her own: "We began to live a quiet life. Now that I had a real home I wanted to stay in it and enjoy it as much as possible. . . . Our staid life would scarcely appeal to lovers of thrills, but for us it is the only real romance."^[49] If Still worked ceaselessly at composition, Arvey, too, applied herself diligently. She continued to write on dance, in addition to undertaking many articles on Still and helping him with his correspondence. In preparation for writing, she amassed numerous scrapbooks on race, anticommunism, and other topics.^[50] She copied out extended passages from books on topics of interest, such as on Dvorak's^[*] sojourn in America.

In fact, Arvey seems to have tried hard to surrender her identity to Still's, willingly adjusting her views to his, being consumed by the slights he and his work experienced, and accepting the subordinate role that Still's working method required of his librettists. She may well have been disappointed that their marriage and their working relationship did not bring about the major change in race relations that she desired and Still

accepted as a basic purpose in his life. Her account of the 1935 symposium's outcome in the Still "autobiography" quoted above eerily projects how fully she would eventually abandon her own persona: "My wife says that if any more composers' symposiums are given, someone else will have to give them. She spent the following day in bed."^[51] Forsythe's question—"can you do it Without Bitterness?"—was very much to the point. Arvey's disappointment at not getting to study at USC left a residuum of anger; indeed, her bitterness at the ability of some of their friends to travel to New York for the 1949 production of Troubled Island when she could not is apparent in her letters to Still before the production.

Whatever the reasons, the result was that Arvey and Still reinforced each other's developing anxieties, helping each other as they lost their individual perspectives sufficiently to blame their troubles increasingly on a grand communist plot (discussed in '"Harlem Renaissance Man' Revisited" below). This began to be evident in the years immediately following World War II. After 1949, the process was carried to an extreme. It would seem that Arvey had conscientiously reflected Still's ideas and his language in writing for and about him in the early years of their relationship. Her conscientiousness continued, but the language became more and more her own. In the process, it became more forced and convoluted. The conclusion of her very late (1969, post-Black Arts movement) discussion of the "I Got Rhythm" controversy is carefully coded to invoke distinctions about class and class-based genre, chosen with a certain implicit snobbery:

As composers, the difference between Gershwin and Still is obvious. Gershwin approached Negro music as an outsider, and his own concepts helped to make it a Gershwin-Negro fusion, lusty and stereotyped racially, more popular in flavor. Still's approach to Negro music was from within, refining and developing it with the craftsmanship and inspiration of a trained composer.^[52]

Her avoidance of opposites for "Gershwin-Negro fusion," "lusty," and "stereotyped racially" that might apply to Still is surprising, given the opening of the paragraph. She introduces the racial issue with these phrases and then fails to follow through on the terms she herself proposes. The suggestion instead that something "popular in flavor" does not admit of "craftsmanship and inspiration" or cannot come from a "trained composer" goes against the grain for many readers and writers who cherish (as an ideal, anyway) a more egalitarian approach to aesthetic evaluations; in fact, it rejects the craftsmanship Still brought to his

commercial work. The use of "from within" in opposition to "outsider" is an attempt to evade a simple inside-outside contrast in favor of the suggestion of something more uplifting on Still's part. The result is an argument that, through its failure to follow through, does Still no good. The paragraph adds up to a late and not well thought out attempt to defend Still. In any case, Still allowed Arvey to take the lead only in one matter, the family's political posturing about anticommunism. It was no easy thing to stay balanced on their own personal troubled island under the pressures she attempted to carry for them both.

The issue of the quality of the librettos she provided for Still should also be addressed, however briefly. The later ones are indeed disappointingly similar, tending to dwell on the common themes of loyalty and retribution despite their varying locales. Costaso, Still's fifth opera (composed 1949–early 1950), engages with themes of loyalty and friendship, major issues in the Stills' lives as they worked on it. Arvey's text repeatedly extols these values, along with domestic serenity over an extended period. For example, Carmela, in her first-act aria about Costaso, does not sing of her passion for him; instead, she sings of their common peacefulness and serenity, for which they have abandoned passion and high ambition, perhaps as Still had done by going to Los Angeles:

Far off riches beckon, false in their promised yield, / while here fortune lingers steadfast and secure. . . . / When life moves on serenely, when friendship's glow surrounds us, time itself becomes timeless. / The moments pile on moments, the hours grow into days, lengthen into years, to eternity. . . . / Our golden moments bring us joy forever!

When given the order to leave home and search for the city of gold, Costaso sings:

Love bids me stay at home / where peace and devotion occupy our thoughts, / where comfort is our watchword.

In the desert, as they despair of rescue, Costaso's friend Manuel voices the value of friendship and loyalty in the opera's most forthright declaration of love:

Your friendship more than repays me. / On the highway, in the town, / people pass and glance in friendly fashion. . . . / Where devotion? Where everlasting love? . . . / When at least the spark is found, when among strangers a friend appears, / then I return his love full measure. . . . / One friend, and I search no more.

Plotting by individuals is the order of the day.^[53] We see Armona plot almost from the beginning to send Costaso to his death in order to win Carmela to himself. We see Carmela confront Armona in Act II Scene 1 with unheroine-like strength and tenacity in her husband's behalf. Her counterplot emerges only in the final scene, a moment or two before Armona is undone by an emissary from the distant capital. The last-minute developments that bring about Armona's fall and Carmela's triumph may be autobiographical for both Still, who had come to believe that his triumphant production of Troubled Island had been made to vanish with comparable unexpected suddenness, and Arvey, whose heroine managed at the last moment to subvert the passive-love object role expected of her as a matter of operatic tradition.

Thus Arvey's libretto and the jointly devised plot of Costaso reflect a view of the world in which heroes are isolated and manipulated by the plotting of either "bad guys" in positions of authority or "good guys" in the form of wives and other loyal but subordinate friends dedicated to the proposition that "Costaso always wins." Arvey's language is often neither graceful nor telling.

Yet Arvey's presence and willingness to collaborate cannot be dismissed as purely negative. She proved a reliable supplier of texts, and Still was a full participant in the devising of the plots he set. In New York, Still had found it difficult to find librettos and librettists with whom he could work. Still's choice of librettists was typically governed by their accessibility as much as or more than by their literary distinction. Grace Bundy, his first wife, had supplied song lyrics as early as 1916; later she wrote letters in his behalf, just as Arvey did later on. In the late 1920s Still began work on an opera ("Rashana") that was based on the plot of an unpublished novel by Bundy. It was to be versified by Countee Cullen, but Cullen was distracted by his personal life and never pursued the project. In Los Angeles, Forsythe was at hand (displacing Bundy, as Arvey was to displace him) to work on Blue Steel . When Langston Hughes agreed to provide the libretto to Troubled Island, Still wrote to him, "Please remember that it is absolutely necessary for us to keep in touch if we are to collaborate."^[54] Arvey's collaboration on librettos did not begin until Still himself grew impatient with Hughes's inattention. As late as 1939, he asked Arna Bontemps for a libretto; he collaborated soon afterward with Katherine Garrison Chapin on And They Lynched Him on a Tree .^[55] The possibility that Arvey's convenient accessibility as a librettist discouraged him from seeking out and setting

a richer variety of opera texts must be balanced against his early difficulty in finding satisfactory texts to set at all.

There is evidence, published and unpublished, about how the Stills' collaborations worked. For example, Still wrote to the New York Times critic Howard Taubman some months after the New York production of Troubled Island concerning the new opera (Costaso ) he was working on in collaboration with Arvey.

