1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Fawcett, 1961), 16-17.

2. For examples, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and other titles; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and other titles; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). African Americans in jazz and blues have attracted far more literary attention than those in other fields of music.

Baker's scheme, intended to apply to literary figures but appropriate as well for composers such as Still, involves complex and continuing negotiation among the "minstrel mask," the "mastery of formation," and presently the "deformation of mastery" in all fields of music. These categories generally refer to the portrayal of African Americans as European Americans wished or wish to see them and the mastery of the white formal languages by blacks and the consequent adjustment of the formal language to accommodate and express the creator's intention. These stages of expressiveness are not necessarily sequential; they may well overlap in ways as various as the creative artists involved.

3. See Willard Gatewood's chapter in this volume; also Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Du Bois.

4. Du Bois's visit is reported in Verna Arvey, "Scribblings," longhand notes on Still (no date, no page number). Gatewood is unable to confirm a visit to Little Rock by Du Bois; most likely Arvey was in error and the visitor was Booker T. Washington. (See Gatewood's chapter below.) Still's brief interest in becoming a chicken farmer was probably inspired by Washington's visit and his writings.

5. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 76, quoted in Ingrid Monson, "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 no. 3 (Fall 1995): 396-422. See also Imamu Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 231, 130, and passim, for expressions of concern about the integrity of the "autonomous blues" in the face of [Monson] "conformist and assimilationist demands of a black middle class that has dictated an 'image of a whiter Negro, to the poorer, blacker Negroes.'"

6. New York Age, February 12, 1921, 3, "In the Realm of Music," reports that Still was a member of the New Amsterdam Musical Association orchestra that gave a concert at the New Star Casino on 107th Street on Sunday evening, February 5, 1921, at 10:00 P.M . Dancing followed the formal program, a variation not modeled on symphony concerts downtown. Hall Johnson, later director of a black choir famous for its performances of spirituals, was among the violas. The program included music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Montague Ring, Sarasate, Ethelbert Nevin, and Elgar. (Coleridge-Taylor and Ring had African ancestors.)

Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See chap. 5, "Old-Line Religion and Musicians, 1920-1930," esp. pp. 106 ff. Harris documents a vigorous, widespread musical practice, although he regards it negatively as part of a borrowed middle-class culture that attempted to suppress indigenous African American musical customs. It is likely that most of these had features, like the dancing that followed the Star Casino performance, designed to accommodate both the location and the audience.

7. The nexus of blackface entertainment that provides part of the background from which the black musicals of the Harlem Renaissance is treated in, among other places, Robert Toll, Blacking Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For discussions of the need for more broadly based and perceptive musical analysis, see Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially Don Michael Randel, "The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox," and Gary Tomlinson, "Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies."

8. Still reacted to this incident by suppressing From the Land of Dreams . His experience raises the question of whether his next work to be performed at a similar concert, Levee Land, was intended as a practical joke. Levee Land, discussed in Murchison's essay, uses a blues singer and mixes "ultramodern" gestures with blues chord progressions. The performance of the work by the well-known blues singer Florence Mills, then appearing in a show with which Still was involved ( Runnin' Wild ), created a sensation, but the connection between Still's self-styled "stunt" and the response to From the Land of Dreams went unremarked.

9. Francis R. Bellamy, Outlook and Independent, undated clipping in Wallace Thurman Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Li- soft

brary, Yale University. Bellamy wrote, "One of the most interesting things about 'Harlem,' the new negro play at the Apollo, is its audience. For it is a prize-fight audience, a spectacle audience, and is fairly representative, we should say, of the element of American society among which the negro in real life has to make his way. . . . The white audience may seem more sinister to you than the colored play."

10. Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) spent several years in Los Angeles (ca. 1922-1925) before going to New York City and earning a reputation as a fine editor. There he met the younger Bruce Forsythe and published some of his early essays in a short-lived journal, so far unlocated, the Outlet . Thurman's influence on Forsythe's thinking about race will become clear in the separate chapter on Forsythe. For a recent study on Thurman, see Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodolphi, 1994). See also n. 7, p. 110. The clippings quoted below are in the Wallace Thurman Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

11. Francis R. Bellamy, Outlook and Independent .

12. John Anderson, New York Evening Journal, February 21, 1929. Clipping in Wallace Thurman Papers.

13. William Jourdan Rapp and Wallace Thurman, "The Negro Made Human: Two Authors Defend Their Play," unlabeled clipping, Wallace Thurman Papers.

14. In "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23, Donald Dorr confuses Forsythe with Richard Bruce [Nugent], a writer, artist, and actor from Washington, D.C., who wrote the initial sketch for Sahdji that appears in The New Negro (1925). (Bruce's sketch was expanded by Locke for Plays of Negro Life two years later; the expanded version became the source for Still's ballet.) Several years later, Locke wanted to recruit Bruce, not Forsythe, to write a libretto, for which Locke had constructed an outline, on the subject of Atlantis. Dorr cites a "Dear Bruce" letter from Locke, in the Department of Special Collections at Howard University. From its contents, the undated letter was written between the premiere of Sahdji in May 1931 and Locke's departure for Europe on June 13, 1931. Many of Locke's letters to Still begin "Dear Still," suggesting that Locke addressed males by their last names in his letters.

Although Locke claimed in the same letter to have registered the title and outline for "Atlantis," no record of it now exists in the Copyright Office. I am grateful to Wayne Shirley for making the copyright search and for pointing out that the material submitted by Locke for copyright, if it was in outline form, would probably have been rejected.

15. Forsythe's letter dated "1933" by a hand that is probably Still's is reproduced as an addendum to Forsythe's monograph. This letter elicited Still's "Personal Notes," also reproduced here.

16. Edward R. Reilly's remark that "widows of composers can have a considerable effect on the posthumous images we have of their husbands" surely applies to the Still-Arvey relationship. Quoted in "Snapshots," Nineteenth Cen - soft

tury Music 20, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 199, referring to Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence, 1888-1911, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

17. In April 1937, Fischer wrote to Still, "Frankly speaking, I am of the opinion that it would seem rather premature to now already publish an extended biography relating to yourself. In my opinion, this ought to be postponed for yet a few years until your name as a composer is still better known in every musical household." Two other letters from George Fischer to Still, September 24 and November 1, 1937, reveal his change of mind. Box 18, Still-Arvey Papers. The Fischer correspondence takes up more than one full box. Fischer handled several of Still's most successful publications in the late 1930s and promoted them assiduously.

18. Forsythe, "Frailest Leaves," undated typescript [ca. 1935], p. 445. Forsythe Papers, The Huntington Library.

1. Judith Anne Still, "Carrie Still Shepperson: The Hollow of Her Footsteps," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62 (Spring 1983): 41-42; Verna Arvey, In One Lifetime, 13; Little Rock City Directory, 1897-98 (Little Rock: R. L. Polk & Co., 1897), 437, 532.

2. Little Rock City Directory, 1900-1901 (Little Rock: Press of Arkansas Democrat Co., 1900), 56-58, 67-79; Ira Don Richards, "Little Rock on the Road to Reunion, 1865-1880," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Winter 1966): 328-329; John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in An Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 114-115; C. Allan Brown, "The Legacy of the 'City of Roses,'" Pulaski County Historical Review 31 (Summer 1983): 22-28.

3. Graves, Town and Country, 104-106; Carolyn Gray LeMaster, A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s-1990s (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 3-96 passim.

4. Graves, Town and Country, 108-109.

5. Ibid., 106-107; William Grant Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 26 (Autumn 1967): 285-286.

6. For a sophisticated analysis of Jeff Davis's appeal, see Raymond Arsenault, The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

7. Fon Louise Gordon, "The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1989), 199-200; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, "The Boycott Movement Against Jim Crow Streetcars in the South, 1900-1906," Journal of American History 55 (March 1969): 773-774; Graves, Town and Country, 218-225.

8. Adolphine Fletcher Terry, Charlotte Stephens: Little Rock's First Black Teacher (Little Rock: Academic Press of Little Rock, 1973), 107.

9. D. B. Gaines, Racial Possibilities as Indicated by the Negroes of Arkansas (Little Rock: Printing Department of Philander Smith College, 1898), 95.

10. On Gibbs, see Tom W. Dillard, "Golden Prospects and Fraternal Amenities: Mifflin W. Gibbs's Arkansas Years," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 1976): 307-333.

11. On Bush, see C. Calvin Smith, "John E. Bush of Arkansas, 1890-1910," Ozark Historical Review 2. (Spring 1973): 48-59; G. P. Hamilton, Beacon Lights of the Race (Memphis: P. H. Clarke & Brother, 1911), 139-151.

12. Arvey, IOL, 27-28.

13. These measures are explored in detail in Graves, Town and Country, chaps. 8, 9, and 10.

14. Fon Louise Gordon, "From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: Blacks in the Arkansas Delta," in Jeannie Whayne and Willard B. Gatewood, eds., The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), 116-117, 119; Tom W. Dillard, "Perseverance and Black History in Pulaski County, Arkansas—An Excerpt," Pulaski County Historical Review 31 (Winter 1983): 64.

15. See A. E. Bush and P. L. Dorman, eds., History of the Mosaic Templars of America: Its Founders and Officials (Little Rock: Central Printing Co., 1924); Berna Love, "A Proposal to Preserve and Rehabilitate Two Historical Landmarks on Ninth Street, the Mosaic Templars of America Headquarters Building and the Taborian Hall" (typescript in possession of the author).

16. I am indebted to Berna Love, Curator of Anthropology and Director of Social Science Education, Arkansas Museum of Science and History, Little Rock, for information on black businesses on Ninth Street; see her "Proposal" and "The Victory Chicken Shack: A Business History of West Ninth Street" (typescript in possession of the author).

17. Gaines, Racial Possibilities, 37-38; F. B. Coffin, Coffin's Poems with Ajax' Ordeals (Little Rock: The Colored Advocate, 1897); fifty years later Coffin published Factum Factorum (New York: Haven Press, 1947).

18. Love, "The Victory Chicken Shack," 5.

19. John E. Bush, "Afro-American People of Little Rock," Colored American Magazine 8 (January 1905): 39-42; Gordon, "Black Experience in Arkansas," 205.

20. "An Account by Emmett Jay Scott of a Speech in Little Rock," in Louis R. Harlan et al., eds., The Booker T. Wasbington Papers, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1989), 8:440-443.

21. Arvey, IOL, 29.

22. Booker T. Washington to Robert Russo Moton, August 21, 1911, in Harlan et al., Booker T. Washington Papers, 11: 296-297.

23. Little Rock City and Argenta City Directory, 1910 (Little Rock: Polk's Southern Directory Co., 1910), 44-46; Gaines, Racial Possibilities, 121-126.

24. Bush, "Afro-Americans in Little Rock," 39-41; Faustine C. Jones, A Traditional Model of Educational Excellence: Dunbar High School of Little Rock, Arkansas (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981), 12-14; Dillard, "Golden Prospects and Fraternal Amenities," 331n.

25. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 289-290; Arvey, IOL, 24.

