William Grant Still:
A Study in Contradictions

Harold Bruce Forsythe

This is the earliest-known commentary on Still's work that extends beyond the a few sentences to be found in reviews of concerts at which his music was performed. It is also the only extended contemporary explication of Still's music from a New Negro, Africanist position. Both because of its specificity and because of the positions its author takes, it is far from the generalized New Negro positions on the music of African Americans taken by W. E. B. Du Bois or Alain Locke, described by Gayle Murchison in her chapter, above. Forsythe, who was twenty-two when he wrote this essay, drew on his training as a pianist and composer in the European and jazz traditions as well as his familiarity with the writers of the New Negro movement and the issues that occupied them. Both because he had long been aware of Still's work—ironic that he, raised in Los Angeles, knew more about the concert works of a composer who was based in New York than did eastern critics—and because of his own involvement as a composer who aspired to write concert music that honored his racial and national inheritance, his insights are compelling.

Forsythe's sweeping judgments about Still and his work were made on the basis of music now thought of as Still's "early" work, very little of it known today except by name. At the time Forsythe wrote the first surviving draft of this essay (February 1930), Still was just completing the score of Africa . It appears that Forsythe saw the score to From the Land of Dreams, but it has since been listed as lost and, though recently located,

has yet to be heard a second time. Portraits is entirely unknown except for its mention here. The two ballets, La Guiablesse and Sahdji, were still unfulfilled dreams, although a version of the former existed. The Afro-American Symphony, the Songs of Separation, the opera Troubled Island, and the choral ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree all lay in the future. By the time of the final draft (October), Forsythe had obtained the score to Darker America, but the newly completed Sahdji was out of reach in New York, as were the first performances of Africa . The virtual abandonment of this part of Still's production along with the vicissitudes of his later career (including Forsythe's estrangement from both Still and Verna Arvey and Still's changed position on Darker America ) at least raise the question of whether Forsythe's judgments are valid for Still's later career. That they will remain stimulating and germane to discussions of Still's work seems certain. Forsythe's passionate interest in Still's work to 1930 strongly suggests that a real reexamination of Still's music should include these now-forgotten works.^[1]

After a short preface and a rather pompous opening paragraph suggesting that most composers are misunderstood in their lifetimes, Forsythe launches into the meat of his essay. He offers a description of Still's unique talent and of Still's physical appearance, conversational manner, and pronouncements on other composers. A great deal of this detail is unique to this essay. After some discussion of earlier works, he then addresses the one substantial Still score to which Forsythe had access at that time, Darker America, composed in 1924 and published in 1928.

Still's Darker America has a large role in this essay and is discussed in the other sources published here as well. Therefore, some information about it is given here. Still provided this program note for the 1928 performance:

Darker America, as its title suggests, is representative of the American Negro. His serious side is presented and is intended to suggest the triumph of a people over their sorrows through fervent prayer. At the beginning the theme of the American Negro is announced by the strings in unison. Following a short development of this, the English horn announces the sorrow theme which is followed immediately by the theme of hope, given to muted brass accompanied by strings and woodwind. The sorrow theme returns treated differently, indicative of more intense sorrow as contrasted to passive sorrow indicated at the initial appearance of the theme. Again hope appears and the people seem about to rise above their troubles. But sorrow triumphs. Then the prayer is heard (given to oboe); the prayer of numbed rather than anguished

souls. Strongly contrasted moods follow, leading up to the triumph of the people near the end, at which point the three principal themes are combined.^[2]

Carol Oja describes the work as one "that synthesized black idioms with areas of intense chromaticism . . . by employing planes—or whole areas—that evoked African-American traditions and juxtaposing them, either vertically or horizontally, with a dissonant fabric." She points out his use of call-and-response technique: "The music for the 'call' imitates black vernacular idioms of uptown New York, and that for the 'response' is a dissonant crash from downtown."

Forsythe's judgment of the work is substantially different from that given later by Still in his "Personal Notes," his letters to Schwerké, and in Arvey's monograph, "William Grant Still." By the time Forsythe wrote about it so eloquently, Still had become dissatisfied with Darker America . "My opinion: Darker America has quite a few faults, viz. lack of consistency in form; too much material for such a short composition; faulty harmonization in places."^[3] Oja observes a similarity between the sectional structure of Darker America and that of "the potpourri of hit tunes that make up the overture to a musical comedy." Although the critics admired its energy and originality, they also commented on its "lack of development." Thus they "ignored the possibility that this kind of discontinuous formal structure might have grown out of Still's work as an arranger and that such a source could be credible."^[4] Still himself would likely have rejected the overture-medley structure of Darker America on the grounds that in practice it did not work as well as he wanted; he needed the broader symphonic structure to allow his themes enough space to speak effectively.

This is the second and later version of the manuscript, located in the Still-Arvey Papers; Judith Anne Still called my attention to it. Another, earlier version is now in the Forsythe Papers at The Huntington Library.^[5]

1930

. . . For there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion . . .

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici^[6]

To M. Edgard Varèse & Mr. Charles E. Pemberton:^[7]

Without the one, there would
Perhaps have been no necessity

For this book; and without the
Other, it could never have
Been written . . .

PREFACE . . .

This little book does not pretend to be a full appreciation or even a just criticism of the man with whom it is concerned. It no doubt suffers all the faults and disadvantages of a pioneer work, since it is, to my knowledge, the first that has yet been written concerning the peculiar gifts of Mr. Still. Biographical details are necessarily fragmentary and Darker America is the only work discussed at great length, for the reason that space prohibited discussion of but one work, and that composition seems to be the most representative production of the composer.