The libretto is by my wife—Verna Arvey, and we are working in a way which seems to us satisfactory, though not usual. The plot we developed together, then she wrote out the libretto, each recitative indicated exactly, but each aria indicated only by the opening lines. I then set the opening lines of the arias and went on from there, developing each aria musically. Afterward, she put the remaining words to the music. This method has given me more leeway than I would have if I had a set libretto from which no deviation is possible. At present I am completing Act II of the opera as far as the music is concerned, but the entire libretto is finished.^[56]

Like most of Still's letters after their marriage, this one was typed on Arvey's typewriter, most likely by her, and signed by Still. The question arises, who wrote it? In my opinion, after receiving the inquiry from Taubman, they discussed what topics to address, Arvey wrote out a draft reply, and Still signed it, with or without changes. This letter survives in a carbon of its finished form, so any changes made on the original in longhand are not present. Since it was clearly intended for publication, Arvey was performing a useful public relations function, giving Still this opportunity for publicity while sparing him the necessity of writing it himself.

There is draft evidence about one earlier collaboration, containing material that involved the film industry and other composers, from several years earlier. Still responded in 1940 to a symposium-by-mailed-questionnaire on film music; his answers are quoted at length in "Finding His Voice," above. A draft of his replies shows that Arvey typed out the questions, leaving space for his answers. She appears to have written down his comments as he spoke them, preserving language that is reminiscent of Still's writing style from his earlier, New York period.^[57]

The anticommunist writings present a more difficult problem, since the Stills' shared position on this topic played a part in their later isolation. Authorship of the 1951 speech read by Still in which he named a rather long list of persons he believed, without real evidence, to be communists (quoted in '"Harlem Renaissance Man' Revisited," below) was claimed by Arvey in her correspondence with the editor of the American

Mercury . One begins by assuming that she is the author of other anti-communist talks given by Still, but that is not the case. In May 1949, Still spoke at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles on the general topic of problems faced by the composer of "serious" music. He divided the problems into external ones, such as taking the critics seriously, and internal ones, such as deciding on a style and finding inspiration. He drafted the speech himself (see fig. 11), then reordered the paragraphs for Arvey to type. His paragraph on the communist threat is quoted in full here. Where Arvey made changes in her typescript, Still's words are bracketed. Her substitutions appear in boldface.

I turn now to one tremendous problem that confronts only those composers in our country who are loyal Americans. It is a problem created by the opposition of Communists to all who do not subscribe to their beliefs; a unique problem in that individuals responsible for it cover up so effectively their affiliation with the [party] Soviet controlled group that people who know of it hesitate to make any accusation on account of the difficulty of offering substantial proof of the guilt of these people. Apparently [they] these Reds do not realize that music and politics have nothing in common. Their code appears to be one that makes art subservient to the Soviet government; a code that says, "All who disagree with us must be destroyed." Through underhanded manoeuvering they have placed their emissaries in [important] key positions where they very effectively [keep the] prevent loyal American composers from being heard whenever and wherever possible. From a person [employed in the Victor Record Co.,] in the employ of one of our most prominent recording companies; a person in a position to know what goes on, I learned that a small group of Communists dictate what music shall and shall not be recorded by that company . [crossed out material] I shudder to think of what could happen if these people had greater power. One thing is certain[.]; Greater power they will surely have unless something is done to curb them. Incidentally, I suggest, if you have not already seen it, that you look over the group of Communists whose photos appear in the April 4th issue of LIFE. In it you will find listed three men very prominent in American music.—I'm quite [underline removed ] certain Life made no mistake in these three instances.

Her editing is light, occasionally intensifying Still's language, and in one case, the reference to the Victor Record Co., serving to weaken it.

How, then, did Arvey influence Still's career? She brought common interests, useful skills, and total dedication; most of her actions in his behalf were based on her best judgment about his interests and in fact often amounted to simply carrying out his wishes. Several factors need to be considered in reevaluating her judgment now. The role of race clearly

Figure 11.
Page from draft of Still's speech for Mount St. Mary's College, 1949. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

Figure 12.
Still and Arvey at work. 
Courtesy of William Grant Still Music.

affects our perception of her position. From the days of Still's earliest successes as Varèse's protégé in New York's modernist circles, it seems that virtually everyone who knew him or knew of him or his work had an agenda for him that turned on racial difference. So did Still himself; so did the critics (see the introduction and "'Harlem Renaissance Man' Revisited"); so did both Forsythe and Arvey; and so do we. It is easy but not very enlightening to blame her for those decisions by Still that seem to go against the grain in one way or another. Most of these were set forth by Still in typescripts that preceded his arrival in Los Angeles. Class distinctions of various kinds are also an underlying issue. The concert music and operas Still composed, although intended to have broad listener appeal, were intended for performing organizations and venues (mainly symphony orchestras and opera houses) that drew middle-class, largely white audiences. Moreover, the quiet lifestyle chosen by Still and protected by Arvey served to reinforce the "peculiar isolation from [his] race" that Forsythe had noted in 1930, years before Arvey and Still married.

Gender issues likewise play a role in our evaluation of this complex relationship. The formulation of aesthetic distinctions by the modernists that served eventually to marginalize Still's work bears an uncanny resemblance to the process by which women, too, were marginalized; misogyny was a significant aspect of the aesthetic approach of the male American modernists of the 1920s.^[58] If Arvey can be blamed for Still's aesthetic decisions, then the modernists' hostility toward Still can be explained away on quasi-"objective" grounds unrelated, on the surface, to these tricky issues of race and class. From another direction, theorists of black culture, specifically including writers on the blues, have tended to formulate their ideas in masculinist terms, making it easy to avoid the gender-related questions that are important to understanding Arvey's role in Still's life and career.^[59] Both of these approaches may help explain Arvey's position as a lightning rod for attacks really aimed at Still, attacks that obscure both Still's thought and Arvey's. That these have not yet been addressed is illustrated by the treatment of her In One Lifetime by its editors as a book on Still rather than one on Still and Arvey, resulting in both the deletion of material that describes her development and the mishandling of other materials. The recent bio-bibliography of Still includes a listing of "Writings by William Grant Still and Verna Arvey." Only thirty-four of the 168 articles she published after leaving school are included; while many of these do not relate to Still, there is no indication in the headnote that the list is a selective one.^[60]

One might think fruitfully about Arvey in terms suggested by Bonnie G. Smith's article, "Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow," in which a "consistent pattern of diatribes" is shown, aimed at a series of widows of literary figures who either "managed a dead husband's reputation, edited his work, or claimed an independent intellectual status for herself." Smith discusses in detail numerous attacks by scholars on the reputation of Athénais Mialeret-Michelet, the widow of the French historian Jules Michelet. She concludes that while Mialeret-Michelet was inferior to her spouse as an author and scholar, the attacks on her have been so extreme as to suggest some other underlying issue, one she finds to be misogyny. "Wrapped in the mantle of science and impartiality, the saga of Michelet mutilated by his widow and rescued by heroic researchers is a melodrama whose psychological dimensions we should begin attending to, if only to understand the world of history better."^[61] In Arvey's case, it would seem desirable to avoid complicity in the male modernist composers' virtually automatic anti-

woman rhetoric, a reaction against the prevailing characterization of music as an effeminate occupation in the world of middle-class whites.^[62] Arvey, after all, had established a local reputation as a performer, writer, and advocate of contemporary music; she had been invited to teach in New York City as a result of her presentations of unfamiliar music. These things she either gave up or placed at Still's disposal.