26. On Florence Price, see Barbara Garvey Jackson, "Florence Price, Composer," BPiM 5 (Spring 1977): 29-43; Rae Linda Brown, "Selected Orchestral Music fo Florence B. Price (1888-1953) in the Context of Her Life and Work" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1988); Rae Linda Brown, "William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Davison: Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance," in Samuel Floyd, Jr. (ed.), Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1933), pp. 71-86; and Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (Urbaba: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

27. See William Pickens, Bursting Bonds; Enlarged Edition of the Heir of Slaves: The Autobiography of a "New Negro," ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Pickens's autobiographical Heir of Slaves appeared in 1911 and was reprinted as the first nine chapters of an autobiographical account entitled Bursting Bonds which was originally published in 1923.

28. Frank L. Mather, ed., Who's Who in the Colored Race, 1915 (Chicago: n.p., 1915), 149; Marla Manor, "The Ish House and the Doctor," Arkansas Democrat Sunday Magazine, June 9, 1968, 1-3.

29. Generalizations about the African American class structure are drawn from my Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

30. Paul D. Lack, "An Urban Slave Community: Little Rock, 1831-1862," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Autumn 1982): 264, 268.

31. E. M. Woods, The Negro in Etiquette: A Novelty (St. Louis: Baxton and Skinner, 1899).

32. This emerging entrepreneurial class is treated in E. M. Woods, Blue Book of Little Rock and Argenta, Arkansas (Little Rock: Capital Printing Co., 1907).

33. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 93-95; Gaines, Racial Possibilities, 61-75; see also Terry, Charlotte Stephens .

34. E. M. Saddler in (Indianapolis) Freeman, September 12, 1901; "The 1905 'New Handy Map of Little Rock,'" Pulaski County Historical Review 34 (Winter 1986): 91; Michael J. Beary, "Birds of Passage: A History of the Separate Black Episcopal Church in Arkansas, 1902-1939" (M.A. thesis, University of Arkansas, 1993), 15-16.

35. Jackson, "Florence Price," 32; Arvey, IOL, 31.

36. Willard B. Gatewood, "Frederick Douglass in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Winter 1982): 303-315; Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 94; Jackson, "Florence Price," 32.

37. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 290.

38. Ibid., 278; Arvey, IOL, 28-29, 37.

39. Arvey, IOL, 20-21, 25.

40. Judith Anne Still, "Carrie Still Shepperson," 37-46; Arvey, IOL, 17-20; Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 288.

41. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 288-289; Fon Louise Gordon, "Black Women in Arkansas," Pulaski County Historical Review 35 (Summer 1987): 28-29; Benjamin G. Edwards, "The Life of William Grant Still" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), 49-50; Judith Anne Still, "Carrie Still Shep-person," 42-43.

42. William Grant Still, "Remembering Arkansas," in Claire Detels, ed., William Grant Still Studies at the University of Arkansas: A 1984 Congress Report (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1985), 44.

43. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 288-290.

44. Ibid., 285, 286; Edwards, "William Grant Still," 53.

45. Arvey, IOL, 36-37; Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 291; William Grant Still, "A Composer's Viewpoint," in Fusion 2, 65-66.

46. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 286.

47. Ibid.

48. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 69, 73, 123, 205.

49. Arvey, IOL, 1-12; Still, "A Composer's Viewpoint," 134; Judith Anne Still, "Carrie Still Shepperson," 41.

50. On "passing" in Little Rock, see Arvey, IOL, 34; Gordon, "Black Women in Arkansas," 34.

51. On the "one drop" rule, see Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980).

52. Still, "My Arkansas Boyhood," 286.

53. Ibid., 289.

1. See Carol J. Oja, "'New Music' and the 'New Negro': The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony," BMRJ 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 145-169, for a study of Still's involvement in modernist music circles in New York during the mid-twenties.

2. See Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988); and George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

3. Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925; reprint New York: Atheneum, 1968), 7.

4. Ibid., xvii.

5. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 291.

6. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 173.

7. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 163.

8. Eileen Southern, "William Grant Still—Trailblazer," in Claire Detels, ed., William Grant Still Studies at the University of Arkansas: A 1984 Congress Report (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas—Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, 1985), 2.

9. The Clef Club functioned as a booking agency or business organization active in securing employment for black musicians, sometimes fielding several orchestras simultaneously.

10. Arvey, IOL, 60.

11. Letter, William Grant Still to Ralph McCombs, March 30, 1949; William Grant Still, "Highway 1, U.S.A.," typescript of speech, p. 3, Still-Arvey Papers.

12. Still, "Highway 1, U.S.A.," 2.

13. Donald Dorr, "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23, reprinted in Fusion 2, 144-161.

14. Moss was one of the organizers and one of three African American men named to direct the Negro Theater Unit of the WPA Federal Theater Project in New York City. The others were Harry Edwards and Augustus Smith. "Three Colored Men Are Named to Direct the Negro WPA Theater," unidentified clipping, Scrapbook, 1935-1936, n.p., Still-Arvey Papers. Blue Steel has never been performed.

15. Alain Locke to William Grant Still, July 8, 1927, Still-Arvey Papers.

16. Locke to Still, July 8, 1927, Still-Arvey Papers.

17. Dorr, "Chosen Image." Dorr erroneously interprets Locke's "Bruce" as Harold Bruce Forsythe. In his correspondence, Locke regularly referred to other males by their last names; he wrote to "Dear Still" and signed himself "Locke." Neither Richard Bruce, who eventually dropped his family name (Nugent), nor Forsythe, who was almost certainly unknown to Locke, is an exception.

18. Locke to Still, December 20, 1937, Still-Arvey Papers.

19. Locke, The New Negro, xv.

20. Du Bois, 44.

21. Ibid., 45.

22. Ibid., 136.

23. Ibid., 138.

24. Ibid., 47.

25. Ibid., 270.

26. Ibid., 265.

27. Ibid. Still turned beyond the spiritual to the blues as having absorbed less Caucasian influence than the spiritual, however. See "The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo," below.

28. The preferred term to refer to persons of African descent dwelling in the United States is "African American," though "black" is also currently used. Throughout this article, the term "Negro" is employed as a metaphor, either as Locke used the term in The New Negro, to refer to an ideal, or as an abstraction of myths or stereotypes.

29. Locke, The New Negro, 5.

30. Ibid., 4.

31. Ibid., 200.

32. Ibid., 210.

33. Ibid., 15.

34. Ibid., 4.

35. Ibid., 15.

36. The manuscript for this work resurfaced in 1995, since the original publication of this article, and is in the possession of WGSM. Future study of this work promises to illuminate Still's style prior to study with Varèse. I am grateful to Catherine Parsons Smith for allowing me to examine a copy of this manuscript.

37. For further discussion of Still's "ultramodernism" during his Varèse period, see Oja, "Still." For Varèse's opinion of Still, see his letter to Dane Rudhyar, March 7, 1928, quoted below in "Finding His Voice."

38. See below in this volume, "Personal Notes," "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," and the essays by Forsythe and Arvey, for more discussion of Darker America .

39. For the musical themes in Darker America, see "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," below.

40. Call-and-response is a structural pattern in which a melodic phrase or call, sung by a leader, is answered by another phrase or response, sung by another voice or by a group.

41. William Grant Still, "American Art and Culture: The Negro's Contribution," October 24-27, 1966, typescript of speech, p. 5, Still-Arvey Papers. [Editor's note: Another of his "ultramodern" works, From the Land of Dreams, described in the introduction, certainly helped to precipitate this decision, since it is even more dissonant than Darker America, and its use of blues much less obvious. From the Land of Dreams, however, was neither published nor given a second performance, and was unknown to critics and commentators on Still's music until the rediscovery of its score in 1997 by Carolyn L. Quin.]

42. William Grant Still, "The Contemporary Composer and His Audience," June 15, 1964, typescript, p. 6, Still-Arvey Papers. Still's move away from modernism was probably more difficult because he admired Varèse as a musician and a man.

43. William Grant Still Thematic Catalog, n.d., p. 7, Still-Arvey Papers.

44. Oja, "Still," 157.

45. From the Land of Dreams is discussed in the introduction.

46. William Grant Still, untitled essay, [Ladies and Gentlemen], n.d., typescript, p. 4, Still-Arvey Papers.

47. Letter, William Grant Still to William Treat Upton, n.d. [ca. 1925], Upton Collection, LC.

48. William Grant Still, untitled speech, delivered February 2, 1968, at Honors Luncheon, Association of the Presentation and Preservation of the Arts, 1968, typescript, p. 1, Still-Arvey Papers. See "The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo," for two other statements by Still, both much closer to the time of the symphony's composition, that strongly reinforce this view.

49. Throughout this paragraph, the term "Negro" is used metaphorically.

50. Still, untitled speech on the Afro-American Symphony, n.d., typescript, p. 1, Still-Arvey Papers.

51. Leopold Stokowski telegram to Still, December 2, 1937, Still-Arvey Papers.

52. William Grant Still Thematic Catalog, 27.

53. Letter, Still to Rudolph Dunbar, December 1, 1945, Still-Arvey Papers; also discussed in Arvey, "William Grant Still" in this volume.

54. Letter, Still to Irving Schwerké, December 20, 1937, Still-Arvey Papers.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. William Grant Still, "An Afro-American Composer's Point of View," in Henry Cowell, ed., American Composers on American Music (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1932), 182-183.

59. Program for the Ninth Annual Music Week in Harlem, May 2-7, 1932, Still-Arvey Papers.

60. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 198.

61. William Grant Still, "A Composer's Viewpoint," Fusion 2, 64.

62. Still, speech, "The Composer's Creed," May 29, 1963, and January 22, 1964, for Dr. Karl With's class, University of California, Los Angeles, typescript, p. 5, Still-Arvey Papers.

63. Ibid., 6.

64. Letter, Still to Joseph W. Ferman, September 23, 1943, Still-Arvey Papers.

65. William Grant Still, "The Music of My Race" (English translation of "La Musica de Mi Raza,"), p. 2, Still-Arvey Papers.

66. Ibid.

67. Still, speech, "Negro Music," July 22, 1969, typescript, p. 6, Still-Arvey Papers.

68. William Grant Still and Verna Arvey, "Negro Music in the Americas," Revue Internationale de Musique (Brussels) 1 (May-June): 283. In his early writ- soft

ten remarks about the Afro-American Symphony, however, he argued in favor of using the blues in preference to the spirituals because the blues was the black music least influenced by the European tradition. See "The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo," below.

69. William Grant Still, "Serious Music: New Field for the Negro," Variety 197 (January 5, 1955): 227.

70. William Grant Still, "Can Music Make a Career?" Negro Digest 7 (December 1948): 82.

71. Ibid., 82.

72. Letter, Still to Schwerké, January 9, 1931, quoted fully below in "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké."

73. Still, "Are Negro Composers Handicapped?" Baton (November 1937): n.p.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid.

77. Still, interview, ed. Edward Kamarck, Arts in Society, Special Issue: The Arts and the Black Revolution (n.p.: Research Studies and Developments in the Arts, University Extension, University of Wisconsin, 1968): 222.

78. Still, speech for the installation of new officers of the Los Angeles Chapter of National Association of Negro Musicians, 1963, p. 2, Still-Arvey Papers.

79. Letter, Still to Richard Bardolph, October 15, 1955.

80. Still, speech, "The Composer's Creed," p. 4, Still-Arvey Papers. This becomes particularly important given Still's opposition to communism, for the Communist party took the position that music was indeed a political expression. He obviously wanted it to serve the cause of racial equality, however.