Holding no exemption from the common infirmities of human nature, I have fallen into the customary deceptions and errors, but possessed of an opinion, not rapidly or carefully nourished, but an opinion that burst forth surreptitiously and slowly spread its foliage until it became an obsession, it has seemed necessary to parade that thought before the world, and to listen with interest to the conflicting echoes that ring in answer. . . .

Bruce Forsythe '30

I

A few years ago, in a letter to Katherine Ruth Willoughby Heyman, I poured another decanter into the distilled ocean of tears already shed over the senile fact that the artist is doomed to years of misunderstanding, even from the otherwise judicious, and to eternal damnation as far as the masses are concerned.^[8] After lavishing the customary complimentary adjectives upon the Yahoos, I proceeded to lament that the only recourse the harassed artist has at his command is to make himself so incomprehensible that all and sundry will let him severely alone. Afflicted at that time with the seriousness of youth, it seemed very strange that many of our major critical voices were so bound in traditional technicalities and dogmas that they were, (and still are), unable to see that one may love the clear daylight of Mozart and at the same time intelligently appreciate the significance of Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse, and all the other men who have had something to say but have confounded the unimaginative by saying it in voices that sing somewhat out of tune with

the accepted Bibles of theory. Whereupon, the author of The Relation of Ultra-Modern to Archaic Music, wisely realizing all the unpleasant truths unseen by my optimistic eyes, answered that the artist is nothing more or less than a sort of glorified radio broadcasting station, sending out his "message" to all those who have receiving sets capable of "tuning in." It is apparent, even to a musician, that if a man followed Mrs. Heyman's advice, he would automatically make himself a disciple of my somewhat ancient suggestion.

This is the tragedy of the man whom nature has graced with ideas, and who has taken the trouble to equip himself with the mechanical means necessary for their logical development. Such a man is far removed from his immediate surroundings and from his friends. Physically he is among them. He eats, drinks, talks, rides or sleeps with them, but his feet at times trudge gingerly up steep precipices that are glass hills to them, broad fields that to them are barren he finds arable, his eyes are on dim and distant horizons that are mere strips of froth to them, ideas that to them are dead he flings into the marmoreal catafalque of his consciousness where, Phoenix-like, they spring to life dripping with the yeasty beauties of his soul, he hears soundless sounds, sees with blinding clarity invisible patterns, his hands are up to the elbows in effervescent urns from which his friends "flee howling in terror." Even when this man of talent sees an equal in a friend, or when he is working seemingly in the company of disinterested people, the wall is still existent. He will, perhaps, enthusiastically discuss his art. But when he feels the mysterious ferments working deep within him, and realizes that an idea is about to burst like a bud into a full blown rose, he flees man as he would flee the plague. Not for fear of bees that might suck from the rose its perfumes, but from plebeian nostrils without the delicacy necessary for the appreciation of its scent, and hands that might sully the flower with careless handling. When the first flush has gone he will share it. Jealously, and with perhaps no little suspicion and caution. He then feels a bit like "broadcasting," partly out of pride, partly from the urges of an inferiority complex, partly from healthy egotism, but no doubt largely from a profound conviction that he has said something worth saying and that someone else might benefit from the hearing of it. This, upon a high plane, is called talent. Upon an infinitely higher perch, so lofty at times that it is not clearly visible, it is called genius.

It is increasingly difficult to write of a Negro of talent. The Negro press itself is impossible. Each day there appears in its columns lengthy accounts of tea-party musicales at which "Prof." J. Wilson Holmes pre-

sented an "original composition which was a great delight to the audience," and Evelyn Mae Smith "charmed the audience with a beautiful trombone solo." These quite dreadful lucubrations are the work either of dunces, or of clever journalists out for larger circulations and advertising sections. Another class of writers, however, has done even greater damage. An intensely serious class of musician, functioning "critically" on weekly sheets, has overworked the words "beautiful," "talent," "genius," and "wonderful" until they have little meaning. Of course all sober men know that this is so much whim-wham. The Negro is not the prodigiously talented individual his sheets assure him that he is, as he is not so downtrodden and forlorn as these same rags contend. Quite to the contrary he seems to be a race of harmless and polite mediocrities. In every field he has practitioners, but the best of these men would be forced to accept third or fourth place on an interracial list. Some men, Cullen, Hughes, Thurman, McKay, Walrond, Douglass; have done excellent work.^[9] Perhaps in Jean Toomer he has a genius, as in Walrond, Hayes and Robeson he has men of very exceptional talent; but in the art with which we have to deal, he has very little to offer on the creative side.^[10] Mr. Burleigh has written some polite and polished things, and gained a reputation quite out of proportion with his artistic output.^[11] Dett, Diton, R. Johnson, Hall Johnson and many others have done good work.^[12] The latter has done some exquisite things in arranging spiritual melodies for his inimitable choir, and he has made some striking songs, notably his vigorous and resonant setting of Langston Hughes' "Fyah Lawd!" Freeman and others have written very dreadful things, even more dreadful than certain of Mr. Burleigh's songs.^[13] But these men for the most part have remained safely and sanely academic: their personalities are without color, and their occasional dabblings into intellectual seas have not been happy.

The intelligent white press is of course suspicious of Aframerican composers. They suspect, and rightly, that each new name ballyhooed will turn out to be a new conductor of spiritual arrangements, vocal confectionery and dishwatery compositions for the piano. They perhaps suspect what has long been a patent fact, that the Negro has little inclination or aptitude for music. A facile and fundamental sense of rhythm and harmony, and a group of excellent folk songs have given rise to the absurd nonsense about the Aframerican's "inherent musical genius." Of course it will be understood that what is meant by music is the ebb and flow of the polyphony of Bach and the cosmic sweep of Wagner's instrumentation and not the weeping of blues singers or the croon of plan-

tation darkies. In Los Angeles, my home city, the situation is grotesque. Among the Aframericans there is a handful of honest and serious students, but they are overwhelmed by the most complete, ambidextrous and pyrotechnical mob of charlatans ever created.