If many of the things for which Arvey is held accountable really reflect Still's choices that may have been contradictory to the expectations of his friends and supporters, then she has been unfairly blamed for carrying out his wishes. Arvey often stated that she regarded their professional relationship as a partnership, a position that may have helped her become a target. It is clear from the record that Still, a major creative force, was in fact dominant. If for no other reason than her constant presence from 1934 on, it is important to consider what she brought to the relationship, and how the relationship changed them both.

As in the case of the "abusive widow," Arvey was indeed a talent far inferior to Still. If she became, especially after 1949, his political voice, she also represented his artistic and political wishes faithfully in the years that preceded the production of Troubled Island, that is, from 1934. Her activity as a gatekeeper for him, protecting his composition time, was something he clearly welcomed. But the isolation that eventually resulted may have created a more destructive situation than necessary, seen best in their mutual difficulty with the Black Arts movement and other political developments of the 1960s. Even before that, Arvey was the writer of his intemperate and uncharacteristic anticommunist speech and must bear that responsibility, while Still was responsible for delegating his political agency to her and for reading her words in public. Yet Still's aesthetic judgments about his music were always his own, including those on which the latter part of his career is based. I am convinced that Still's concern over the representation of Africa and African Americans in his music, and therefore his decisions about what to compose and how, antedated his relationship with Arvey, and that he explicitly retained aesthetic control over his artistic decisions. Recognizing that his artistic judgment was set, it was Arvey who accepted it as absolute and gave up her own personality in service to Still and to his work. Very likely she was the one who attempted to take on the burden of racial resentment, thus freeing Still to continue creating but assuming for herself an unbearable emotional burden. The relentless poverty that was their lot after World War II must have contributed to her alienation as

well. This, along with her unconscious resentment at having submerged her identity so fully in his, could well explain the anger of her later writing. If Still's position as an African American brought him unusual challenges and set him a path demanding extraordinary resourcefulness, and if he chose solutions that raise their own questions, we are better served by addressing these issues directly rather than by blaming Arvey.

To conclude, it is clear that Arvey began with an artistic persona of her own, however fragile it turned out to be. Early on, one can see emerging a mix of talent, energy, chutzpah, and self-doubt. Her broad interests represented something of a Los Angeles version of the "new," less fiercely grounded in rebellion against the nineteenth-century musical canon than we have come to expect elsewhere, more receptive to the work of "others," including Still, Forsythe, and herself. Later on there appears the weakness that resulted from submerging herself in the work first of Forsythe, then of Still; the suspicion that developed from her own distance and the exclusion and subordination of her own creative energy; the defensiveness that grew from the ugly incidents that went along with her racially mixed marriage; the narrowness of view that allowed her to perceive the indifference or opposition that was Still's lot as a pioneer as a communist plot. To return to the initial query about what Arvey brought to her relationship with Still, it would seem that her early eclecticism was more compatible with Still's ideas and his music than was the "new" in New York. She brought competence in handling his affairs, sympathy with his political views, an interest in dance and theater, energy and enthusiasm and willingness to subordinate herself to his needs. If anything, she served him too well. Whether she deflected Still from his purpose or facilitated his chosen path seems to be a judgment that depends on the observer's interpretation and perhaps on what part of Still's career is being considered, at least for now.

Appendix

DISMAL SWAMP ^{[ 63]}

[Forsythe's text, suppressed]

My heart pierces the thick pulpy wall of your body
To be caught in the delicately spun web of your spirit,

And drawn deeply into a core beyond the world, where
Resonantly a strong voice sounds for me your final Truth.

[Arvey's alternate text, as published:]

Oh, swamp! your gloomy surface strikes me cold
Your sombre stumps no joy awake
Yet beyond your rotting, odorous mould
Strange charm greets those who penetrate.

No longer dismal, swamp!
Wild ferns, green moss, small twigs a-spin
Your beauty acrid; verdure damp
What joy for those who gaze within!^[64]

THE BLACK MAN DANCES

[Forsythe's texts for each of the four movements; this entire piece was not published or performed.]

In the night the young man's flute is a shadow
Trailing from the spirit of his lost love.
Deep in the jungle; gloomed darkly in his song,
Slowly dances the heart of the lonely lover.

Sharp red lights crackle in the [jungle],
Dancing to the pounding of feet.
The poignant slowness of a hidden sorrow
Slows, once, the clear brightness of rhythm.

Their feet are leaves from an autumn tree,
They float, O Jazz River, on your bosom,
The piano swells thru smoke and gin,
The cabaret walls stand like a levee.

"Strut it, sistuhs an' brothuhs, Rent man on de way!"
Shout it voices, shoulders, hips . . .
Blacks and browns, clap hands and shout:
"Shout it sistuhs an' brothuhs, Rent man on de way!"

"Harlem Renaissance Man" Revisited:
The Politics of Race and Class in Still's Late Career

Still reached his artistic maturity as a versatile and innovative commercial musician and composer of concert music in Harlem in the 1920s. He sought to break down race-based limitations on the mixing of African American and European techniques, forms, and styles through the use of blues-based harmonic progressions, melodic turns, forms, and sometimes rhythms in his symphonic music as well as to blur class-based boundaries between the "popular" and the "serious." Unlike his white modernist colleagues, Still had nothing to gain and everything to lose by using the exclusionary, modernist creative languages such as serialism or atonality. His personal interest lay with integration into the larger society and the larger musical language–in becoming, as he said, "another American voice" whose work confounded both race- and class-based distinctions. His 1934 move to Los Angeles now appears to be an act of self-exile, one that allowed him to work out his own highly individual creative position–a position that continues to problematize his contribution to American music for both white and black observers. By leaving New York City, he distanced himself psychologically as well as geographically from the interconnected aesthetics and politics of white modernist composers and black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He repudiated essentialist racial distinctions but embraced and even exploited cultural difference in his art. In pursuing his own creative imperative, he was forced throughout his career to untangle and then reweave in his music (as in his life) many strands of American culture, strands in-

volving race and musical genre, class differences and political loyalties, gender and geography.

Over a period of a quarter century, his audience grew steadily. Yet his music often drew ambivalent critical responses that were permeated with stereotypically race-based expectations. The 1949 production of Troubled Island by the New York City Opera, a case in point, formed the apogee of Still's rise as a composer. But after that production, he came to believe that he was the target of a communist conspiracy. Here I want to discuss Still's outspoken anticommunism. Far from being a frivolous stance easily dismissed as personal paranoia, I propose that Still's anticommunism and his acceptance of what I will call the "plot theory" are closely connected to the race-based critical expectations often assigned to his music across his career. I make no attempt to explain or justify Still's public denunciations of other individuals; rather, I limit myself to an attempt to understand the political position that lay behind his unfortunate public statements.

Before addressing the questions about how it was that Still came to subscribe to a communist-inspired conspiracy theory and participate in the anticommunist movement, it is necessary to say a few things about Still's politics, his relationship to communism, and the anticommunist movement itself. Controversy over communism and the Communist party was lively and pervasive in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Despite the monumental indifference to matters political ascribed to him by his friends, Still could hardly have avoided contact with creative artists who were both politically involved and interested in communism in his New York years.^[1] Carlton Moss describes dining with Still at the Harlem YMCA, "the only decent place to eat in Harlem" and a major gathering place where political discussions must have swirled around him; he could scarcely have shut them all out.^[2] In the late 1920s and 1930s, Still worked with at least two writers who were close to the party. One of them was Moss, who supplied the short story on which Still's first opera, Blue Steel, is based; the other was Langston Hughes, author of the libretto for Troubled Island . Still welcomed the opportunity to compose these operas, both on black subjects. He collaborated amicably enough with Hughes on the project until Hughes left for the Spanish Civil War. He was even interested enough to put his name on two Popular Front-style letters supporting the Spanish Civil War, a liberal cause that was co-opted by the Soviets.^[3] Given the disruption of Harlem society in the

course of the Great Depression of the 1930s, it is possible that he shared at least a passing interest in communism with a good many Americans, including many modernist composers. In A History of Musical Americanism, Barbara Zuck gives a long-accepted explanation for this passing interest: "The Communist Party had an important sociopolitical function at this time in its organized agitation against groups fostering discrimination and racial hatred. Thus, political leftism in the 1930s simply became a common framework in which the American intelligentsia expressed their idealism and humanitarianism."^[4] Still's anti-communism flies in the face of this long-accepted explanation.