81. William Grant Still Thematic Catalog, 32.

82. Wayne D. Shirley, "William Grant Still's Choral Ballad And They Lynched Him On a Tree," AM 12 (Winter 1994): 425-461.

83. Letter, Locke to Still, August 9, 1939, Still-Arvey Papers.

84. As quoted in Dorr, "Chosen Image," 9.

1. This chapter is extensively revised from an earlier essay intended for an exhibition, "The Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles," originally scheduled for 1991 and opened in February 1995.

2. Still's arrangements are widely scattered. Some early arrangements published by Pace & Handy in Memphis have been located at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. Approximately one hundred are in the Paul Whiteman Archive at Williams College. About half that number of arrangements for Robison's Deep River Orchestra have been identified in the Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Some arrangements of spirituals were published. A few other arrangements are in the Eubie Blake Collection at the Maryland Historical Society. Many others are lost or unlocated.

Judith Anne Still has counted some four hundred such arrangements listed by title in Still's diaries, which are only known for 1929-1930 and 1937—and thus do not include many of his busiest years. The estimate of one thousand is mine, based on this admittedly incomplete information. Research on Still as an arranger and composer of popular music is in its infancy; copyright deposits are one example of a major source that remains virtually untouched.

3. Diary, October 24, 1930.

4. According to Thomas Warburton, "Still, William Grant," in Amerigrove, 4:544, Howard Hanson, the major champion of Still's music, coined this phrase. Intended as high praise, its limiting function soon became evident.

5. W. C. Handy's (1873-1958) importance to the history of the blues is well established. Biographical information appears in print as early as 1908, in G. P. Hamilton, The Bright Side of Memphis: A Compendium of Information Concerning the Colored People of Memphis, Tennessee, Showing Their Achievements in Business, Industrial and Professional Life and Including Articles of General Interest to the Race (Memphis, 1908). He published an autobiography, Father of the Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1941). Most of Handy's surviving correspondence, business records, and music are in a closed private collection.

The songs were published in band arrangements by Pace & Handy, Memphis. I am indebted to Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, for pointing out the existence of eight of these arrangements in the John Robichaux Collection. One, "No Matter What You Do," sets lyrics by his first wife, Grace Bundy, whom he met at Wilberforce; the lyrics are not included in the arrangement. Several other of Still's early stock band arrangements have been located by Gayle Murchison in a private collection.

6. For information on the enterprising Europe, whose untimely death interrupted the development of a distinctively African American symphonic tradition, see Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); also Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, eds., Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York: Viking Press, 1973). Eubie Blake, who composed most of the music for Shuffle Along and was a longtime friend of Still, was Europe's assistant conductor. The Blake Collection contains folders of music used by Europe's band. Luckeyth [Luckey, Luckyeth] Roberts (1887-1968) was a pianist, bandleader, and composer of musical comedy.

7. For information on Shuffle Along, the Clef Club, and the influential James Reese Europe, whom Still probably did not meet, see Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake .

8. There is surprisingly little information on Vodery despite his prominence. See Mark Tucker, "In Search of Will Vodery," BMRJ 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 128-182. A collection on Donald Voorhees (1903-1989) is located in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

9. Olin Downes, review of International Composers' Guild concert of February 8, 1925, that included Still's From the Land of Dreams, published February 9.

10. J. Brooks Atkinson, review of show opening August 6, 1928. Arrangers worked under pressure of time with little thought beyond the immediate production or performance. Since they worked on an ephemeral product in collaboration with composers, conductors, performers, and perhaps authors and directors as well, the evidence about their contributions is often anecdotal in nature.

11. See Wayne D. Shirley, "Religion in Rhythm: William Grant Still's Orchestrations for Willard Robison's 'Deep River Hour," BMRJ 18, no. 2 (forthcoming). Archival tapes of air checks from the "Deep River Hour" are at WGSM. Still's later comments on arranging and composing for radio, along with his ideas about "American" music, appear in an interview done by Forsythe, now in the Forsythe Papers.

12. Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America (New York: Random House, 1948), 478-479.

13. No formal record has been found of Still's study with Chadwick, who was in ill health by 1921. See Steven Ledbetter, "William Grant Still, George Whitefield Chadwick, and the New England Conservatory," paper read at "A Tribute to William Grant Still," Flagstaff, Arizona, June 25, 1998.

14. See Still's "Personal Notes," below, for his log of these performances and critical responses.

15. Still expressed his admiration for Varèse several times. A letter from Varèse to Dane Rudhyar, listing his best students and describing them, gives his teacher's view of Still:

7 March 1928

 . . .

William G. Still—A Negro, my student since 1922, lyrical nature, typical of his race. I handle him with care, not wishing that he should lose these qualities, but not wishing that he should keep the banalities of the whites that was inculcated through the course he followed at the New England Conservatory. . . . These [i.e., Edouardo Fabini, Adolf Weiss, Colin McPhee, Sam Reichmann, and Still] are the students who do themselves credit and for whom we await with confidence and hope what the future will allow them to achieve.

William G. Still négre—mon élève depuis 1922—nature lyrique—et typique de sa race. Je le pendle avec précaution—ne voulant pas qu'il perde ses qualités—mais ne voulant pas non plus qu'il garde les poncifes "des blancs" qui lui ont été inculquè par les cours qu'il a suivi au New England Conservatory. Ceci. . . . Faites lui crèdit et attendez avec confiance et espèrè ce que le futur leur permettre de réaliser .

Rudhyar Collection, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library, Stanford University.

16. Thomas A. DeLong, Pops: Paul Whiteman, King of Jazz (Piscataway, N.J.: New Century Publishers, 1983), 102. According to DeLong, Whiteman decided to improve the quality of his already popular group by adding some Afro- hard

American musicians. Dissuaded by the argument that a racially mixed group would create insuperable problems with accommodations when it traveled, he settled for hiring some Afro-American arrangers, of whom Still was the most successful. Don Redman also made a few arrangements for Whiteman.

17. Ferde Grofé (1892-1972) was hired to work on the film. His orchestrations for King of Jazz are in the Grofé Collection, LC.

18. Eileen Southern, "Conversation with William Grant Still," BPiM 3, no. 2 (May 2975): 165-176.

19. Bruce, a native of Washington, D.C., was a prominent Harlem Renaissance poet and artist who published relatively little. Locke published his two page sketch of "Sahdji" in his 1925 The New Negro .

20. The title page, an isolated single page, is at WGSM.

21. See "Personal Notes," Arvey's "William Grant Still," and "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," all in this volume, for evidence of Still's dissatisfaction with Darker America .

22. Letter, William Grant Still to Alain Locke, August 6, 1938, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

23. "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music," interview by R. Donald Brown, November 13 and December 4, 1967, Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton.

24. Application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, "Plans for Study" (1934). Courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation.

25. "Negro Serious Music," interview, 1967.

26. A condensed score and set of parts are in the Whiteman Collection at Williams College.

27. This may be the work that Forsythe invited Arvey to read for Still in 1930, the occasion of their first meeting. The poems are lacking in the Whiteman materials.

28. Neither the Whiteman materials, which do not include a full score, nor the pencil score is dated. The interpretation given here is confirmed by Arvey in a "Scribbling." Arvey reports that Whiteman had reserved the right of first performance but not exercised it. Still then composed Kaintuck' as a vehicle for her. In Fusion 2, 175, Carolyn L. Quin lists "The Black Man Dances" as a movement of A Deserted Plantation, another work composed for Whiteman; this is an error. The incipit listed in the same source in the composer's catalog as edited by Celeste Anne Headlee belongs to some other work.

Still experimented with his new music typewriter with The Black Man Dances . Although he prepared only part of a page of this score on the typewriter, he used the clumsy device regularly thereafter.

29. Letter, Grace Bundy Still to Countee Cullen, December 9, 1929, Countee Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Cullen, a prominent poet of the Harlem Renaissance, was involved in an opera project with Bundy and Still under the title "Rashana" which did not come to fruition. At this point, Cullen was continuing to express interest in completing the project.

30. Efforts to bridge the cultural gap between elite U.S.-born white audiences and urban working-class audiences that included many European-born immigrants are documented in the early chapters of Claire R. Reis, Composers, Conductors and Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; reprint 1974); and Catherine Parsons Smith, "'Something of Good for the Future': The People's Orchestra of Los Angeles," Nineteenth-Century Music 16 (1992): 147-161. Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 5, describes performances in black churches in the early 1920s of European and African American concert music. Still had participated in a similar tradition as a member of the Amsterdam Musical Association; see the introduction, n. 6.

31. See Mikel Garcia, "Adaptation Strategies of the Los Angeles Black Community, 1883-1919" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1985), for the coping strategies developed by L.A.'s relatively small African American population before World War I.

32. C. L. Bagley Collection, Regional History Center, University of Southern California, Box 4, includes copies of Bylaws for the Musicians' Association from 1925 and 1940, as well as a directory of the members from 1944. Local 767 was integrated into Local 47 in 1953.

33. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 278. Sadie Cole Talbert toured in Europe after her New York debut and taught at Tuskegee, Fisk, and elsewhere before retiring to Los Angeles. Verna Arvey, IOL, reports her connection with Mrs. Shepperson. Florence Cole Talbert had graduated from Los Angeles High School, the only African American in her class, studied at the University of Southern California and later in Chicago, and retired to Los Angeles after an extensive career as a singer and voice teacher. I am grateful to Phyllis Panhorst for providing evidence of Sadie Cole Talbert's New York concerts from the weekly New York Age .

34. December 22, 1994, Smith interview with Harold Sumner Forsythe, who pointed out that in the early 1930s there were only two neighborhoods where blacks could live in Los Angeles, Central Avenue and the smaller area near Jefferson, where Lawrence, Still, and Forsythe all lived. Latinos, Asians, and African Americans lived in proximity to one another, since all three groups experienced discrimination in housing.

35. For more information on Still's Los Angeles, see Betty Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue—Its Rise and Fall (1890-c.1955), Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1996).

36. "Writing Music for Films," typescript prepared by Verna Arvey "from an address delivered at the John Gray Conservatory of Music on December 13, 1937," at WGSM, was probably for this occasion. (See below concerning Still on film music.) Clippings from the Still-Arvey Papers. Many African Americans in Los Angeles had their musical training from either the Wilkins Conservatory or the Gray Conservatory.

37. Mary Carr Moore, "Los Angeles News," Music and Musicians, September 1935.

38. Such composers would have included Charles Wakefield Cadman, Fannie Charles Dillon, Homer Grunn, Mary Carr Moore, and Elinor Remick Warren. Many of them were women, who often had much less access to the lucrative commercial field and who were also marginalized and stereotyped, though collectively they formed an important part of the audience for the opera, the Philharmonic, and the touring virtuosi of the day. See Catherine Parsons Smith and C. S. Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), especially the chapters "The First Los Angeles School" and "The Ultra-Moderns"; also Catherine Parsons Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility': On Feminism and Modernism in American Concert Music," in Susan C. Cook and Judith Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Essays on Music and Gender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Among the prominent émigrés were Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Toch, and Eric Zeisl.

39. See Catherine Parsons Smith, "Founding the Hollywood Bowl," AM 11 (1993): 206-242. A concert by several all-African American choruses was one of the earliest performances in the Bowl, probably in 1920, even before the Philharmonic began its regular summer series there. The Philharmonic began playing there in 1922. African Americans did not attend Bowl concerts in large numbers, however. The Bowl's sponsors wished its audiences to be integrated, but the community of Hollywood itself was not. See Isabel Morse Jones, Hollywood Bowl (New York: G. Schirmer, 1936), 24.