But for the inevitable exception. As usual, he is the least known, and, if we except a small and select circle, the least honored. His name is ignored on the lists of Negro artists, issued in the press during the past year. The Journal of the fraternity of which he is a member ignores him in a long lucubration on contemporary Negro composers. Dr. Moton has evidently never heard of him and Carl Diton has recently printed a longwinded essay in which my subject does not receive the insult of bare mention, among men who are by no means his equals.^[14] This man of whom I speak is a wildly colored flower, headily perfumed and exotic in contour, blooming alone but without loneliness in a vast and uncompromising desert. There is something poisonous about this perfume, to be true, but that has only tended to destroy the banalities of the common run of Negro composers. And to chuck their musty souls into the academic barrels where they belong. This man, William Grant Still, is without doubt the most talented Negro ever to compose music in America, and the only man of his race to abandon the past on one hand, to cling to it successfully on the other, and to make a successful and original artistic cohesion of the two. He has his hands in assorted dishes. He has written From the Land of Dreams, a strange, inchoate but brilliant fantasy, in which he takes the hand of that modern intellectual circle to which no other Negro, save only Jean Toomer has ever been admitted; he can write Levee Land, in which he brews the familiar racial stews in exotic kettles; he arranges American jazz well enough to work as running mate with Ferde Grofé;^[15] and he has written Darker America, the most significant and thoroughly artistic tonal work ever written by a man of African descent. These are unusual feats, suggesting a plastic intelligence and a sound education, to say nothing of a singularly resilient talent.

He has hidden behind his position as an arranger of popular music. Most of his closest associates receive with surprise the news that he is an artist. A lady once made a remark that instantly recalled the cry of Heine's inamorata: "They tell me my Heinrich is a great poet. Is it true?" Having suffered all the neglect and misunderstanding that inflicts such exquisite pain upon the man of talent, and having in his hide the pointed barbs of narrow-visioned critics, to say nothing of the even more painful arrows of patronization, he has constructed about himself that fortress

erected by all men who have something new to say and have had trouble in saying it to people who are incapable or unwilling to understand it. I knew him for months before I had the first inkling of his significance and before he showed me one of his orchestral scores.

Still is handsome in a languid Latin manner, inclined to portliness, and with eyes that glow with an unholy and unhealthy light when working, or when a beautiful woman interests him. It is curious that the flash is identical. The most revolutionary Negro composer ever heard of, and seemingly the quintessence of Paganism, he exhibits an outward display of religious devotion that is nothing so much as amusing. He has repeatedly warned me that unless I recant, repent, and mend my ways, I shall wake up one day in hell. To which I retorted that if he said verbally what he wrote in Darker America, he would be kicked out of Church. I am not here interested in religious discussions; there exists a vast literature of criticism to which I can add nothing. I note these facts because they are simply manifestations of the bundle of contradictory elements in this man's personality. He is singularly charming. It is significant that a sophisticated lady once remarked that he resembles a "bad little boy who has been caught stealing jam." He is equally at home in the company of jazz piano players, lady nondescripts, seers, bores, cabaret entertainers and society matrons. It is only when he is assailed by Intellectuals that he begins to fidget. However, I have seen him sit unmoved and without facial expression while intellectual imbeciles grew misty-eyed over the beauties of Bizet, and endure without facial expression the ordeal of a discourse on Beethoven by a local attorney. These feats at first greatly puzzled me. I soon found that he is the least intellectual of artists. He has little reverence for the very large men of his craft. He remarks without passion that Tristan is not so good, and that he prefers Italian opera; a moment later sneers at Mozart in such a manner that my ears fairly burn with anger; and causes one to fairly howl for his blood by refusing to be moved by Beethoven, Scriabin or anyone else, save only Bach. Sebastian he deems the greatest of composers, a fact for which we may pardon him his other sins. Since he has admitted that Bach has for him almost a purely intellectual appeal, it is perhaps logical that the mighty emotional storms of the Master [i.e., Beethoven] escape him. This seeming insensitiveness is very misleading, and will create a paradox when we come to consider his extraordinary feeling for orchestral color. Then too, we always take these opinions with a grain of salt. I for one, think Still is spoofing, and refuse to believe that he sees beauties in Leoncavallo, Mascagni and Verdi that he cannot see in Beethoven,

Mozart and Wagner.^[16] He does not know himself as yet, and it is a credit to his honesty that he does not pose.

His ideas on music are terse and brief. He believes that music is "primarily an appeal to the ear," and that the composer "who attempts to offer concrete theories" is posing, and that "the theories of certain composers, notably Rebikov,^[17] are nothing but attempts to explain away their musical shortcomings." He believes in tossing Jadassohn, Prout, Goetschius, and Richter into the desk drawer forevermore.^[18] (Always granting that one knows their contents, of course!) The only text he keeps at hand is Cecil Forsyth's splendid treatise on orchestration.^[19] He is pointed in his opinions, very honest, and cares little for justice where his own prejudices are concerned. He denounces other men's work without giving them any examination whatever, possibly because he has suffered the same fate.^[20]

He is a connoisseur in liqueurs, an epicure, and is fond of clothing. He is not interested in the world of ideas, outside of music, reads only time killing fiction, but betrays little of this one-sidedness in his compositions.