From the first public performances of his works in new music concerts in the 1920s, critics sought to pinpoint musical indications of Still's racial identity. They frequently evaluated his work in terms of their success at finding what they understood to be such features. In early 1925, for example, the New York Times critic Olin Downes (not himself a modernist) scolded Still for experimenting with modernist effects in From the Land of Dreams, thus by implication abandoning Downes's expectations: "Is Mr. Still unaware that the cheapest melody in the revues he has orchestrated has more reality and inspiration in it than the curious noises he has manufactured?"^[5] (Still followed From the Land of Dreams a year later with Levee Land, a self-styled "stunt" that brought the blues singer Florence Mills to the concert stage, creating a sensation in which his point remained unremarked.) Downes's expectations of "exotic folksong and popular rhythms" in his review of the 1949 production of Troubled Island is a much later expression of the same practice.^[6] It would seem that the challenge of composing concert music that was "recognizably Negroid" and at the same time avoided popular and commercial stereotypes was one reason Still turned away from his short-lived "modernist" phase of the early 1920s to focus on making his already-present "racial" expression more obvious. Still's self-characterized "racial " period lasted until 1932, but he continued to write pieces with "racial" features long after that date.^[7]

The first performances of the major works from Still's racial period, the Afro-American Symphony and the ballet Sahdji, took place in 1930 and 193 1. These performances, which were given in Rochester, were covered

by critics whose comments also reflected race-based expectations. For example, Emanuel Balaban's report to Modern Music (the "little magazine" of the musical modernists) on the premiere of the Afro-American Symphony rejected the idea that Still had composed an "acceptable" symphony, insisting instead that it was merely a "suite" and stressing the work's simplicity, sincerity, and use of "racial color," qualities safely attributable to an African American composer.

William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony would be more acceptable had he called it a suite. It is not cyclical nor symphonic in the accepted sense. Rather does it make use of dance forms. . . . The work is quite simple harmonically; in instrumental color typical of Still at his best. He derives extraordinary color with the scantiest of means, color that is essentially racial. Sincerity and naivete are among the most important elements in his work.^[8]

Balaban's report was merely wrong and stereotype-laden. It did not contain the vituperation the same symphony attracted a few years later, when it was performed in New York City.

New York-based modernists wrote about the Afro-American Symphony in late 1935, after it was presented by the New York Philharmonic. Marc Blitzstein reviewed the 1935 performance for Modern Music . He attacked the symphony on ideological grounds, criticizing Still's "servility, . . . [his] willingness to debauch a true folk-lore for high-class concert-hall consumption," thus turning the Afro-American Symphony into something "vulgar."^[9] The delay of four years between the Rochester premiere and the New York performance may have affected Blitzstein's reaction, as will be seen below in the discussion of the Composers' Collective. Soon after Blitzstein's diatribe, Aaron Copland wrote disdainfully of Still's music in general:

William Grant Still began about twelve years ago as the composer of a somewhat esoteric music for voice and a few instruments. Since that time he has completely changed his musical speech, which has become almost popular in tone. He has a certain natural musicality and charm, but there is a marked leaning toward the sweetly saccharine that one should like to see eliminated.

And of a piece that Still had striven to make "modern":

There is the "naive" kind [of American music] such as William Grant Still's . . . often based on the slushier side of jazz and mak[ing] a frank bid for popular appeal. . . . [O]ne can't help wishing that their musical content were more distinguished.^[10]

These remarks by Copland long irked Still, for their effect was to dismiss Still's efforts at crossing race- and class-related barriers of genre as merely profit oriented and sentimental.^[11]

In between the symphony's 1931 premiere and its first New York performance (1935), the Composers' Collective, affiliated with the Workers' Music League, an arm of the American Communist party, was formed by some of the New York modernists.^[12] The collective's composers, including Blitzstein (the group's secretary), attempted to compose music that would appeal to the masses. (Still, who had used folk materials for years in his concert music, must have seen this as an attempt to reinvent his example, one that was not acknowledged by the composers of the collective.)^[13] After the Composers' Collective's efforts to write new songs for workers to sing had ended in failure and the collective itself had dispersed in the late 1930s, folk song was adopted by the American Communist party as a means to promote its revolutionary ideas. A part of its Popular Front approach, the party's position coincided with wide interest in folk music and New Deal support for the arts.^[14] Blitzstein's scathing attack may have been less a personal matter than an exercise in the application of party policy, uncritically borrowed from the Soviet approach to the folk musics of its various republics and not thought through in terms that fitted the racism of American society.^[15] At about the same time, for example, Marian Anderson was attacked in the pages of New Masses for her recordings of spirituals that were "lacking the requisite rhythmic fire," "far too polite for comfort," and "castrated replicas of the original."^[16] For Still, Blitzstein's and Copland's critical attacks in the pages of Modern Music constituted more attempts to circumscribe his creative voice and tell him how he ought to compose. They represented a pernicious old stereotype dressed in new, left-wing clothes. As a prominent African American, Still was seen by the party as an attractive potential recruit. His experience with the members of the Composers' Collective, however, may well have reinforced him in his decision to reject any overtures he may have received from the party.

In the early 1940s, many creative artists who had been drawn to communism as an expression of their "idealism and humanitarianism," in Zuck's words, became disillusioned and either left the party or ceased to cooperate with it. While some African Americans remained loyal to the party publicly, others became seriously disenchanted. The prominent Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay had articulated his objections in 1937. I quote them here as a likely statement of Still's position as well:

(1) I reject absolutely the idea of government by dictatorship, which is the pillar of political Communism.

(2) I am intellectually against the Jesuitical tactics of the Communists: (a) their professed conversion to the principles of Democracy . . . ; (b) their skulking behind the smoke screen of People's Front and Collective Security . . . ; (c) their criminal slandering and persecution of their opponents.^[17]

Particularly relevant for Still, a steadfast integrationist, was McKay's view that, Popular Front and party claims to the contrary, the party really advocated black separatism: "Negro Nationalism in the United States . . . is the brain child of the American Communists and the real Negro nationalists are the Communists. They have advocated the creation of a separate Negro state within the American nation."^[18] Along with his own experiences in the world of concert music, the position stated by McKay was at the heart of Still's anticommunism and of his plot theory as well.