40. Program, Hollywood Bowl, Thursday, July 23, 1936. Courtesy of Lance Bowling. Later, when he was director of the Indianapolis Symphony, Sevitzky conducted Still's music.

41. Los Angeles Saturday Night 43, no. 45 (August 1, 1936): 10. William K. Purves, a substitute for the regular reviewer, Francis Kendig, wrote the review.

42. Harold Bruce Forsythe, "Johnson and Still," unpublished typescript, Forsythe Collection. The typescript was intended for California News, an unidentified periodical.

43. Paul Eduard Miller in Esquire magazine. Quoted in Adrian Michaelis, "Still Music on the Western Air," BPiM 3, no. 2 (May 1975): 177-195. Conductors included Werner Janssen, John Barnett, Paul Lemay, Henry Svedrofsky, Alfred Wallenstein, Pierre Monteux, William Steinberg, Maurice Abravanel, Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, Meredith Willson, Carmen Dragon, and Still. In fact, many of Still's arrangements, including some for Whiteman and others for the "Deep River Hour," attempted to treat jazz in a serious manner.

44. Dismal Swamp was composed in 1935 and published in 1937. The League of Composers, based in New York City, commissioned a work from Still in the late 1930s. Still offered Dismal Swamp, written in a style that retained traces of his "modernist" idiom and the more populist Kaintuck' . Claire Reis chose Kaintuck' as the piece to be dedicated to the league, which in fact did not perform either piece. Kaintuck', however, found performances in Cincinnati and elsewhere. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for more on Kaintuck' .

45. See " they, Verna and Billy."

46. Pauline Alderman, We Build a School of Music: The Commissioned History of Music at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles: Alderman Book Committee, 1989), 198.

47. Interview, "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music."

48. A few of these sketches are in the archives of Columbia Pictures. Judith Anne Still kindly allowed me to look at Still's ASCAP list of film and television cues.

49. William H. Rosar, " Lost Horizon —An Account of the Composition of the Score," Filmusic Notebook 4, no. 2 (1978): 42. The orchestrators, in addition to Still, were Robert Russell Bennett, Peter Brunelli, Hugo Friedhofer, Herman Hand, Hugo Kaun, Charles Maxwell, George Parrish, and Max Reese. Jester Hairston, who continued to collaborate with Tiomkin, made the arrangements used by the Hall Johnson Choir in the film. (The Hall Johnson Choir was hired at Still's suggestion.)

See also Tony Thomas, Film Score: The View from the Podium (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1979), 93. Tiomkin assembled the largest orchestra ever at Columbia (45-65 pieces).

50. Interview, "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music."

51. "Music in Films, a Symposium of Composers," Films 1, no. 4 (Winter 1940): 5-18. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for a discussion of how Still's response was produced. The 1937 typescript "Writing Music for Films" (see n. 3 6 above) explains the process and pitfalls of composing music for films; it serves as something of an introduction for the remarks quoted here.

52. The hypothesis of a "Laredo Suite" incorporating these elements was offered in informal conversations between Clifford McCarty, author of several books on film music, and Lance Bowling of Cambria Records and Archives, July 1994.

53. Letter, George Fischer to Still, September 22, 1936, Still-Arvey Papers.

54. The Forsythe Papers contain a one-page outline for "Central Avenue," undated. Forsythe's unpublished novel, "Frailest Leaves," uses Central Avenue as a metaphor for the African American community in Los Angeles.

55. The others were Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, and Walter Piston.

56. Lenox Avenue was broadcast over CBS radio on May 23, 1937. Still wrote to Schwerké that it was a new work. Wayne Shirley has ascertained that it is a revision of Central Avenue in which the second half is essentially recomposed (" Central Avenue and Lenox Avenue, " paper presented at "A Tribute to William Grant Still," Flagstaff, Arizona, June 26, 1998). There were also changes in scoring between the radio and ballet versions. For more on Central Avenue/Lenox Avenue, see "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" this volume.

57. Donald Dorr, "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23. Dorr is wrong in identifying Forsythe as a potential librettist for "Atlantis" on the basis of a 1931 letter from Alain Locke to Still; in accordance with his practice of using last names (for example, "Dear Still" rather than "Dear William" or "Dear Billy"), Locke referred not to Bruce Forsythe but to Richard Bruce (Nugent).

58. Still, application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This application was initiated in June 1931, but the "Plans for Study" is dated 1932. A second application filed in June 1933 was successful; this time, Blue Steel was to be the primary project. Still's Guggenheim was renewed for six months in 1935; another application for Troubled Island was funded in 1938.

59. Still refers to "A NEGRO ETUDE, text by Mr. Trask." Mr. Trask is not further identified. He might be Sherwood Trask (b. 1890), author of The Interweaving Poetry of American History: New Frontiers (New York: Pageant Press, 1967), a volume of poetry; or more likely Willard Ropes Trask (b. 1900), editor of Classic Black African Poems (New York: Eakins Press, 1971) and The Unwritten Song: Poetry of the Primitive and Traditional Peoples of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1966). For more on The Sorcerer, see "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" below.

60. Moss attempted to return the favor during World War II, when he was working for the Office of War Information and was involved in making the film The Negro Soldier . Although Still was hired to compose the music, presumably at Moss's behest, his score was not used. Moss (1909-1997) was an important African American figure in early radio, the Federal Theatre Project, and film. See obiturary, Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1997.

61. Forsythe Papers. A copy of the libretto, with Still's musical annotations, is in the Library of Congress along with a draft piano-vocal score. WGSM has both the full score and the finished piano-vocal score. Still and Bundy had prepared a similar scenario for Countee Cullen to work from for their proposed "Rashana," but the scenario is unlocated.

Copyright materials at the Library of Congress consist of a piano-vocal score in which Act I is copied on transparent sheets for duplication using a blueprint process; the remaining two acts are incompletely sketched in pencil. These suggest that Still abandoned this opera before he completed a fair copy. However, William Grant Still Music has his hand-copied full score and a version of the piano-vocal score done on Still's music typewriter, acquired in 1935. From this it is clear that he abandoned the hand-copied transparent sheets (a) to make further revisions and (b) to produce the piano-vocal score on the music typewriter, a more technologically advanced but still very laborious method. Thus he had no intention of discarding the opera at this time.

62. Much later, Mota, with a libretto by Arvey, had an African setting unrelated to The Sorcerer .

63. See Arvey's "William Grant Still," below, for her enthusiastic discussion of Blue Steel .

64. Katherine Garrison Chapin, who supplied several choral texts, was the exception.

65. Carlton Moss, interview with the author and Lance Bowling, February 21, 1993.

66. Forsythe, "W. G. Still: A Study in Contrasts," undated two-page typescript in the Forsythe Papers.

67. Benjamin Griffith Edwards, "The Life of William Grant Still" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), 242.

1. Title page at WGSM. "The Rising Sun," a lengthy manuscript now at The Huntington Library, may have been intended as the prologue.

2. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for the alterations and more on this triangle.

3. Forsythe's death certificate shows his parents to have been Sumner Forsyth and Elizabeth Smith of Georgia; that he had lived for sixty-two years in Los Angeles County; that his surviving spouse was Sara Turner; that he had worked for twenty-three years as a horticulturalist in a nursery; that he died February 2, 1976, of a brain tumor. His school records are not open; an obituary notice in the California Sentinel contains no biographical information. Harold S. Forsythe reports that Sumner Forsyth came to Los Angeles in 1912 and his family followed the next year. Sumner Forsyth was a Pullman porter; he later was divorced from Elizabeth and lived in San Gabriel, California, east of Los Angeles. Family letters among the Forsythe Papers show that Sumner Forsyth did not help his son financially during his New York sojourn. Forsythe added the "e" to the family name.

4. "Song composer gains laurels writing lyric . . . ," undated clipping in Arvey Scrapbook #49, Still-Arvey Papers. Except for some songs and piano music, none of the compositions listed here or later in this chapter has been located.

5. "Introducing a New Contributor," Hamitic Review (April 1935). Except for the clippings and one later issue, this journal is unlocated outside the Still-Arvey Papers. The California Eagle was a weekly African American newspaper published in Los Angeles. Flash was a weekly African American newsmagazine published in Los Angeles briefly, ca. 1930-1931. Several copies, none containing Forsythe's byline, are in the Forsythe Papers.

6. March 20, 1931, Baldwin Hall, 810 South Broadway. The program reads, "Mr. Charles E. Pemberton presents the original compositions of his pupil, Harold Bruce Forsythe." Performers included Arvey for the piano solos; Neyneen Farrell, soprano; Victor Boggis and Dewey Johnson, baritones; and Charles Lawrence, accompanist. The concert was favorably reviewed in the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Examiner .

7. For more on Thurman, see Phyllis I. Klotman, "Wallace Henry Thurman (1902-1934)," in Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, ed. Trudier Harris, vol. 51 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987), 260-293; see also p. 13, n. 10.

8. Letter, Forsythe to Verna Arvey, March 15, 1934, Forsythe Papers.

9. Letter, Arna Bontemps to Verna Arvey, December 29, 1941, Still-Arvey Papers.

10. This information is taken from albums and scrapbooks containing theater programs and newspaper clippings in the L. E. Behymer Collection at The Huntington Library. See also Robert Stevenson, "Los Angeles," in Amerigrove, 3: 107-115.

11. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1983), 343.

12. See Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje, "Gospel Music in the Los Angeles Black Community: A Historical Overview," BMRJ 9, no. 1 (1989): 35-79; and "Los Angeles Composers of African American Gospel Music: The First Generations," AM 11, no. 4 (1993): 412-457.

13. This event is described in the pages of the Progressive weekly, the California Outlook, over several issues in the fall of 1912. A report in the Outlook after the fact remarks that the African American women sang "surprisingly well." Theodore Roosevelt campaigned actively for the votes of African American women and men in this campaign. Women got the vote in California in 1911, nine years before the Nineteenth Amendment was approved.

14. I am grateful to Josephine Blodgett Smith, who volunteered this information after I spoke at "The Musical Renaissance of Los Angeles, 1890-c. 1955," Los Angeles, February 17, 1995. She suggested that it was probably McCullough who sent Forsythe to study with Pemberton at USC.

15. I am grateful to Miriam Matthews for locating several sources on Wilkins and on the younger John S. Gray, both of whom operated private conservatories, primarily for African American students. Wilkins graduated from Polytechnical High School and studied at the pre-World War I Von Stein Academy in Los Angeles, which in those years offered excellent European-style conservatory training to as many as seven hundred (mainly white) students at a time.

16. Interview with Jack McVea, by Michael Bakan, reported by Bakan in "Way out West on Central: The African American Jazz Scene in Los Angeles, 1917-1929," paper read to the Society for Ethnomusicology, November 7, 1990. McVea was a saxophonist who began his career in the 1920s in Los Angeles.

17. Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, ed. Mel King (New York: Knopf, 1971).

18. Listed in Fusion 2, 231, as "What Makes Me Believe You?" from the "early 1920s."

19. Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 112-114. See Murchison's numerous references to Locke's The New Negro in "'Dean of Afro-American Composers' or 'Harlem Renaissance Man,' " above.