He has a gift of attraction that makes it impossible to regard him with indifference; you either like him immensely or dislike him. He has uncritically and with no examination, disparaged my own work, my "not much praised but altogether satisfactory lady" has become sweet on him, and I feel but a mild if slightly bitter amusement.^[21] The voice of the soothsayer has for him great truth.^[22] I would hate for a haruspice to tell him that I was hatching a foul plot against his life. He is not interested in the fact that he is a Republican, a Kappa Alpha Psi and a Negro, and I wish he would lose interest in the fact that he is a Presbyterian. He carries large tone cathedrals behind a skull embellished by raven-black locks and masked by a face radiating "good fellowship," artlessness and a baffling lack of profundity.

But underneath there is a nervous sensuality, a psychic unscrupulousness, a fitful spurting of moods that is like a vast fingerprint in his works. We shall see how Paul Rosenfeld, with his customary insight, saw this in Still's very first work to receive performance, and how it follows in nearly all his subsequent compositions. It is not altogether a physical sensuality, though that plays a large part, but a certain androgyne-like conception of creation dwelling in a man who is at once normal and devout. He is a perfect model of a pagan consciousness, a nihilistic entity without regard for the troubles and aspirations of other men, completely smothered under a mass of traditional hocus-pocus that refuses to allow him a moment of rational concrete speculation. His music, as usual, is

the safety valve. There his nervous energy and his unconscious revolt against the false mass of dogma under which his true person sleeps takes expression. Great slabs of sound in Darker America spit forth the sincerity of spirit many do not believe him to possess.^[23] He notes that it is his intention in this work to suggest the "triumph of a people over their sorrow through intense prayer," and that "The Backslider" is not a parody on religion. The exalted recesses of his unconscious spirit, immune from dogma and the pettiness so characteristic of artists, as well as conscience, flutter like an orchid hued but tinged with sable out of the dank cellars of apparent paradox.

He is not without sadism; a mental pleasure in mentally inflicting pain upon those who are fond of him. It is not the gross gloating of a successful suitor over a vanquished rival. He is harsh at times, as his music is harsh, for the pleasure received in rubbing the bruises with a disarming balsam. Sometimes it is with an innocent chord of the ninth, again it is with a "wisecrack." Sincerity at times hangs in the balance, but we cannot say that he is excused on artistic grounds, for he is forgiven by those for whom his music cannot possibly have any appeal or meaning. Such a man is a living argument both for and against himself. As mentioned above, he is not full of windy ideas that he is incapable of putting into practice. He is the only Negro composer with the instincts and heart of the artist (though totally devoid of any outward marks), a wealth of genuinely new and arresting ideas, and the technical training necessary to present them logically. He spurts out his compositions as abstract manifestations of feelings he cannot express concretely and proofs of an innate nobility of spirit that outwardly some would deny him. This is the dominant characteristic of genuine musical genius.

II

William Grant Still was born at Woodville, Mississippi, on May 11, 1895, but much of his early life was spent in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those who knew him as a child remark concerning the exceptional shyness and reserve of his manner, and his stubborn resolution. He was fortunate in having a mother of exceptional culture who wished to see him well educated. A monkey wrench was thrown in the family machinery, however, when the young William announced that he had decided to study music. The highly respectable family was scandalized. Perhaps it is necessary to explain that better-class Negro families of the very adjacent past lifted their skirts in holy horror of music as a profession (of

course they had no conception of it as an art), listing it with the theatre and with bank-robbery as snares set by a wily and ever alert devil to ensnare the young, lead astray the middle aged, and charm the footsteps of centenarians from the grave. The family pooh-poohed the boy's declaration and decided that he should become a doctor. Still laughs ironically at the very imagined picture of himself cutting out tonsils or prescribing for the baby's colic.

Openly defying parental authority, as he now defies the musty authority of textbook compilers, he followed his general studies at Wilber-force University with serious musical courses at Oberlin and at the New England Conservatory, where he had Mr. Chadwick as professor in composition. It is significant of his nervous haste that he completed a year's course in harmony in three months or less.^[24] About this time the most important event in Still's artistic development took place. Edgard Varèse, the brilliant French-American whose audacious compositions have been so deeply damned and highly praised, saw a potential anarch in young Still. Varèse is a very vivid personality, even to one who has never heard his works. Still has explained them to me so vividly that it seems that the shivering of percussion instruments has assailed my own ears. There are those who have tried to sneer at the composer of Octandre, Integrales and Hyperprism with the characteristic charge that the composer thinks "he can express the fourth dimension and the Einstein theory in music." Well, for all we know, perhaps it can be done! On the other hand M. Varèse has been called "the man destined to lead the art of music onward from Stravinsky's fresh virgin realms of sound." The remark of the Parisian newspaper, Comoedie that "Sa personalite lui vaut des admirateurs enthouslastes et des adversaires acharnes. C'est l'indice certain d'une force creatrice," is the best summary of the matter for one as unfamiliar with his scores as I am.^[25]

Still has been criticized for submitting himself to the influence of Varèse; well-meaning critics asserting that his virgin talent has been perverted by the revolutionary doctrines of the Frenchman. This, I think, is so much buncombe. It is possible that Still might have followed the same paths had he never met M. Varèse, but it is not likely that he would have followed them so well. Quite to the contrary of many critics of Levee Land, Varèse has put Still in possession of the materials that he needed. From him Still has learned how to be individual and free of the academic remnants of the New England Conservatory. I shudder to think of the young Negro writing consonant barcaroles for the pianoforte and Burleighesque songs. Examination of some choruses written during

student days makes the shudder more pronounced. Varèse has been the guide into uncharted paths of modern music, and after all influence has been shaken off and his spiritual forces thoroughly orientated to his method, the composer may express himself in a work of major consideration.^[26] It is perhaps regrettable that Still has not interested himself in literature, for the unconscious influence of some modern poet would undoubtedly have been of great inspiration, and not without a power of liberation from the astringency of his subjects and the unpoetic quality of his titles and programs.