The comments by Blitzstein and Copland marked a general change in the critical reception of Still's work at least from 1936, the end of the period when his music, though it often drew stereotyped critical responses, regularly attracted critical admiration as well. In the mid-1930s it was the modernists who rejected this music; by the mid-1940s the attitude had become more general. By 1946 Olin Downes had arrived at a formula for discussing Still's music that conflated the class-based genre barrier with the frankly racial one:

The composer's expression is diluted in a way that deprives it of racial essence. . . . Years ago we heard music by Mr. Still, of a exoticism and imagination that recompensed considerably for the immaturity of its workmanship. . . . [Now, Still] appears to have smoothed out as a composer—conventionalized. This is unfortunate. It is to be hoped that in later scores Mr. Still will return to what hide-bound academicians might call the original error of his ways.^[19]

Troubled Island was premiered in 1949, eight years after its completion and eight years after the campaign for a production began. Following a rejection from the Metropolitan Opera, the campaign paused during the early years of World War II and then centered on the infant New York City Center for Music and Drama, which organized its own opera company not long after the war ended. It became a liberal cause célèbre in

which librettist Langston Hughes's high visibility on the left played a role, as did Eleanor Roosevelt and New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. In 1944 Still wrote about the opera to Leopold Stokowski, who had conducted several of Still's orchestral scores and was in his first year as conductor of the New York City Symphony, a one-year-old arm of the City Center for Music and Drama. Stokowski was enthusiastic, leading Still to expect a concert performance in the 1944–1945 season, to be followed by a fully staged production the following year.^[20] That plan ended because Stokowski's association with the symphony lasted only one season; he left without conducting an opera. Nevertheless, the company continued to indicate an interest in producing the opera. Newbold Morris, board chairman of the City Center of Music and Drama, Inc., wrote to contributors to a "Troubled Island Fund" on July 8, 1946:

I am writing to advise you that since Leopold Stokowski has left the City Center, we have recommended that this great opera by William Grant Still be included in the regular repertory of the New York City Opera Company during the 1946–1947 season. Mr. Halász, director of the Opera Company, feels that this production should be presented because we have not yet given to the public the work of an American composer.

This was not the first plan for producing the opera, as the next paragraph suggests:

It is felt that this method of presentation would be a distinct advantage over our original idea of producing the opera all by itself. It will give an opportunity to music critics and music lovers to hear this work and then, of course, if the response is what we hope it will be and impressive financial interests are attracted to it, it might be possible to send it on tour throughout the country.^[21]

More delays and a further lowering of expectations ensued.^[22] There was plenty of time for both composer (Still) and librettist (Hughes) to get discouraged and grow suspicious at the convoluted and seemingly endless process. Toward the end of this difficult period, Stokowski's own negative experience with the City Center may have encouraged Still's suspicions: "My experience with them was far from good. Confidentially, I would be careful with them if I were you."^[23] Through the years of waiting, Still clung stubbornly to his faith that the intrinsic quality of his work would eventually overcome the obstacles. The hoped-for result would not only be a production of Troubled Island but also a fundamental breakthrough in race relations in America—an aspiration he

had once attached to the Afro-American Symphony . When he was finally sure that the opera would be produced, he wrote, "I pray that the opera will be done successfully. Fears arise. I've waited thirty-seven years for it. All is in God's hands."^[24]

The opening night audience gave Troubled Island a prolonged ovation; Still took twenty bows. This memorable outpouring was offset by the critics' lukewarm reception. In particular, Olin Downes's review in the New York Times began by addressing Still's crossing of genres, starting with the opera's "cliches of Broadway and Hollywood" and complaining that "very little is new." Toward the end of the evening, in the market scene that opens the last act, Downes found a hint of the racial stereotype he had expected, a clear representation of "exotic folksong and popular rhythms." (Perhaps not coincidentally, the scene includes extraneous sexual byplay, which, also not coincidentally, Still removed in a later, unperformed revision described below.) Only in the small print did he grant Still's gift as a composer of opera who had created "a structure of considerable breadth and melodic curve." Other reviews in the white press followed Downes's model. Two additional performances, scheduled before the season began, did not change the critics' minds.^[25] Returning to Los Angeles after the intoxicating experience of the premiere, Still anticipated Voice of America broadcasts of the dress rehearsal, which had been recorded for that purpose.^[26] He also set about revisions in preparation for another production, for several possibilities had been mentioned.

Troubled Island is about the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessa-lines, who was murdered in 1806. In Act I, as the revolution is about to begin, Dessalines is treated as the hero-to-be. In Acts II and III, he is portrayed as the emperor of Haiti, debauched, illiterate, and unable to govern. Finally in Act IV he is murdered by his erstwhile followers; his first wife, abandoned in the years of debauchery, returns to sing a final aria over his body.

So convinced was Still that there would be further productions that he set about a revision that would give the denouement more weight, bringing the tragedy of the hero's high early aspirations and his subsequent destruction into more telling perspective. In the market scene that precedes the assassination, Still removed the lighthearted give-and-take

Example 7.
Excerpt from the revised version of  Troubled Island,  Act IV, final
scene, words added after the 1949 premiere performance at the New York
City Opera. Underlying chords in the strings in an eighth note—dotted quarter
pattern from measure 273 on are omitted from the piano-vocal score. 
Copyright 1976 by Southern Music Pub. Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Example 7.
(continued)

that had attracted Olin Downes's approval as suitably "exotic," deleting an exchange between a female fruit vendor and a fisherman of the chorus and substituting repetitions of text already sung for the excised words. The deleted text, sung by the fruit vendor and echoed by the chorus, includes this couplet:

Out of my way and let me pass!
All men's tongues are full of sass!

In the revised closing scene, Azelia (the abandoned first wife), comes upon Dessalines as he lies fatally wounded (but not, in this version, dead)

from the assassins' attack. This is part of the text (supplied by Verna Arvey) that Still interpolated to follow Azelia's discovery of Dessalines:

The text was added to a passage that was purely instrumental in the production.

Presently it became clear that none of Still's expectations for further performances and productions would be realized and that his opening night triumph had led to nothing. As his disappointment grew, he came to believe that the cause of these nonoutcomes lay with the unfair reviews by the New York critics, especially Downes, whom he had once counted as a supporter. The revised ending of Troubled Island, devised to enhance the power of the closing scene with a minimum of change, reflects his feelings. "They were never with you," one of the lines supplied by Arvey in this revised ending, takes on added meaning in the real-life context of fear and suspicion that had begun in the campaign to achieve a production.^[28]

After the Troubled Island production, Still became increasingly withdrawn. A sense of preoccupation and distance from his fellows had been a characteristic of his demeanor even in 1930; in his later years, it was carried to an unhappy extreme. He believed, as does his daughter, Judith Anne Still, to this day, that a communist-inspired conspiracy produced the destructive reviews and robbed him of the recognition that was his due. She recalls from her childhood (age seven):

My father returned from the New York production wrenched by disappointment. I remember how he looked in his long, charcoal grey overcoat and brown, wide-brimmed hat, wearily taking his suitcases out of our '36 Ford after we had brought him home from the airport. . . . He took out the little notebook in which he always jotted down notes when he did not have my

mother there to remember things for him, and he glanced through it. "Well, Verna," he said, "I just don't know. I just don't know what to say."^[29]

She describes her father reading from the little notebook, telling of a pre-performance visit to his hotel room by the Times drama critic Howard Taubman. Taubman, she reports, warned Still that the white critics had decided "the colored boy has gone far enough" and that the production would be panned. An inquiry by a New York singer friend drew the reply, "You know we're only going to let just so many Negroes through."^[30] She believes the notebook may survive, though it remains unlocated.^[31] Judith Anne Still's often-repeated personal testimony, which should not be dismissed out of hand, and that of her parents remain the strongest evidence for a specific plot to deny Still an unqualified operatic success.