20. Interviews with Harry Hay, 1993-1994. Hay, a sometime musician, actor, and writer who became a Communist party member and later was a founder and activist in the Gay Rights movement, first called my attention to Forsythe. Hay was part of a circle that included Arvey, John Cage, and various dancers and theater people; he sang Forsythe's arrangements of spirituals on several occasions in the early 1930s. He describes a brief homosexual relationship with Forsythe in the same period. I am grateful to him for supplying information and answering my questions. For more on Hay, see Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay, Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990); and Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

21. Now in the Forsythe Papers.

22. Letter, Forsythe to Arvey, March 7, 1934, Forsythe Papers.

23. The members listed may be a key to identifying members of the New Negro movement in Los Angeles in the 1920s: Theodore Banks, Roy Johnson, William Middleton, Eardly Gauff, Forsythe, Haven Johnson, David Floyd, Lawrence Johnson, Ronald Jefferson, Clifford Gantt, Marvin Johnson, Lawrence Lassiter.

24. Harold Bruce Forsythe, "Frailest Leaves," undated typescript [ca. 1935], 442-445, Forsythe Papers. It is listed in the finding aid as "Masks."

25. Letter, Forsythe to Arvey, October 19, 1933, Forsythe Papers. In the quotations that follow, the present author's ellipses are bracketed to distinguish them from Forsythe's.

26. The letter from Pemberton is in Forsythe's Juilliard file; Forsythe's son reports Thurman's recommendation. The value of the fellowship is put in question by the letters from Forsythe's mother to Forsythe while he was in New York, and even one from her to Goldmark, promising to put together the money for her son's lessons.

27. Information from the Archives of The Juilliard School. The reason for his early departure is unknown.

28. Letter, Eardly Gauff to Forsythe, November 4, 1927, Forsythe Papers. This is the letter on "Iconoclast" letterhead.

29. Forsythe writes of making this offer to Still and Still's failure to acknowledge it in "A Study in Contradictions" (29). The following journal entry may relate to this issue: "Letter from Harold Forsyth. Grace angry because of it" (Still, Diary, July 23, 1930), Still-Arvey Papers.

30. Letter of application to the Guggenheim Foundation, stamped "received 6/12/1931." Courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation, with permission from Judith Anne Still.

31. Wayne Barlow to Still, July 7, 1939; July 27, 1937; September 7, 1939. Barlow wrote in Howard Hanson's behalf; the letters are filed under Hanson, BOX 21, Still-Arvey Papers.

32. The piano score carries the notation "This ballet was later rejected" on the front cover. (Courtesy William Grant Still Music.) Arvey, IOL, 15, reports its role in Still's recycling of rejected works: " 'Dance of Love' (played over the radio many times) was put into the 'Sorcerer Ballet' which has itself been scrapped and its themes used in other compositions." One section of this ballet surfaces later as the "Orator" scene in Lenox Avenue .

33. A copy of the libretto, heavily annotated by Still, is in the Library of Congress. A copy of a contract among Moss, Still (both of New York), and Forsythe (of Los Angeles) to collaborate on Blue Steel is dated June 19, 1933. Still-Arvey Papers.

34. A typescript of Forsythe's libretto, with additions in Forsythe's hand and extensive annotations in Still's, is in the Library of Congress. A second copy, also annotated, is in the Forsythe Papers.

35. In "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still" ( Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2. [Summer 1986]: 1-23), Donald Dorr reports that Alain Locke proposed an opera under the title "Atlantis," mistakenly identifying Bruce Forsythe as the librettist. Nothing seems to have come of this project.

36. No other such contracts between Still and librettists are in the Still-Arvey Papers. On the same day that Forsythe signed the contracts for The Sorcerer and Central Avenue, he witnessed a contract drawn up between Still and Ruby Berkely Goodwin of Fullerton, California, in which Still agreed to provide arrangements for voice and piano of the following spirituals, to appear as part of a book, Great Day, already written, a collection of stories built around these spirituals: "Great Day"; "Lis'en to de Lam's"; "Camp Meetin' Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells, Mah Lawde Says He's Goin' to Rain Down Fishes"; "Good News"; "Didn't Mah Lawd Deliver Daniel"; "Ah Got a Home In-a Dat Rock"; "All God's Chillun Got Wings"; "Keep Me F'om Sinkin' Down"; "Gwinter Sing all Along De Way"; "Lawd, Ah Wants to be a Christian." See n. 37, below, for more on Central Avenue .

37. In a paper on Lenox Avenue given to the American Musicological Society in 1996, Gayle Murchison mentions a contract with Columbia Pictures for Central Avenue . Although the film was not made, the movie studios were protective of their copyrights; the Stills may have feared claims of copyright infringement from the studio. Wayne D. Shirley compared the two scores in " Central Avenue and Lenox Avenue, " in a paper presented at A Multicultural Celebration of Diversity in Music: A Tribute to William Grant Still, Flagstaff, Ariz., June 26, 1998.

38. Verna Arvey to Carl Van Vechten, August 6, 1934, autograph letter on Arvey's stationery. Carl Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.

39. Letter, Bruce Forsythe to Mr. Carl Van Vechten, postmark August 24, 1934, JWJ.

40. Letter, Bruce Forsythe to R. Jean Toomer, August 29, 1934, Jean Toomer Papers, JWJ.

41. Undated typed letter, Forsythe to "Dear Verna," Still-Arvey Papers. The concert in question was given on November 4, 1934.

42. Letter, Harold Bruce Forsythe to Mr. Carl Van Vechten, December 13, 1934, JWJ.

43. Letter, Forsythe to Van Vechten, January 15, 1935, JWJ.

44. JWJ. There are no pre-1940 letters from Van Vechten to Arvey or Still in the Still-Arvey Papers.

45. In IOL, Arvey reports "Quit Dat Fool'nish" as dedicated to Still's dog Shep. Arvey suggested the alternative story in her 1985 interview with Smith.

46. Verna Arvey, "Scribblings," undated entry from notebook at WGSM. In a postcard to Van Vechten dated March 6, 1944, she wrote more succinctly: "No, Bruce Forsythe is not related to Cecil Forsyth and we do not see him anymore. He is still in Los Angeles, and not overly popular with hosts or hostesses." Arvey to Van Vechten, JWJ.

47. Arvey's "Scribblings" reports a series of such incidents. The poverty is confirmed by his mother's letters while he was in New York as well as Harold Sumner Forsythe's account of his own youth.

48. The C. L. Bagley Collection, Western History Center, University of Southern California, includes a run of directories for Local 47, the white union, and only a few for Local 767, the black musicians' union. (The two locals merged in the 1953.) Forsythe's name does not appear in any of these.

49. Arvey, "Scribblings": "He was in love with me, he said, and I was on a high pedestal in his home. . . . His jealousy when I was writing to Still flamed out in disagreeable remarks."

1. Claude Palisca, ed., Norton Anthology of Western Music, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 822-838.

2. J. Fischer and Bro. published the complete score in 1935; two years later, the same publisher brought out the Scherzo, arranged for small orchestra. In some unlabeled, typed notes on the symphony supplied through the courtesy of Judith Anne Still, there is a reference to three such reduced versions:

A. flute, oboe, 2 char, bassoon, 3 horns, 2 trp, trb, perc, pf, strings.

B. 2 alto sax, tenor sax, trb, 2 trp, perc, of, 1 or more violins, bass, tenor banjo.

C. 5 woodwinds, 3 sax, 2 hn, 2 trp, trb, perc, pf, tenor banjo, strings.

In other typewritten material, Arvey lists 56 performances through February 141, 1953, and 52 more of the Scherzo alone through September 3, 1951. Several of these were conducted by Donald Voorhees, Still's old employer, on the NBC Telephone Hour.

3. Still's "racial" aesthetic, expressed in his concert music especially between 1925 and 1932, is described in Murchison's chapter above. As shown in this chapter, it implies a fusion of African American folk music, especially the blues, and the European concert tradition. Its centrality to Still's work is affirmed by the title William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music, a collection whose two editions were prepared under Still's and his daughter's supervision, respectively. But this is hindsight; the primacy of the Afro-American Symphony in Still's oeuvre was not established until some years after its composition. In his compositions from 1924 on, he tried several techniques to achieve this fusion. We are reminded of that by the fact that Still's contemporary and friend Forsythe was entirely unfamiliar with this symphony until about 1936.

4. Guthrie Ramsey made this suggestion in the discussion that followed my presentation, "Transforming the Blues: Doubleness of Race, Genre and Geography in the Music of William Grant Still," American Studies Association, Kansas City, October 25, 1996. The trickster figure is exploited in relation to the efforts of the African Diaspora to enter the written, European language by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

5. Paul Harold Slattery, "A Comprehensive Study of the Afro-American Symphony," Fusion 2, 101-127, is described by Orin Moe (n. 8 below) as "schoolmasterish." Assembled many years after the symphony was composed under the eye of the composer, Slattery's 1972 description and analysis includes charts and phrase-by-phrase descriptions of all four movements. The charts refer to "expositions" and "development" areas and otherwise follow the terminology used for analysis of sonata forms in the European concert tradition. Still also used this terminology. I have taken Slattery's numbering of the Scherzo's themes (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B).

6. Carol J. Oja, "'New Music' and the 'New Negro': The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony," BMRJ 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 145-169.

7. Rae Linda Brown, "William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson: Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance," in Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 71-86.

8. Orin Moe, "A Question of Value: Black Concert Music and Criticism," BMRJ 6 (1986): 57—66.

9. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 109-110, 152-154, 253-254. This quotation is from p. 153. White critics are more likely to award Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue this status even as they remark negatively on its sectional construction.

10. Ultimately there were five symphonies and many more suites.

11. My dating, based on several aspects of the work. They include its uncharacteristic style features, its technical clumsiness, and its impractical notational style. An undated postmark (Columbus, Ohio) on a letter of inquiry suggests that the manuscript was submitted after Still had left Wilberforce (May 1915). See also pp. 5-6 and 222-223.

12. This work has been known only by its critical reviews and Still's description. It was thought lost until it was located at WGSM in September 1997. See also pp. 5-6 and 222-223.

13. The Bio-Bibliography, W1, 45-50, gives substantial information about the eleven-year evolution (1924-1935) of this work, which had a number of partial performances between 1930 and 1938. It was consistently well received by critics. A revival, this time of cut versions of the first and third movements, by the Centennial Celebration Orchestra, conducted by Ronnie Wooten, at Northern Arizona University on June 25, 1998, leads one to wonder about the eclipse of this remarkable work, arguably a twentieth-century masterpiece. Two explanations suggest themselves. One is that Africa was overshadowed by the eventual success of the Afro-American Symphony and that Still was too busy composing to promote it. The second is more likely. Still contracted with Robbins Music Corporation to publish his concert music between 1934 and 1936. Robbins did not promote his music; moreover, the company retained the rights to Africa until 1947. In 1937 Still signed with J. Fischer and Bro., a firm that vigorously promoted the Afro-American Symphony and other Still works for several years before the untimely death of George Fischer, the "Bro." who was the firm's driving force. I am grateful to Wayne D. Shirley for calling my attention to Robbins's and Fischer's roles.