In October, 1915, Still married Grace Bundy,^[27] and since has become the father of four children, to whom he is sentimentally attached. This streak of sentiment is perhaps the greatest handicap he has to overcome if he would become a major composer. It sticks to his fingers like soft taffy in the Portraits, one of his latest works; and a composition that notwithstanding is beautiful and imaginative. It is not always a dishwatery sentimentality, however, but has savage and even vicious undercurrents. I have spoken of the unholy flash of his eye, and immediately after the short indulgence in confection, he writes an atavistic sketch above a pounding ground bass that ends in a thrilling crash.

With his unusual success as an arranger of jazz I do not intend to dwell here, save to note that his arrangements for Runnin' Wild, Earl Carroll's Vanities, Shuffle Along, Dixie to Broadway, Don Voorhees and Paul Whiteman's orchestra stamp him with Grofé and Challis as a leader in the field, helped him to useful publicity and colored to a large extent his serious composition.^[28] Whether he has been more successful than Gershwin in utilizing jazz motives I will not opine, but it seems that the Rhapsody in Blue is a failure in that it is either one thing or the other successively, while Still has succeeded in writing, in Darker America, jazz rhythms that seem a logical and smooth part of the whole.^[29]

From the Land of Dreams, the first serious work of Still to receive public performance, (though Three Fantastic Dances for chamber orchestra, and From the Black Belt, for full orchestra as well as numerous songs, were already in manuscript,) was played at a concert given by the now defunct International Composers' Guild, an organization founded by Edgard Varèse for the advancement and presentation of new music, on February 8, 1925. The work appeared in company with Bartok's Sonatina, the Three Preludes of Acario Cotapos, and works by Carlos Chavez, the young Mexican who directs the National Conservatory at Mexico City, and who has lately received much recognition for his ballets, Four Suns and New Fire, Carlos Salzedo and Anton von Webern,

the protege of Schoenberg.^[30] The concert was conducted by Vladimir Shavitch.

From the Land of Dreams is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, viola, cello, double-bass, bells, triangle and three voices (high soprano, soprano and mezzo soprano), used instrumentally. It is in three movements, Lento, Allegretto, Allegro moderato. The composer excuses his introduction of jazz motives in the last movement on the ground that "there are dreams with clearly defined and very vivid outlines." The composition seems to have astonished the critics, although it is well known that most metropolitan writers carry an attitude with them to such concerts. One reviewer called forth the gods of tradition to witness that "William Grant Still . . . tried the instrumental use of human voices in an incoherent fantasy . . . and succeeded once or twice in making them sound like Wagner's Rhine Maidens." A clever phrase signifying nothing.

Olin Downes wrote: "One hoped for better things from Mr. Still . . . for he knows the rollicking and often original and entertaining music performed in Negro reviews. But Mr. Varèse, Mr. Still's teacher, has driven all of that out of him. Is Mr. Still aware that the cheapest music in the reviews that he has orchestrated has more reality and inspiration than the curious noises he has manufactured?"^[31] Mr. Downes proceeded to announce that the three voices did little but howl, and wound up with the remark that "this is music unprofitable to compose or listen to." It will seem that Mr. Downes has added his name to the long list of well-meaning but patronizing Nordics who have kindly taken it upon themselves to attempt to guide young Negroes out of forbidden territories. He is absurd in saying that there is more "inspiration" in burlesque-show music than in the shattering dissonances of this strange composition, although he is perhaps right about the "reality." He seems to expect Still to write like Walter Donaldson or Harry Burleigh, as others expect Roland Hayes to sing like Al Jolson.^[32] M. Varèse has by no means driven the jazz spirit away, or so far as I can make out, ever tried. Mr. Downes should have listened a bit more attentively to the last movement, and to the Fantasy on the St. Louis Blues, of which the New Yorker said: "The composer has prodigious gifts. The Fantasy  . . . is the best blues transcription that we have ever heard. . . ." The Jungle episode since written for Whiteman indicates that jazz is still very much with our composer. If the voices in the Dream "howl," so does the voice in Medtner's Vocal Sonata, and most of the coloratura soprano solos I have yet heard.^[33] No genuine idea of a sensuous and iridescent charac-

ter such as Still's is either unprofitable to compose or, indeed, to listen to. The half forgotten radio-leitmotif re-enters.

Among American critics, aside from James Huneker, Paul Rosenfeld, with his sympathetic insight, his broad catholicity of taste, and his breadth of knowledge, speaks with the greatest authority on musical subjects.^[34] Van Vechten is a mere surface polisher and wise-cracker, Mencken (the greatest of American men of letters and a profound music lover) is hopelessly archaic in his musical tastes and opinions, and most of the others, especially the academics, are negligible.^[35] Some are scared to death of a chord of the thirteenth, and some of a Mozart sonata. Edgard Varèse has written of Rosenfeld in the same French newspaper already quoted: "Cette vie Americaine a crée pareillement une litterature nationale. Celle-ci se divise en deux groupes: a la tete, du premier sont Paul Rosenfeld, le plus brillant essayiste Americain, remarquable par sa largeur de vues, par l'interet qu'il porte a tout ce qui est nouveau et par la generosite de sa pensee. . . ."^[36] What he goes [on] to say about Kreymborg is not important.^[37] But it is of great importance that this same Paul Rosenfeld wrote in the Musical Chronicle of From the Land of Dreams:

W.G.S . . . adds another member to the growing company of American musical embryonics. Still has learned a great deal from Edgard Varèse . . . although he has not yet quite learned to speak out freely: a certain absence of freedom in the use of his ideas limit one's enjoyment, and the material of the first two sections of his composition is insufficiently contrasted. But Mr. Still has a very sensuous (italics mine) approach to music. His employment of his instruments is at once rich and nude and decided. The upper ranges of his high soprano have an original penetrating color. And the use of jazz motives in the last movement of his work is more genuinely musical than any to which they have been put, by Milhaud, Gershwin, or any one else  . . . (italics mine).