One may track the development of the plot theory in Still's diary in the months following the production. On first hearing the recording made by the State Department for foreign broadcast, he reacted negatively to what he had heard on musical, not political, grounds, perhaps reflecting a postproduction letdown: "June 14 . . . Got dubs of records. Disappointed. Halász did a very poor job as director. Winter's amateurish. Some others not satisfactory."^[32] Later, after the Voice of America recording had been broadcast in Paris and Brussels, the State Department recalled the recording and advised Still that it was "mauvais."^[33] Stokowski's comment, "I am afraid there has been some intrigue going on against your Troubled Island, " refers to this incident.^[34] The plot theory appears full-blown in Still's diary in October 1949, some five months after the production: "Disquieting news re the persecution we are receiving from the Communists. Unfortunately we cannot tell people of this because they would not believe us. Only God can help us. I believe He will."^[35] Lumping the New York critics (especially Downes) with the modernists, Still wrote that he was "downcast over attitude of the so called 'musical intellectuals' toward My Music."^[36] By the following February, he concluded sadly, "I marvel on listening to the records of [Troubled Island ] at the critics' reaction. But they were biased for several reasons. I hate to be forced to admit that racial prejudice entered into it."^[37]

Still summed up his view about the coterie that opposed him in a letter to Howard Hanson that discussed the State Department's withdrawal of the recording from radio stations in Europe in August 1950: "Although I have recognized the fact that you, and I, and other American composers have had strong opposition for years, this is the first legal

evidence I have had, outside of a number of disparaging clippings written by members of the clicque [sic ]."^[38]

Still had started to speak out against communist exploitation of racial issues and recruitment of African Americans for the communist cause after the canceled production of 1946. To begin with, he published "Politics in Music" in a small southern California music periodical. After a slap at the "cerebral pseudo-music" of unnamed modernists who had, through intrigue, "done American music . . . a grave disservice," he distanced himself from the "many who subordinate their art to [communist] political propaganda," and named Paul Robeson and Earl Robinson as examples of the "many." He wrote of his own refusal to allow himself or his name "to be used indiscriminately by political left-wingers" and concluded, "I believe that most of us in the arts are liberal, but not Leftists. I believe that the American tradition itself is liberal. . . . Some Americans have chosen to make their liberality the servant of a foreign political ideology. . . . [S]uch a choice is not mine." In support of his argument, he made the point that his outspoken protest pieces from the early 1940s had been commissioned and performed under the current social and political order, without the need for a violent revolution to enable him to speak. He asserted that, contrary to party claims, he had artistic freedom under the current system: "I thought back to two of my own compositions which were strongest in protest against existing conditions (And They Lynched Him on a Tree and Plain Chant for America ) and remembered that both of them were initiated by a member of what is called our capitalistic class, the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin."^[39]

Three years later, he continued this theme in "Fifty Years of Progress in Music," a more widely distributed essay citing several African Americans (Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson) who either had reversed or were helping to reverse the stereotype that "Negroes were talented only in folk or theatrical music." He wrote of the effort that white symphony conductors had to make to hire African American musicians in the face of rigidly segregated musicians' unions; of the one black impresario in the United States (M. H. Fleming of Salt Lake City); of the tremendous success and worldwide influence of jazz as opposed to the ban against black singers at the Metropolitan Opera and the continuing difficulty that African American composers of concert music had gaining recognition. Turning to his recent experiences with Troubled

Island, he described the even higher barriers faced by black composers when they undertook to get an opera produced. For the first time, he publicly attacked two white modernist composers as enforcers of a communist-inspired, aesthetically doctrinaire strategy with racist as well as political implications:

It is a fact that there is in New York a powerful clique of white composers who exclude all others, white as well as colored. . . . it is interesting to know that Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, the leaders of the clique, were also publicized in Life magazine's April 4, 1949, issue, in an expose of "Dupes and Fellow Travelers." The connection is all too obvious!

Having refused to follow Leftist doctrines, certain colored and white composers have been opposed by this clique for many years. Among other things, the door to adequate recordings of our music—always a sore spot—has been closed to us. Thus the New York clique had made a totally unnecessary obstacle for many of us—an obstacle that has wider implications than the merely racial or personal.^[40]

In 1951, Still was reported by the Hollywood Citizen-News as having asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.^[41] The following year, he wrote at length to the Arkansas Gazette, not to name names this time, but to set forth his earnest conviction that the Communist party had no program to improve race relations in the United States and to cite evidence that the party had actually proposed (some years earlier) further segregation of the races as a solution.^[42]

In May 1953, he read a potentially incendiary speech to the San Jose, California, Chamber of Commerce. This time he neither argued the communist position on race relations nor settled for naming a couple of people who had sold out to a foreign power or were part of a politically motivated music conspiracy. The typescript of his remarks is entitled "Communism in Music." Some excerpts:

Although America has not been taken over by the Soviets in fact, it is true that Moscow has had a subtle but effective hand in our arts for many years. . . . [I]n no instance am I accusing any American citizen of being a Communist, because I am not in a position to say who carries a Party card and who does not. . . . I am able to mention a series of coincidences, backed up by printed documentation, and ask the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Still's list of those who furthered Moscow's "subtle but effective hand" is long, varied, and deserving of skepticism. Roy Harris is named for dedicating his Fifth Symphony to the Soviet Union; Aaron Copland, for allegedly being a member of twenty-eight communist-front groups. Also named are Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Olin Downes, Marc

Blitzstein, Newbold Morris (board chairman of the New York City Opera), and Kurt Weill. For good luck, perhaps, he named some others "whose names appear on such lists [of un-Americans] regularly": Larry Adler, Dean Dixon, Morton Gould, Earl Robinson, Margaret Webster, Garson Kanin. Even his old friend Henry Cowell, whom both Still and Arvey had stuck by all through the San Quentin years, is mentioned.^[43] In addition, Douglas Moore, Oscar Hammerstein II, Ira Gershwin, and Hanns Eisler are named, along with the sponsors of a concert of Eisler's music: Copland, Bernstein, David Diamond, Harris, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Randall Thompson. On the other side, he gave a much shorter list of composers whose work had been intentionally shut out: Charles Wakefield Cadman, Deems Taylor, and Paul Creston were named as loyal white American composers. In addition, Still reported, "On one occasion, I was made so uncomfortable in a studio job that I resigned, only to have my place taken by a known Communist." At the same time, he emphasized that his primary concern was race-based:

Here, a word must be said concerning the part played in all this by the racial angle. When the communists decided to take over America, they also decided that American Negroes would be their shock troops and lead a revolution for them. American Negroes have thus been under great pressure but, speaking in general terms, they have not as a whole fallen in with this plan. However, the pressure on them still continues, and any Negro leader who dares to think for himself is a target of special attention. So, both musically and racially, my work has been opposed.^[44]

In reading the speech, Still omitted these sentences by Arvey: "In the final analysis, Party membership may be only a technicality. The big question is: to what extent have certain musicians used their talents and their positions to further the aims of Soviet Russia?" Though Still did not identify his informant, he added his story about Howard Taubman's preperformance visit and warning. He also remarked on Newbold Morris's role in the firing of László Halász, the music director who had chosen to produce Troubled Island, and (erroneously) the subsequent decision to produce a work by Kurt Weill, whom he added to his list of communists.^[45] Neither Still nor Arvey changed their minds in later years; this speech, however, marks the end of Still's career as a public speaker on the issue of anticommunism.

One returns to the following overriding questions. Why did Still come to a conspiracy theory to explain the critical reception of his music (es-

pecially Troubled Island ) and the lack of recordings of his music? After all, many an opera by an American composer has sunk into the unmarked depths after a few performances, certainly some that may not have deserved that fate.^[46] Why the anticommunist position that laid the "failure" of Troubled Island on this doorstep and so soured both Still and Arvey toward much of the concert music establishment, especially considering that Still's concern with the racial issue is evident throughout? My purpose here is to understand how Still came to the conspiracy theory and to anticommunism, both of which are difficult to accept.