14. The contact with Barnhart is noted in his diary on October 22, 1930.

15. There was, however, considerable freelance work. A list at the front of the diary reports his arranging work, all of which follows the end of his contract with Whiteman on May 30:

Glow-worm—delivered Aug. 25 $95
Deep River—delivered (radio) $95
Rumba Rhythm—delivered (Remick) (radio) $115.50
Kentucky Home (24 pages)—scoring $84
Composing interlude $20 (bill in) $104
Suwanee River (28 pages) $98
Peg O' My Heart (28 pages) $95.50
Ol' Man River, 42 pages [Probably the "Show Boat Medley" done for Paul Whiteman.]
Chinese Lullaby $80
Blue—(Reisman) $50

Aunt Hagar's Blues (Reisman) $50
Waters of Perkiomen $80
Sunshine of Your Smile $80
2 numbers for woodwind $15

Most of these cannot be associated with specific employers, though "Ol' Man River" was probably for Paul Whiteman (who discussed a 52-week contract at one point but couldn't deliver) and the radio arrangements were almost certainly for Willard Robison. Other musicians with whom he had contact, according to the diary: Sam Lanin (Oct. 29), [Nathaniel] Shilkret (Oct. 31), John Rehauser (Nov. 4), Hugo (Leo?) Reisman(n?) (Nov. 14), Paramount Studios (Nov. 15), [Irving] Weill] (Nov. 15), Don Voorhees (Nov. 26).

16. Willard Robison, singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader, organized the Deep River Orchestra in the late 1920s. Still worked as arranger and sometimes conductor for Robison's radio show, the "Deep River Hour," from 1931 to 1934. Some of Still's arrangements for Robison have surfaced in the Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian. See Wayne D. Shirley, "Religion in Rhythm: William Grant Still's Arrangements for Willard Robison's 'Deep River Hour,'" BMRJ 18, no. 2 (forthcoming).

17. Still attended Wilberforce University from 1911 to 1915. His wife, Grace Bundy, graduated from Wilberforce in 1915. This was probably a social engagement rather than a working one.

18. This is the first volume of Still's diary that survives. It runs from July 7, 1930, through the end of that year. No further diaries are known until the one for the year 1937.

19. "The first of this week saw the completion of my latest effort. Its title, Afro-American Symphony, is self explanatory." See "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," below, for the full text.

20. "Rashana" (earlier entitled "Roshana") was to be an opera, but it was never completed.

21. "Rashana" sketchbook. See figure 5. The final sentence, reduced to "With humble thanks to God, the source of inspiration," appears at the end of all Still's scores after the Afro-American Symphony . Of the caricatures drawn by Still in figure 5, he represents himself twice. The two upper figures are probably Donald Voorhees and Paul Whiteman. The lower figures are not identified; they could be two of his children.

22. See three different accounts by Still in Arvey's "William Grant Still," the "Personal Notes," and the Still-Schwerké correspondence below.

23. Courtesy of Judith Anne Still. The paragraph was typed on Still's typewriter. Some of it is written in longhand in the sketchbook described below. In that source, parts of the poems are given as well. Ellipses in the original.

24. All of Dunbar's poetry quoted here is from Joanne M. Braxton, ed., The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 243, 1951, 13-15, 15-16 (includes The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar [New York: Dodd Mead, 1913). I am grateful to Wayne Shirley for calling my attention to the meaning of the third of these quotations. Only one of the two holograph scores in the Library of Congress bears this stanza.

25. See the introduction and Murchison's chapter for Du Bois's famous paragraphs.

26. The European practice is exemplified in the single best-known work in the entire symphonic repertoire, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which "progresses" from C minor to C major.

27. I am grateful to Craig Russell for pointing out the resemblance to Dvorak's * music in this passage. After a presentation based on the "Politics of Race and Class" at the Northern and Southern California Chapters meeting of the American Musicological Society, April 26, 1997, Russell suggested that Still's fondness for the oboe and English horn, shown both in his selection of the oboe as his major performing instrument and in his use of it in his scores, was an acknowledgment of Dvorak's use of these instruments in the New World Symphony.

For a discussion of the controversy around Dvorak's use of "American" melodies in that symphony, see Adrienne Fried Block, "Dvorak * , Beach, and American Music," in Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol J. Oja, eds., A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 256-280.

28. See the "Personal Notes," below.

29. Robert A. Simons, "Music Events: Three Native Composers, Many Orchestras, and a Few Virtuosi," New Yorker 11 (November 30, 1935): 55. Quoted in Bio-Bibliography, WB2.13, 54-55.

30. See Chadwick Hansen, "Jenny's Toe Revisited: White Responses to Afro-American Shaking Dances," AM 5 (1987): 1-19, for an etymology for Still's term, "janny."

31. In the course of his 1916 summer in Memphis playing, traveling, and arranging for W. C. Handy, Still almost surely heard and absorbed echoes of older New Orleans improvising style that involved varying the melody but not necessarily composing new melodies as later improvisers did.

32. Detroit Symphony, Neeme Järvi, conductor, Chandos CHAN 9154, 1993. The tenor banjo is also almost inaudible on this otherwise excellent recording. The horns, which are assigned the first "I Got Rhythm," and banjo are very clear, however, in the performance by the Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, Jindong Cai, conductor, Centaur CRC 2331, 1997.

33. "Conversation with Eubie Blake (continued): A Legend in His Own Lifetime," ed. Bobbi King, BPiM 1-2 (1973): 155-156.

In a 1977 interview, Blake lists this among unacknowledged white "borrowings" from black musicians. Eubie Blake, taped interview with Lorraine Brown, Research Center for the Federal Theater Project (George Mason University), January 9, 1977, Eubie Blake Collection, Maryland Historical Society.

34. Judith Anne Still reports that her father and Blake went at least once to Gershwin's apartment to help him with orchestration. But in his 1973 interview Blake was probably confusing Still with Will Vodery, who orchestrated for Gershwin, most notably Gershwin's 1922 one-act opera, Blue Monday .

35. Manuscript Reading Report, Dominique-René De Lerma to University of California Press, September 29, 1996. De Lerma and Still met at a conference organized by De Lerma at Indiana University, June 18-21, 1969. Subsequently De Lerma edited a collection that included a Still speech drawn from the conference: Black Music in Our Culture: Curricular Ideas on the Subjects, Materials and Problems (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970).

36. Still's recollection of Gershwin in the audience of Shuffle Along (De Lerma, n. 35 above) dates Gershwin's acquaintance with African American jazz and blues earlier than assumed by Charles Hamm in "A Blues for the Ages," in Crawford, Lott, and Oja, A Celebration of American Music, 346-355. Hamm was unable to document Gershwin's acquaintance with African American music making before 1925, the year of Gershwin's Concerto in F .

37. Verna Arvey," Memo for Musicologists," reprinted in Fusion 2, 21-25. This essay first appears under this title in the first edition of Fusion (ed. Robert Bartlett Haas; Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972, 88-93). To judge from the citation in the Bio-Bibliography (A30), which quotes a sentence reproduced in the quotation here, it is probably an expansion of Arvey's "Afro-American Music Memo," Music Journal 27 (November 1969): 36, 68. Arvey goes on to discuss Dvorak's * use of "national American melodies" in the symphony From the New World, so strongly influenced by the singing of "Plantation songs and Hoe-downs" by Harry T. Burleigh.

38. William Grant Still, "The Men behind American Music," Crisis (January 1944): 12-15, 29. Reprinted in Spencer, Reader, 114-123.

39. In June 1938 Still wrote to Willard Robison to complain, "While listening to a local radio station last Thursday night, I heard some transcriptions [implied: from Robison's "Deep River Hour," for which Still had arranged] made by the Associated Music Publishers Inc. [Still was later to correct this to "Associated Recorded Program Service"] . . . All of them sounded like my own arrangements, although they were credited to Walter Remson. Do you think that it is fair to me to do a thing like that?" In a later letter he notes that the Associated Record Program Service had informed him that " 'Walter Remsen' [ sic ] is a pseudonym for Willard Robison." Carbon copies of letters, Still to Robison, June 12, 1938, and August 1938, Still-Arvey Papers.

Still also wrote very generally about white borrowings of the music of African Americans, distinguishing again between unconscious borrowings and conscious imitation, in "A Symphony of Dark Voices," Opera, Concert and Symphony (May 1947): 18-19, 36, 38-39 (reprint, Spencer, Reader, 136-143).

40. Unsorted biographical papers at WGSM.

41. Wayne D. Shirley to the author, June 24, 1997. Short excerpts from the choruses of four of the returned songs appear on the back covers of the two deposited songs. None shows the characteristic rhythm.

42. Still was not the only musician to quote "I Got Rhythm," although he was probably the first to use it in concert music, in a written score. Richard Crawford, in The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), devotes a chapter to "I Got Rhythm." He describes its subsequent use as a song, as a jazz standard, and as a chordal structure for jazz improvisation. His table, listing seventy-nine recordings of "I Got Rhythm" and contrafacta between October 1930 and January 1942 indicates the song's enormous popularity. Still's artistic intention and his relationship to the tune were clearly different from the uses examined by Crawford.

43. Lawrence Kramer, "Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music," BMRJ 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 53-70, shows how white modernist composers often used quotations of African-derived music in ways that contain it, reflecting the prevailing societal power structure in their music.

44. See Still's "Personal Notes," below.

45. "Fifty Years of Progress in Music," Pittsburgh Courier, 11 November 1950, 15. Reprinted in Spencer, Reader, 177-188.

1. The program she reviewed was a Saturday Morning Musicale given by Adolf Tandler's Little Symphony on January 9, 1926, of music by Bach, Sibelius, and Cowell. Two months earlier, on October 22, 1925, Tandler and his orchestra had participated in the first concert of Henry Cowell's New Music Society, which was presented in Los Angeles. Rita Mead, Henry Cowell's New Music 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), chap. 3, "The New Music Society," 31-49. That program, which both Arvey and Forsythe probably attended, consisted of Dane Rudhyar, "Surge of Fire"; Varèse, "Octandre"; Ruggles, "Angels"; and Schoenberg, "Sechs kleine Klavierstücke."

2. Los Angeles before the famous émigrés from Hitler had its own style of modernism, described for music in Catherine Parsons Smith and C. S. Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978). See especially chap. 12, "The First Los Angeles School," and chapters 17-19, "The Federal Music Project," "The Ultra-Moderns," and "Musical Americanism." For a more recent approach that involves art and architecture, see Paul J. Karlstrom, ed., On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art 1900-1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).

3. Jon Michael Spencer, "An Introduction to William Grant Still," in Spencer, Reader, 1-60. In "William Grant Still: Eclectic Religionist," Theomusicology: A Special Issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 135-156, Spencer considers Arvey and Still's interest in spiritualism. Spencer was unaware of Forsythe's presence when he wrote these essays, and so did not speculate on Forsythe's connection with Still or Arvey.

4. Arvey, IOL . Little of the vital young adult is suggested in this infelicitous book. In the editing of the book, the few clues that might have illuminated her character and her pre-Still career were removed, along with considerable repetition. In an interview with Lance Bowling, April 3, 1987, Arvey described how her book had been edited. Most striking, she had prepared a long list of the prominent figures in music, film, and theater she had interviewed, going back to her high school years. In the published book, the list becomes a disproportionately long appendix entitled "Who's Who in the Life of William Grant Still," with new annotations that ignore both Still and Arvey. Arvey told Bowling: "That section at the end, you know, where I told about some of the people that I'd interviewed, . . . when the man came to write his notes, the explanatory notes, he said that all these people were known to William Grant Still. Well, they weren't, because I wrote those interviews before he came out here. . . . We didn't even see the galley proofs for that, you know."