Aside from the interesting circumstance that Mr. Rosenfeld pricked the Gershwinian bubble just when it seemed to be the thing to blow, it is remarkable how one of the dominant traits of Still's work struck him at this single hearing. The composer admits that From the Land of Dreams was little more than a tentative experiment in harmonic and orchestral color, and that in the writing of it his own personality was colored in a large manner by that of Varèse, but he violently denies that he is simply indulging here in strange noises for the mere sake of appearing ultra-modern. It is pleasing that one man saw the germ in this first of-

fering, and that man was Paul Rosenfeld himself. Alain Locke wrote the composer in compliment, and noted the work in his The New Negro, a fact that deserves mention because other than this, and letters from Charles S. Johnson, Still has been either abused or ignored by the intellectuals of his race.

Levee Land, a group of four songs with orchestral accompaniment, was performed at an I.C.G. concert at Aeolian Hall on January 24, 1926. The late Florence Mills sang them in an inimitable manner and a great deal of the applause went to the little entertainer. The performance was no mean feat for her since she read no music, and had to be taught the difficult scores entirely by ear. The first song, "Levee Song," is a blues poem in the Langston Hughes manner, treated modernistically, while the second, "Hey Hey," is broadly humorous and without words, as is the third, "Oroon." The composer, with rather comical care, has noted that the fourth number, "The Backslider," is not a satire on religion, as one would naturally think, from the words and music. It tells the old tale of the good sister who means well but:

"Wen dat banjo go plunk-plunk
An' foller up wid brrrunk
Ah felt religion goin'" . . .

Still has further proved his skill in writing richly humorous music in his setting of Dunbar's quaint little poem, "Winter's Approach," that has a droll hum that brings a contagious smile to the lips, and a highly characteristic rhythm. Of course there were the customary smart-alecky, superficial press comments on Levee Land . One writer, borrowing the ancient platitude concerning Varèse, said that Levee Land sounded like the Einstein theory and the fourth dimension applied to the blues. A compliment, perhaps. One may read, in Osgood's So this is Jazz,^[38] intelligent and favorable remarks on the work, and the Musical Courier, after digging up dry bones long enough to again denounce From the Land of Dreams as a "slavish imitation of the noises that Edgard Varèse calls compositions," admitted that the Levee songs are "good, healthy and sane," and that the composer belongs on a high plane of the super jazz fiend. It is not at all curious, but noteworthy that the Nordic is so willing to grant recognition to a Negro in this particular field, but denounces him as an invader the moment he feels himself too broad for confining racial fetters. Nobody complains when Julia Peterkin, Waldo Frank, Haldane McFall, W. B. Seabrook, Covarrubias and Du Bose Heyward take Negroid material and do vastly more with it than Ne-

groes themselves, but the moment a Negro steps nakedly into the symphonic field and speaks as a pure artist, howls of protest are heard.^[39]

Still's career has not been without either encouragement or rebuke. Black Bottom and Three Negro Songs for Orchestra were returned to him by Stokowski with the excuse that he had no time for their examination, and with a promise of future consideration that has never been kept.^[40] Still once high-handedly set about orchestrating Norman Peterkin's Dreamer's Tales, because both Dunsany and the little piano pieces appealed to him, and was severely reprimanded by Gustave Schirmer, whose firm owned the copyright.^[41] The group of symphonic sketches, From the Journal of a Wanderer, was submitted to a contest conducted in 1926 by the Chicago North Shore Festival Association, and although attaining to the distinction of being one of the five compositions selected for public rehearsal by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Frederick Stock, the contest was won by a Tragic Overture by Edward Collins. Maurice Rosenfeld wrote of the Journal that it was a series of five pieces "without rime or reason." In the spring of 1929, however, it was played by Dr. Howard Hanson and the Rochester Symphony with great success. The five pieces in the suite are: "Phantom Trail," "Magic Bells," "The Valley of Echoes," "Mystic Moon," and "Devil's Hollow." They display without doubt Still's consummate skill in instrumentation, and his knowledge of the resources of the orchestra, and are of astonishing rhythmic interest and harmonic ingenuity. One misses in this work the stark directness of Darker America, or the mysticism of Africa, but when considering the diverse subjects, it is perhaps a compliment to the composer's versatility. The Eastman School of Music has added a copy of the score to their library.

Of great interest is the ballet Still next undertook to write, at the instigation of Adolph Bolm, the distinguished dancer of the Russian Imperial Ballet, Diaghilev Ballet Russe, and the Chicago and Metropolitan grand opera companies. It was to have appeared on a series of ballets and music for small orchestra presented by the Chicago Allied Arts, Inc., in company with new compositions by Carpenter, Milhaud, Williams, and Alexander Tansman.^[42] Something happened, and the work was never produced. Bolm, to judge from his letters, had much praise and much censure for Still's score, and after a somewhat lengthy correspondence it was finally decided to dispense with the ballet, although it had been extensively advertised. The music was written to a legend of the isle of Martinique, La Guiablesse adapted by Ruth Page. There is much that is beautiful in the musical score. "The Dance of the Yzore" is particularly

delicate. This exquisitely fragile little piece offers another paradox in the work of a man who is a bundle of contradictions.^[43]

Shortly after the performance of From the Land of Dreams, Alain Locke had written to Still suggesting Richard Bruce's libretto for an African ballet "Sahdji" as a subject. Bruce's work had grown out of a very good sketch of the same name, printed in The New Negro . One wishes for time to dwell on this vivid personality, for of the myriad of young Negro "intellectuals," he is the most interesting, and has accomplished many beauties both with the pen and the brush. Still became interested in "Sahdji" but soon found that the poetry found little response in his own nature, and abandoned the project entirely. Bruce told me that he was rather pleased at this, since he would prefer to have his verse set by a "more modern" composer. "Sahdji" may be read in Locke's collection of Plays of Negro Life .