Other incidents, in conjunction with political developments, probably reinforced Still's perception of a pattern of communist-inspired racial persecution that he began to dwell on as the Troubled Island production developed. Noisy competition among political factions suffused the Hollywood film colony in the 1930s and 1940s. The rise to power of the leftist Screenwriters' Guild by 1940 was countered by the 1944 formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, organized by film producers to "combat what we regard as a growing menace within our own industry of Communists and to some degree Fascists."^[47] After years of shrill political debate (fanned in part by the intransigently antiunion Los Angeles Times ), the 1947 hearings on alleged communist influences in the Hollywood film colony may have predisposed Still toward his anticommunist position. It may have led him to wonder whether his treatment at the hands of Twentieth-Century Fox over Stormy Weather had been politically motivated. (In 1943, Still resigned from a lucrative studio contract, partly because he disapproved of the image of African Americans projected in Stormy Weather, the film he had been signed to work on and the "studio job" mentioned in the 1953 San Jose speech.)^[48]

Circumstances surrounding the premiere of Still's choral ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree in New York City in June 1940 may also have fostered Still's developing sense of distrust, even though (or even because) its positive critical reception showed no obvious sign of the pattern I have described in connection with the Afro-American Symphony and Troubled Island . Still learned a few days before the premiere that another new work calling for roughly similar performing forces, Roy Harris's Challenge 1940, would be performed at the same concert. Many years later, Arvey wondered aloud how Harris, once a member of the Composers' Collective, had managed to push his way onto this program and deflect some of the glory away from Still. The presence of Paul Robeson and of Earl Robinson's music, which Still knew about in ad-

vance, added to the surprise presence of Harris's music, may also have left Still feeling used by these leftist composers.^[49] Still had been aware earlier of conductor Artur Rodzinski's concerns about programming so timely and controversial a text as Still's piece employed. He probably never knew, however, that Rodzinski had commissioned Harris for another new work that would focus on a more traditionally patriotic and therefore "safer" topic. Because he did not go East for the concert and it was not broadcast in Los Angeles, he was unaware of how negligible Harris's contribution actually was.

With And They Lynched Him on a Tree, premiered in New York City in 1940, not only Still's highest aspirations for his music but also his single strongest public expression in music about racial oppression had been, as both Arvey and Still viewed it later, co-opted at its premiere by the left. Still's absence from the performance may have bolstered a sense of helplessness in the shaping of distant events. He may even have attributed the warm critical reception his own work received to the presence of music by Robinson and Harris, both of them far to his left, on the program. The feeling of co-optation became increasingly uncomfortable, at least in hindsight, for a man who was convinced that the Communist party was cynically exploiting racial violence in the United States with no program or expectation of improving the situation.

Another incident that may have influenced Still's thinking about communism cannot be dated. Judith Anne Still reports an occasion when her father was invited to a meeting in an "elegant apartment" where he was promised support as a composer and urged to become a party member as some other prominent African American artists had done. Langston Hughes was in Los Angeles in 1939 to work with Still on Troubled Island . Judith Anne Still suggests that Hughes arranged such a meeting at that time. Whenever it happened, the result seemed to be to create suspicion rather than interest on Still's part. The coolness that developed between Still and Hughes, which became public shortly before the opera's 1949 premiere, resulted in part from Hughes's departure for the Spanish Civil War before the Troubled Island libretto was completed to Still's satisfaction, but it may well have fed off their increasing political differences as well.

The situation with the New York City Opera beyond Still's previously described negotiations may also have encouraged the plot theory. Newbold Morris, the official who was the liaison between the City of New York and the opera company, was heavily involved in politics and often a center of public controversy because of his position with the city.

Among the board members and those on the "Troubled Island [fund-raising] Committee" was Claire M. Reis, longtime administrator of the League of Composers. Though the league had commissioned Still and given him early performance opportunities, it was also the sponsor of the journal that had led the critical attack on his work, Modern Music . Reis, who functioned as secretary of the opera board and had been one of the original donors, appears to have favored board involvement in artistic decisions, something that appears in Martin Sokol's account of Halász's firing in 1951.^[50] Divisions and politicking on the board were, apparently, well reported in the press, a situation that may have encouraged Still's dissatisfaction.

Around 1950, Still's income began to diminish. His fellowships (a Guggenheim, twice renewed, followed by a Rosenwald, renewed once) had long since run out. Commissions for new works and opportunities for commercial work likewise dwindled. He ascribed the problem to the conspiracy: "Funny that people think we have money when on the one hand I am denied employment in the movie studios as a composer, and on the other the intellectual & Communist musical people (who are in control) keep us from getting recordings and performances. They would have me starve."^[51]

None of the concerns I have mentioned—the stereotyping of his concert music throughout his career, the critical treatment of the Afro-American Symphony, the performance circumstances of And They Lynched Him on a Tree, the controversy over the music for Stormy Weather, the politicization of the New York City Opera, disappointment over the curtailed European broadcasts of Troubled Island as well as its critical reception in New York, even the loss of paying work—seems to be serious enough to warrant Still's increasing suspicion and his conversion to the communist plot theory in itself, let alone his public espousal of these positions. Yet, taken together, and given the atmosphere of mystification and manipulation that surrounded the activity of the party,^[52] one can see why someone in Still's position might well have discerned a pattern of obstructionism. Certainly one can recognize the desperation and the suggestion of paranoia in Still's journal entries quoted above over the months following the production.

One may infer that Still's anticommunism was the end product of a line of reasoning that his experience as a composer of concert music led him to ascribe to his critics: he was an African American, and African Americans were by stereotyped assumption considered not capable of composing in elite "higher forms." Hence the evaluations by white crit-

ics and composers that he was not really composing in the "higher forms" at all but must be writing commercial music. If that was the line of reasoning that led him to attack stereotyped, race-based expectations of his music, the reasoning he apparently applied in arriving at his anti-communist position formed a parallel, equally weak syllogism: Still composed (for whatever reason) conservative, less dissonant music and was himself politically conservative. The composers of the "New York clique" wrote more dissonant music, and many of its members or associates had flirted with communism, perhaps even joined the party, and had certainly espoused more liberal politics than he. Therefore dissonant music was part of a communist plot to undermine American music, and critical attacks on his music were a part of this plot. One of the ugly aspects of the anticommunist movement around 1950 was that "communist" was sometimes understood as a code word for "Jewish" and/or "homosexual." The homophobic and anti-Semitic implications here problematize the Stills' position even further. Still's African American identity made him a very visible composer of concert music who had long been a target for recruitment by the party. However alienated he had become from Copland, Blitzstein, and Harris et al., he had once been a New York modernist himself. He had once been grateful to Downes for addressing his work at all; now he was frustrated that Downes and other critics would not outgrow their racially stereotyped views of his music. His connections with Hollywood might have served to make him even more of a target of the anticommunist witch hunt. In addition, Arvey's heritage was Jewish. Her uncle, Jacob Arvey, occupied a prominent position in the Democratic machine that controlled Chicago politics; Uncle Jake's record of opposition to communist-controlled unions might not have protected either him or his relatives from what was, among other things, a partisan political movement.^[53] Still may thus have acted in part out of concern and support for Arvey. He granted the role of generic racism in what he had come to see as the Troubled Island debacle only in a moment of despair, months after the fact; it must have been less painful for him to perceive the "failure" of that production as contrived by a specific coterie than to see himself as a helpless victim of institutionalized racism. Under these circumstances, the flawed reasoning evident here may have had much less to do with Still's actions (and Arvey's) than with the fact that Still was culturally positioned in a way that left the path he chose as the one least objectionable. Perhaps the final irony of his entire involvement with anticommunism was that the McCarthyite movement rent American society in an excruciating way, one whose

scars remain visible; yet, except as a more or less theoretical civil liberties issue, it did nothing whatever to address the issue of racism. All it did, on either side, was to distract attention. Still's anticommunism—by far his most controversial public position—was thus irrelevant to his principal cause, which was to end racism.