For one critical reaction, see D. Antoinette Handy's negative review in AM 5, no. 4 (1987): 456-458.

5. Interviews with Carlton Moss, the author of the short story on which Blue Steel is based, and Harry Hay, an early associate of Forsythe and Arvey.

6. Donald Dorr, "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23.

7. See below, Harold Bruce Forsythe, "William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions," n. 16.

8. Verna Arvey, "Time for the Old Ox," typescript, p. 88, Still-Arvey Papers, an early version of her memoir. This and several other quotations below were cut from In One Lifetime . (See n. 4.)

9. "Commencement memories," Arvey, Scrapbook #49, Still-Arvey Papers. In 1926 the campus of the University of California-Southern Branch was still on Vermont Avenue, although construction on the present Westwood campus was beginning. Students who wanted to study music theory and history or enroll for applied lessons studied across the street at the California Christian College (later Chapman College). The University of Southern California, a private institution, would have been beyond Arvey's financial reach.

10. Later scrapbooks, now at WGSM, reflect her increasing interest in race and politics.

11. Arvey's letter was addressed to a Chicago theater manager/film distributor. For information on Jacob Arvey, see Milton L. Rakove, Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers: An Insider's Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 112-113, 144-145. Alex Gottfried, Boss Cermak of Chicago (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), describes Jacob Arvey's 1923 role in the shady financial dealings of Chicago machine politics.

12. "Present Day Musical Films and How They Are Possible," Etude (January 1931): 16-18, 61, 72.

13. These were, respectively, Victor Baravalle, Martin Broones, Arthur Kay, and Heinz Roemheld. Her article was featured in a two-page spread with photos of the individuals interviewed.

14. See column by Arthur Corey, American Dancer, November 1933.

15. Ruth Eleanor Howard, "Dancing in Southern California: Terpsichorean Los Angeles Takes Second Place Only to New York," in Bruno David Ussher, ed., Who's Who in Music and Dance in Southern California (Hollywood: Bureau of Musical Research, 1933), 52-53. Among those with whom Arvey was associated are Ernest Belcher, Melissa Blake, Rosa Buruel, Waldeen Falkenstein, Eleanore Flaig, Norma Gould, Michio Ito, Teru Izumida, Dorothy Lyndall, Manual Perez, Charles Teske, Bertha Wardell, and Charles Zemach. Belcher, Falkenstein, Flaig, Gould, Lyndall, Perez, Teske, Wagner, and Zemach are listed in Ussher. For more on dance in Los Angeles between the wars, see Naima Prevots, Dancing in the Sun: Hollywood Choreographers, 1915-1937 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987).

16. Verna Arvey, "Trio: Music for Dancers," American Dancer, January 1933.

17. Verna Arvey, Choreographic Music: Music for the Dance (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), 433, end of chap. 29, the end of the text.

18. Bowling-Arvey Interview, 1987, p. 4. Arvey's younger sister, Dolly, remembered little music in the household, however.

19. Ussher, Who's Who in Music and Dance, 188. The entry in full: "Eachus, Ann J. Pianiste, Teacher; b. Duarte, Calif.; studied exclusively w. Thilo Becker; asst. teacher w. Thilo Becker many yrs; teacher of Marguerite Bitter, Margaretha Lohman, Bernice Morrison. Add.: 310 S. Hoover St., Los Angeles." Thilo Becker, a German-trained pianist of Australian origin, was the premier piano teacher in southern California from the turn of the century; his students included Paloma Schramm and Olga Steeb. There is no direct evidence as to when Arvey stopped studying. In 1932 she gave a recital at Eachus's studio.

20. American Dancer, June 1932. Review of an evening of dance by the Flaig group, signed "O.S.F." Arvey Scrapbook.

21. August 30, 1933. "Listening In with Ben Gross." The clipping is in Arvey's scrapbook. In response to Arvey's inquiry, Gershwin wrote that the tempos were too slow.

22. Undated letter, Still to Arvey, Still-Arvey Papers. The return address is 408 Manhattan Avenue, New York City.

23. "Time for the Old Ox," 91. She may have been referring to Forsythe.

24. Forsythe to Arvey, March 15, 1934, Forsythe Papers. This is from one of two letters bearing the same date.

25. See my article "Athena at the Manuscript Club: Reflections on John Cage and Mary Carr Moore," Musical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1995): 351-367. Hay is now an important informant for me and for John Cage's biographer, Frans Van Rossum.

26. She had expected to give a recital with Benjamin Zemach, a dancer with whom she had worked in Los Angeles. Zemach backed out at the last minute, but Arvey went through with the concert anyway. According to her typewritten memoir, the backing and filling that went on before the concert-she rejected the theater booked for her initially by the Mexican government because the stage was too small to accommodate the anticipated dancer-put off her sponsors; neither the composers associated with the Conservatory nor the appropriate government officials actually attended the performance. "The govt officials were conspicuous by their absence, for Chavez, out of pique or something else, had called a 'junta' at which they all had to be present elsewhere." Typescript from notebook "Verna Arvey's scribblings from her notebook of subjects for future writings," courtesy WGSM.

27. The program, as given in Los Angeles, November 4, 1934, The Dance Theater, Norma Gould Studios, 118 North Larchmont:

28. Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, October 23, 1934.

29. Rob Wagner's Script (Beverly Hills, Calif.), November 10, 1934. A letter, this one from Forsythe, sheds some light too:

I cannot forego the pleasure of telling you briefly how much I enjoyed your recital. But strangely, Verna, I still think that you played that night at Eachus' better than ever before or since. You were possessed that night. Last evening I'll be darned if once or twice you didn't actually act as if you were indifferent to audience and music! . . . I just couldn't . . . forbear to mention Ravel and the minuet. This is exquisite music, and it was exquisitely performed. By far the high water mark of the program. . . . It was a beautiful moment, for once more your potential ability was made known to me. . . . Of course you played other things well too. . . . I thought the 2nd Gulablesse dance delicately done, and that amusing Brazilian Dance! and the opening Galuppi . . . intelligent, reserved, innately well bred.

. . . [Y]ears from now I'll be expounding the art of Verna Arvey and bragging that on page 344 of Frailest Leaves is a swell description of her approach to music. HBF

30. Letter, Cowell to Dear Miss Arvey, February 9, 1935, Still-Arvey Papers. The papers he listed whose critics were present included the Musical Courier, Musical America, and Musical Leader as well as Trend, Nation, New Republic, Daily Worker, and New Masses .

31. Postcard, Cowell to Arvey, Still-Arvey Papers. Unfortunately, there is no record of this event in the archives of the New School. I am grateful to Margaret Rose, Archivist/librarian, for searching the records in my behalf.

32. Hedi Korngold Katz, b. ca. 1890, Budapest, d. December 7, 1960. Katz, a violinist, graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, Vienna, and studied in London and Berlin. According to her obituary notice ( New York Times, December 8, 1960), she was first violinist of the Symphony Orchestra of The Hague from 1919 to 1923, when she came to the United States. She founded the music school of the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1927 and was director for eight years; later she helped found two other music schools in New York City.

33. Letter, Mrs. Hedi Katz, director, The Music School of the Henry Street Settlement, NYC, to Miss Verna Arvey, Los Angeles, December 10, 1934, Still-Arvey Papers.

34. Letter, Artie Mason Carter to Verna Arvey, August 12, 1935, Still-Arvey Papers.

35. Letter, August 16, 1935, letterhead "Charles E. Pemberton, Mus.M., University of Southern California / Private Studio," to "My dear Miss Arvey,'" Still-Arvey Papers.

36. Further information from pp. 248-249, incomplete typed memoir in Still-Arvey Papers. Rogers later performed The Book of the Hanging Gardens at an Evenings on the Roof concert.

37. High school commencement brochure, Still-Arvey Papers.

38. See quotations in "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" above.

39. An earlier version exists in the Forsythe Papers.

40. Please see "'Dean of Afro-American Composers' or 'Harlem Renaissance Man,'" "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" and Forsythe's "A Study in Contradictions," elsewhere in this volume.

41. Letter, Forsythe to Arvey, March 15, 1934, one of two bearing this date, Forsythe Papers.

42. This and other quotations from Arvey's letters to Forsythe appear in several pages of such quotations at WGSM. She must have excerpted them later from carbons she kept of her letters to him. None of her letters to Forsythe survive.

43. The example she chose to illustrate one of these "nuggets" was her experience of interviewing Francis Joseph Hickson, director of an otherwise unidentified experimental little theater. Hickson gave her a pattern for the development of a drama; she reports, "Years later, when I began to write libretti for my husband's operas, these simple precepts helped in the formation of our ideas."

Act i: The characters and situation are presented.

Act ii: The conflict develops and is left unresolved at the end of the act.

Act iii: The characters unravel their difficulties and arrive at a satisfying conclusion.

44. Eleanora Flaig, quoted in "Time for the Old Ox," 94, Still-Arvey Papers.

45. Letter, Harry Hay to the author, March 19, 1994. Hay returned to Los Angeles ca. 1950. Falkenstein and Izumida were dancers whose recitals Arvey had accompanied on several occasions.

46. Carl Van Vechten letters, JWJ. There are no pre-1940 letters from Van Vechten to Arvey or Still in the Still-Arvey Papers.

47. See "Finding His Voice," above.

48. Letter, Arvey to Langston Hughes, n.d., Langston Hughes papers, JWJ. The letter is written on Arvey's own letterhead, and includes a copy of a program dated November 21, 1937. It may have been written after Still filed for divorce in May 1938, however; the filing received front-page treatment in the Pittsburgh Courier .

49. Typescript, undated autobiography of Still, p. 212, Still-Arvey Papers. Pages 11-151 are missing.

50. Several boxes containing dozens of scrapbooks on these two topics alone are at WGSM.

51. MS autobiography, Still-Arvey Papers.

52. Verna Arvey, "Memo for Musicologists," reprinted in Fusion 2, 21-25. To judge from the citation in the Bio-Bibliography (A30), which quotes a sentence reproduced in the quotation here, it is probably an expansion of Arvey's "Afro-American Music Memo," Music Journal 27 (November 1969): 36, 68. Arvey goes on to discuss Dvorak's * use of "national American melodies" in the symphony From the New World, in her view strongly influenced by the singing of "Plantation songs and Hoe-downs" by Harry T. Burleigh.

53. Although the original story seems to have called for an appearance by the Virgin, who shows the two men the way to safety, she does not appear in the opera.

54. Postcard, Still to Langston Hughes, December 16, 1935, JWJ.

55. Still to Bontemps, 1939, Still-Arvey Papers. For details of the Chapin collaboration, see Wayne D. Shirley, "William Grant Still's Choral Ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree, " AM 12 (Winter 1994): 425-461.

56. Carbon copy, letter, September 20, 1949, WGS to Howard Taubman, Still-Arvey Papers.

57. "Music in Films, a Symposium of Composers," Films 1, no. 4 (Winter 1940): 5-18.