From the Black Belt, in six orchestral sketches, "Dance," "Honeysuckle," "Dance," "Des' Keep on Shovin'," "Blue," and "Serenade" was played by Georges Barrère's Little Symphony, and later, at one of John Murray Anderson's Sunday Nights at the Park Avenue Theatre, by a Negro orchestra conducted by Mr. Still himself. Log Cabin Ballads was played by the same organization. The witty Barrère has been very sympathetic to the composer, and the several letters, which Still treasures, are of a blunt kindliness, and show admiration for the gifts of the young Negro. O. G. Sonneck would not publish the Log Cabin Ballads in the orchestral version, although he seems to have liked them.^[44]

Jesse Zachary sang the three Dialect Songs at a concert at the New School for Social Research auditorium in 1927, during the same season, I believe, that Gorham Munson gave his lectures that have culminated in his splendid book Style and Form in American Prose .^[45] The concert was arranged by Paul Rosenfeld. One of the numbers, "Winter's Approach," has already been mentioned.^[46] The "Breath of a Rose" is a setting of a sentimental poem of Langston Hughes and bears the same relation to Still's best work that Debussy's banal and lovely "Romance" bears to his best songs. It is better than most of the songs of Negro composers, but it is by no means so good as the songs in the same idiom written by Frenchmen. The vague melodic outlines and the harmonic style seems affected with the little poem. On paper it looks positively rococo, when sung it is not without loveliness, which is a quite different thing from beauty. All of Still's work for piano, that is, songs with pianoforte accompaniment (he writes no piano solos) seem like diminu-

tions of orchestral scores. Keith Corelli and other pianists have expressed willingness to play the compositions of Still, and many believe that with effort, he could produce not inconsiderable work for that instrument. The piano plays a prominent part in the scores of Darker America and in Africa .

Darker America, the finest of Still's works to date, (Africa, completed a few days before this was written, will not as yet be considered) received its debut in 1926 under the auspices of the same association that has been so consistently kind to new composers. Of this extraordinary composition, Olin Downes, writing in the New York Times, said "The best music last night was that of Darker America  . . . the polyharmonic treatment of the theme in the opening and closing measures is more than ingenious. In communicates an atmosphere. . . . This music . . . has direction and feeling in it, qualities usually lacking in contemporaneous music." Samuel Chotzinoff and others were too busy with their flippant attitude to give an adequate review, but both the Musical Courier and Musical America saw that a great development had taken place in the composer since From the Land of Dreams, and that Darker America is something more than a groping but a broad free and logical form. The writer in the Musical Courier was bold enough to declare that Still is destined to "blossom forth as one of America's really great composers." (!) Far back, commenting on the Dreams, Still had warned that he was not trying to depict, uplift, or glorify anything, and when referring to Darker America, always uses the word "suggest." This did not stop a number of critics from denouncing him for not simply and straightforwardly expressing the life of the Negro. The composer explains that it was part of his intention to "suggest the triumph of a people over their sorrows through intense prayer." But the material got out of his control, stuffs get into it unawares, and Mr. Downes was right, but very incomplete.

Darker America is music devoid of sentimentality and attitudinizing. It is direct, vigorous, decided, at times harsh and rugged; with edges sharply out and with no rounded contours. Its formlessness is its form. It is the formlessness of the chaotic impulses and desires and rebellions of all of us. There is no French fluidity, no Debussian revelry in silken sensuousness, no dreamlike fantasy, no American chauvinism, blowing of racial trumpets, glorification of concrete ideals. It is music that awakens an indefinable thrill of recognition of some spiritual battle we have fought with ourselves, and from which we have emerged with our faith

in the gods a bit shattered. It is the battle of a man with himself; the rebellion not against man-created prejudices, but an unconscious revolt against the unseen forces that dog our footsteps from cradle to grave.

There are three themes in the work, two of which are of major importance.^[47] Mr. Downes was quite right in speaking of the theme that appears at the opening and closing. He might have added that it appears, in some guise or other, all the way through the work, and that it is intensely interesting to follow it as it serpentines its way along, changing hue with the versatility of the chameleon and disguising itself behind ingenious developments. This theme, of a bald nudity, and of great simplicity and directness, is announced in unison by the violins, viola and cello in G minor. It comprises simply the G minor triad, with a curt upbeat at the close. It is followed immediately by a unison passage in the woodwinds that accentuates the cutting rising inflection. A muffled pizzicato in the strings supported by the piano ushers in a plaintive answering motif in the flutes. The generative theme is then repeated, as decidedly as before, but this time the upbeat is replaced by a sinister drop of an augmented fourth. The ensuing development, intensification and colouring of these ideas, with the masterly and economical introduction of new material is more than remarkable. One is astonished, after study of the score, to read criticisms in which men charge that it is fragmentary, chaotic, pointless and other nonsensical things. Blocklike slabs of sound are sometimes vomited from the orchestra. There are no pretty patterns, neat little furbelows of harmonic or contrapuntal cleverness. The work has about it an elemental roughness and vigour. It is the work of a potential master of musical architectonics. There are spurts of nervousness, as the passage that ushers in the jazz theme; in quite Dettesque fourths. The rhythm, however, is not ordinary, nor is the colouring. Against this jazz motif, the woodwinds sing one of the three principal motifs of the piece. The composition is not without beauty. The passage in which the opening theme is sung in A-flat minor, below a sustained sixth in the horn and trombone, and a plaintive downbeat in the English horn, while the piano, with dampers against the strings, plucks sonorous chords of the ninth, is beautiful, if somewhat grotesque.