If I have indeed tracked some of the reasons for Still's early perception that the radical left had no sympathy for his artistic aspirations and no agenda to improve race relations in America, and if the critical attacks on his music in the 1930s and later were partially motivated by doctrinaire political considerations, as now seems entirely possible, it may be necessary to rethink the charge of "paranoia." It must be remembered here that, despite the apparent opposition suggested by the term "anticommunism," the issue was never a simple question of "communists" versus "anticommunists." The crude polarized language that marked this movement fostered confusion at the time and continues to complicate discussions. The outspoken "anticommunists" were a relatively small group who shared right-wing, nativist views. They labeled many more liberal Republicans and Democrats, most of whom had long opposed the Communist Party, as "communists" or "communist sympathizers." It is now clear that many careers were destroyed by the extreme anticommunism of the McCarthy era. It is also clear that the party attempted to destroy the careers of prominent writers and artists who left it (e.g., Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright). We also know that critical judgments of artistic production have often been based on nonobjective criteria and that racism was pervasive among both liberals and conservatives. One could claim that Still was as much a victim of those battles as a participant. Such a claim has the advantage of insisting on the complicated contextual web in which Still took his position but denies Still's agency as an individual capable of making his own decisions. Whatever the whole story may be, individual paranoia is not a satisfactory explanation.

Whether there was a conspiracy or not seems less important at this point than that Still firmly believed that there was one and that he acted on that belief. Like his long-standing conservative politics and his often-stated belief in God, anticommunism became a way to confront and separate himself from the white liberal establishment that had both supported and thwarted him for so long. Forsythe's insight (perhaps gleaned from his conversations with Still) presents an aspect of the modernism that Still came to oppose at such cost and is relevant here despite

its incompleteness: "The intellectualism of modern music is more psychopathic than has been generally understood."^[54]

Yet racism remained Still's principal issue. In the early 1940s, Arvey had written,

Very few people regard racial matters as a vital topic in this war. How wrong they are will only be seen after the war is over, and perhaps even before it ends. We who are close to the heart of the matter know that is one of the chief reasons for the war and, after it's all over, this will be seen as a major objective. It's one of the necessary topics.^[55]

Jon Michael Spencer has recently documented Still's continuing statements against racism, showing them to form a long-standing and consistent pattern.^[56] Nevertheless, in the late 1950s and 1960s Still's public position as a McCarthyite remained unchanged.

The complexity of the situation in which the racial issue and Still's creative efforts were repeatedly submerged in other, irrelevant issues provides a background for the arguments about racial separation and integration that arose afresh in the 1960s. Not least among the ironies of Still's anticommunism is that in the twilight of his career he wound up in bitter opposition to the Black Power and Black Arts movements. Still had long been committed to racial integration, and he did not change his position; yet his difficulties in keeping the focus on the racial issue almost seem a textbook argument in favor of separatism, a doctrine he had addressed in another context decades earlier, in the course of his racial period. Yet a great part of Still's musical utterance had addressed the development of an authentic African American voice for concert music where there had been almost no such voice. It appears that he had hashed out the issue, probably not for the first time, with his Los Angeles friend Forsythe, who in 1930 was the first to write at length about Still's work. Forsythe ascribed the "dark-heart" to Still and celebrated Still's compositional achievements with the insights and the resolve born of his own struggle to produce literature and music that might reflect his own identity as an African American.^[57] The upshot was that Still rejected the principle of black separatism along with Forsythe's rhetoric, but not, where his music was concerned, the practice of self-conscious racial expression. His resistance to the prescriptions of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s simply repeated the position he had reached in his discussions a generation earlier with Forsythe and elsewhere. Since then, the

practice of ignoring middle-class African American cultural contributions has militated against knowledge, let alone acceptance, of Still's life and work by a wide American or African American audience.^[58] In what seems the greatest irony of all for the composer of Africa and the Afro-American Symphony, the Black Arts movement saw Still's great "classical" aesthetic experiment as irrelevant, if they knew about it at all.^[59]

Still's use of African American materials embodied a different approach from that of white composers, carrying the potential for subverting or even upsetting the racial status quo. Who might present "black" musical ideas as concert music and in what format and to what audience were clearly at issue as Still (and other African Americans) entered the arenas of concert music and opera. Still addressed this issue directly in his work.^[60] The critical reception of Still's music as too commercial, even too polished (however ironic in view of his early struggles to master his art), suggests that his long-term efforts were indeed successful at raising questions about the artificial barriers of genre that mirrored racial distinctions, that he was occupying new ground, opening an unfamiliar and not entirely welcome territory. The critical misunderstanding he attracted suggests that his challenge to a wide array of cultural stereotypes met with resistance, however poorly articulated, from both races.

It is worth remembering here that Still participated in not one but several transformations of the blues, including not only the "uplifting" transformation found in the Afro-American Symphony but also W. C. Handy's earlier metamorphosis of blues from a folk practice to the commercially viable (and sexually suggestive) "classic" blues of the 1920s and even Paul Whiteman's "sweet" synthesis of blues and jazz for large orchestra. Still's racial doubleness figures in each of these changes. Hindsight locates Still in the role of the mythical West African trickster, a figure he may not even have known about, as his career evolved.^[61] The self-consciousness with which he went about his compositional practices, his contrasting and complementary double personae as modernist and Harlem Renaissance man as well as the multiplicity of adaptations of African American cultural practice he experienced in the crucibles of Harlem and Broadway, make this a valuable insight. His response to the reception of From the Land of Dreams in 1925 had been to offer Levee Land, featuring a blues singer performing the blues to a "modern" accompaniment, to the same audience the next year. As we have seen, the Afro-American Symphony contained its own response to white commercial borrowings from African American folk music. His firing from Columbia Pictures in 1936 for inserting "The Music Goes Round and

Round" into a rehearsal of a quiet passage for the film Lost Horizon was surely a tricksterish gesture as well. It is possible, too, that the social change of the 1960s involved at last one too many adaptations for a single human being to negotiate. How does one accommodate to a cultural change that appears ready to bury one's entire creative output? (Close analysis by other scholars may show that, in his music, he did negotiate it.)

Still's anticommunist position hints at how complicated his chosen path was. His identification as an African American who confounded a range of sometimes conflicting popular stereotypes—raised in an urban Southern environment in a tight-knit family with aspirations to uplift the race; active and successful in the separate, culturally opposed worlds of commercial and concert music; more the modernist and Harlem Renaissance man than he would have cared to admit, self-exile notwithstanding—assured that his aesthetic synthesis would be a unique and valuable contribution to American culture. The uniqueness of Still's creative path meant that even when audiences received his music warmly, as they often did, his formal and technical achievement would go largely unrecognized. There was little room for this experiment, for the inflections of class distinction and racial expressivism that were essential features of Still's art, in the fierce and reactionary political and social binarisms of the 1950s. In this light, Verna Arvey's aphorism, "they were never with you," takes on a far richer meaning. When it comes right down to it, they—whoever "they" might have been, then or now—were probably never entirely against him, either. They just didn't, and don't, know quite what to make of him. By now, we may be ready to rethink the person and rehear the music.