On page 41 of the printed score, the opening theme reappears FFF in the pianoforte, reinforced by the basses, cellos and bassoons, with the second subject appearing polyharmonically against it. This example of Still's polytonality is particularly biting and has an almost mystic modal flavour. The pompous inexorability of the principal theme is broken by a nervous ascending passage in the piano and flutes that is nothing so

much as the harassed gesture of a man feverishly trying to wipe away unpleasant thoughts with the back of his hand. But the gesture is fruitless. The bald, naked theme crashes forth again—again the flickering wave of the hand—but now more brutally than ever the uncompromising figure returns, this time in B-flat minor, where it is greatly intensified. Quickly it makes a final, irrefutable statement in the original key, where, as if nature has said the last, pitiless word, the spirit, with a rattling sigh accepts the final edict and is quiet. Whispers in the woodwinds, held up by a quietly tense pulse in the cymbal, close the composition.

Darker America was later awarded second prize in a contest conducted by the Eastman Foundation in Rochester, where Dr. Hanson played it with the Rochester orchestra. Dr. Hanson has been more than generous with young Still. The jury that awarded the prizes was composed of Olin Downes, Eugene Goossens, Howard Hanson, Edward Royce, Bernard Kaun and Stuart Sabin, who has written as favorably of the Journal of a Wanderer .

III

Still definitely severed the already strained lines uniting him with racial classification when the Pan-American Association of Composers, at their second meeting, held at Birchard Hall February 9th, 1928, voted him a member. Those present were Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Emerson Whithorne, Carlos Chavez, Adolph Weiss, Miss Armitage and Louis Mesam. Most of the representative modern composers were invited to join, Chavez wiring invitations to Cubans and F. F. Fabini to composers in South America.

Between Still and the other Aframerican composers no possible comparison can be made. He overtops them too simply and completely. He is, of course, a rank modernist, in the purest sense of that much abused word. As stated above, he is quite without windy theories concerning modernity, or anything else, though one may receive with surprise his spoken word that: "Music is nothing more than an appeal to the ear." But it is important that he does not make noise for the mere sake of causing vibrations. The same is true of many so-called "cacophonous" composers. They are called "crazy" by the same class that held Mr. Joyce thought it "was smart" to drop punctuation marks in the final chapter of Ulysses . Inherently sincere, Still writes nothing that does not sound well to his own extraordinarily sensitized ears. He pretends to dis-

like Scriabin, Mozart and Wagner, attitudes that are of no importance. He has not entirely escaped Debussy, as the first of the three Portraits affirms.

Although Darker America and other works are largely polytonal, Still is gradually falling into atonality. The first of the Portraits is supposedly in B flat, although that tonality scarcely appears in it from stem to stern. Rhythmically as above stated, he is astonishingly fertile. He flings out sprays of notes as a cowboy flings a lasso, coils them about an idea, and yanks them into the consciousness of the auditor, and (granting the commensurate radio set) makes it simmer and glisten in brilliant flickers of orchestral colour. In Darker America he hammers the eternal hopelessness of mankind into us and adds an ironically pious footnote. Pessimism with overtones of jazz and with a dogmatic tag! Looking at some of his scores, one seems to feel the rhythms tripping over one another, and laughing heartily as they fall into a crotchet, bruising their glittering backsides.

The newly completed Africa is claimed by the composer to be his major work. It is an imposing work, growing out of a later and arresting generative motif into a vast architecture. Space makes it impossible to discuss it in this little paper. No doubt it has by now been performed by Georges Barrère's orchestra, as has been planned.

In December, 1926, Comoedia noted that "William Grant Still, orchestrateur prestigeux, qui vient d'ecrire un opera, dont le livret fut connu par un poète de sa race, Countee Cullen."^[48] This opera, "Rashana," a fantastic story well suited to the gifts of the composer, has not yet been written, and bids fair never to be. Countee Cullen did not finish the libretto. In 1929 it passed into the hands of the writer, and my efforts have met with no musical response from the composer. It is possible that "Rashana" may go the way of La Guiablesse and Sadhji, which would be a pity, considering the beauty of the story and the abundant sketches he has made for it.

With the Journal of a Wanderer recently played, Three Portraits and Africa completed, and "Rashana" an unknown quantity, there can be no question as to whether or not Still is industrious, or whether or not he is written out. He is the contented and doting father of four children, and the sympathetic cousin of Charles Lawrence, whom I believe will be heard from musically in the future, since he complements his coldly searching intelligence with a genuine harmonic sense.^[49]

William Grant Still is, with Jean Toomer, one of the very first artists of his group. Both of these men have a touch of the divine spark, and are

no more to be classed as Negro artists than as Eskimos. Each time I read "Kabnis" or the scores of Darker America, Africa, or the sketchbooks of "Rashana," I am more convinced of it.^[50] Despite Still's name, he is destined to make a great noise in the world, when he has completely oriented himself, and when the spiritual stuffs, already sending out incipient flaShes of smoke and flame, burst forth in a fiery efflorescence. . . .

Bruce Forsythe
Los Angeles
October, 1930