58. Catherine Parsons Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility': On Feminism and Modernism in American Concert Music," in Susan Cook and Judith Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Essays on Gender and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Literary critics have documented this even more fully. See, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

59. See, for example, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963); Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues (1973; New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Paul Oliver, Blues Fell this Morning, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

60. Bio-Bibliography . The number 168 is Judith Anne Still's count of her mother's work.

61. Bonnie G. Smith, "Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow," in Ann-Louise Shapiro, ed., Feminists Revision History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 24-46.

62. See Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility.'"

63. Published by New Music Edition.

64. Forsythe's poem is attached to the draft score of Dismal Swamp in the Still-Arvey Papers; Arvey's appears in the published score (1937).

1. Both Carlton Moss, in the interview of February 21, 1993, cited in "Finding His Voice," and Harold Bruce Forsythe, in "William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions," describe Still's preoccupation with music to the exclusion of other things going on around him.

2. Interview with Carlton Moss.

3. Scrapbook #10, Still-Arvey Papers. Both letters are undated and mimeographed, ca. 1939. The Communist party's use of loosely affiliated organizations with tangentially related interests led to a great deal of confusion about its influence, then and later. (See Claude McKay's comments about this practice below.) The Musicians' Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, for example, includes on its letterhead the names of Pablo Casals, Charles Wakefield Cadman, John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland, Olin Downes, Howard Hanson, Hall Johnson, Daniel Gregory Mason, Paul Robeson, Still, and Edgard Varèse. Among these names selected from the long list, Cadman, Carpenter, Hanson, and Mason may be considered as especially far to the right of the Communist party in their politics.

The second is from the Negro Peoples' Committee . . . to Aid Spanish Democracy; among the names on its letterhead are Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Still, Richard Wright, and Adam Clayton Powell. The same caveat applies to them.

4. Barbara Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 107. The comment about the party's "important sociopolitical function" is drawn from Paul Bowles, Without Stopping (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), 80.

5. Olin Downes, "Music," New York Times, February 9, 1925, 15. As stated in the introduction, Downes and other listeners missed the blues allusions in the work.

6. Olin Downes, "Halász Presents New Still Opera," New York Times, April 1, 1949, 15:1.

7. Murchison outlines Still's style periods as "modern" (1923-1925), "racial" (1925-1932), and "universal" (1932-), based on Still's own writing about his music.

8. Emanual Balaban, "Progress at Rochester," MM 4, no. 4 (May-June 1932): 182-184. The ballet Sahdji was premiered on May 22, 1931; the Afro-American Symphony on October 29, 1931. Africa, another large work from this period, was premiered in 1930 but was revised several times after that. Its complicated history is documented in the Bio-Bibliography . See the foreword for a recent revival.

9. Marc Blitzstein, "New York Medley, Winter, 1935," MM 13, no. 2 (January—February 1936): 34-40.

10. Aaron Copland, "Our Younger Generation—Ten Years Later," MM 13, no. 4 (May-June 1936): 3-11; Copland, "Scores and Records" (arranger Otto Cesana is named along with Still), MM 15, no. 1 (November-December 1937): 45-48. In the latter review, Copland was discussing Still's Dismal Swamp, a League of Composers commission. For more on the early history of the League of Composers, see David Metzer, "The League of Composers: The Initial Years," AM 15, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-69.

11. Some fifteen years later, in making notes for the 1953 anticommunist speech discussed at length below, Arvey included this item: "Copland slushy jazz; his own jazz; and the Communist party line regarding jazz." "Extra notes for Communism in Music article, and for the book," Still-Arvey Papers. It appears that in preparing the essay, she made notes of things she had heard Still discuss. This particular note was not developed in the speech. However, Copland's comment rankled enough so that, in 1941, Arvey wrote to Claire Reis, who directed the League of Composers, suggesting that Modern Music favored Copland unfairly over all other composers. (Reis, of course, rejected Arvey's complaint.)

The class-related "commercial" stereotype had already been assigned to white composers of successful commercial music who ventured to compose in larger forms (George Gershwin is the most obvious example).

12. For more on the Composers' Collective, see Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism, and Carol J. Oja, "Composer with a Conscience: Elie Siegmeister in Profile," AM 6, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 158-180. Not all the collective's members were members of the Communist party, though some were.

Soon after Still left New York, for example, one estimate had it that "75% of black cultural figures" were party members or "maintained regular meaningful contact with the Party." Mark Naison, "Communism and Harlem Intellectuals in the Popular Front: Anti-Fascism and the Politics of Black Culture," Journal of Ethnic Studies 9, no. 1 (1981): 1-25. Naison is here quoting from a 1977 interview with Howard Johnson, a party organizer in Harlem in the 1930s. Since anyone might come in contact with a member of an organization that had a loose connection with the party through a few of its members, the estimate is meaningless.

13. Blitzstein's first social protest theater work dates from 1935; and Copland began working on El Salon Mexico, a self-consciously "popular" work, in 1933.

For more on performances of Still's concert music in the 1920s and their folk/blues connections, see Carol J. Oja, "'New Music' and the 'New Negro': The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony," BMRJ 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 145-169; and "The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo," above.

14. Robbie Lieberman, "My Song Is My Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 31.

15. The Composers' Collective seems to have echoed, or perhaps influenced, a party position taken in the early 1930s, "when its critics demanded a Black music free from 'commercial influences.'" The party, as part of its Popular Front phase from 1935, changed its policy in order "to speak of the Black arts (with the exception of vaudeville and musical comedy with sexually explicit themes) as politically "'progressive' in and of themselves," thus accepting "commercialism" in order to attract black musicians. See Naison, "Communism and Harlem Intellectuals in the Popular Front."

16. Henry Johnson, music column in New Masses 19 (April 14, 1936): 29-30, reviewing a Victor recording of spirituals sung by Anderson.

17. Claude McKay, "Negro Author Sees Disaster If the Communist Party Gains Control of Negro Workers," New Leader (September 10, 1928): 3, as quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, ed., The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 228-229, under the title "Communism and the Negro." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) owed at least some of its success and perhaps its National Book Award not only to the excellence of its writing but also to its subject, the recruitment and subsequent betrayal by the party of an African American political activist.

18. Claude McKay, "Claude McKay versus Powell," (New York) Amsterdam News, November 6, 1937, 4, as quoted in The Passion of Claude McKay, 250-252, as "On Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: A Response."

19. Olin Downes, New York Times, April 5, 1946, 19, writing of the Poem for Orchestra on a program featuring "Music of Negroes" that included Still's work, "Spirituals for String Choir and Orchestra" by Morton Gould "freely in Negro style," and Marian Anderson singing Mahler and Donizetti. On the same page is a report of a speech by Gov. Harold Stassen of Minnesota (later a candidate for president) entitled "Stassen Assails Bigotry in Nation."

20. Letter, Leopold Stokowski to Still, May 1, 1944, Still-Arvey Papers.

21. Letter, Newbold Morris to Mr. and Mrs. Louis Kaufman, July 8, 1946, courtesy of Annette Kaufman. The mimeographed letter, which asked the Kaufmans to look for other contributors to the City Center Troubled Island Fund, concluded, "We would like any suggestions you may have as to ways and means of raising the $20,000 necessary for the production of this opera, so that we may be certain to have the money we need to include this production in the 1946-1947 City Center Opera Season. Let us remember that if this opera proves to be as successful as we hope it will be, it will continue to be included in the regular operatic performances by the New York City Opera Company." Stokowski wrote to Still with the idea of performing an orchestral suite from Troubled Island, then a staged version of the opera, then a full production. Letter, Stokowski to Still, May 17, 1944, Still-Arvey Papers.

For a published account of the formation of the New York City Opera, see Martin L. Sokol, The New York City Opera (New York: Macmillan, 1981). Sokol focuses on László Halász's contributions to the company and on the events leading to his firing in late 1951; his bias is toward defending Halász. Since Stokowski was associated with the New York City Symphony and not the opera company, his name does not appear until much later in the chronicle. Moreover, Sokol's annals do not include the Voice of America recording of Troubled Island, which was the first such recording of a company production. (Tapes transcribed from this recording are available through WGSM.)

A typescript account of the New York City Center's early years, missing its first 118 pages but giving a somewhat more balanced version, is in the Heddy Baum Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center.

22. Tammy Lynn Kernodle, "Still's Troubled Island, a Troubled Opera: Its Creation, Performance, and Reception" (M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1993), details the struggles of Still and Hughes to get the opera produced, including the rejection of the work by the Metropolitan Opera and the correspondence from 1944 with conductors Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Monteux, and Laszlo Halász as well as city official Newbold Morris and others (see esp. 25-37). Kernodle concludes that the public record does not demonstrate a plot against Still. Verna Arvey's account appears in IOL, 141-145. In addition to these sources and others in note 24 below, Arvey's letters to Louis and Annette Kaufman (unknown to Kernodle) recount the story as it developed.

23. Letter, Stokowski to Still, May 19, 1948. The letter specifically addressed Still's question as to whether the contribution Stokowski had made to the opera's production fund had been returned as promised. Still-Arvey Papers.

24. Still, Diary, January 28, 1949, Still-Arvey Papers.

25. Olin Downes, New York Times, April 1, 1949, 15:1. In his introduction to "The Life of William Grant Still" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), Benjamin Griffith Edwards writes that the opera received "only" three performances because of its poor reviews. Edwards does not take into account that only three performances were scheduled to begin with. Arvey, IOL, 143, reports that the opera was "scrapped" after three performances, also leading to the impression that the production was closed before initially planned. In fairness, it must be added that, at this early point in its history, the New York City Opera company was able to schedule extra performances on two or three occasions in response to audience demand.

26. Letter, Still to Leopold Stokowski, September 9, 1950, Still-Arvey Papers, refers to the second performance as the one that was recorded. In all other sources, the recording was said to have been made at the dress rehearsal.

27. The altered and added texts appear in both the piano-vocal score and the full score but not in the typed libretto at WGSM. The action is not described in the argument that appears at the beginning of both scores.

28. Arvey's text for Costaso, the opera Still composed in the year of Troubled Island 's production, described briefly in " they, Verna and Billy," above, reflects the beleaguered quality suggested by this line throughout.

29. Judith Anne Still, "In My Father's House . . . ," BPiM 3 (May 1975): 199-206.

30. This statement also appears in Still, "Fifty Years of Progress in Music," Pittsburgh Courier, November 11, 1950, 15. Reprinted in Spencer, Reader, 177-188. In a private communication dated February 27, 1996, Taubman's son, William C. Taubman, advised me that he does not remember his father mentioning either Still or his opera.

31. Telephone conversation with Judith Anne Still, December 15, 1994. This statement is a regular part of her slide lecture on her father.

32. Still, Diary, June 14, 1949. "Winter" is the baritone Lawrence Winters, who sang the role of Dessalines on the recording and in the production. Still-Arvey Papers.

33. Letter, Still to Leopold Stokowski, September 9, 1950, Still-Arvey Papers.

34. Letter, Leopold Stokowski to Still, September 18, 1950, Still-Arvey Papers. Stokowski's letter continues, "Is there something I can do in Bruxelles to assist you regarding this?" Still replied (September 25, 1950) by thanking Stokowski for his offer and rejecting it: "I feel that the intrigue is going on here in America, and that it is only a continuation of the intrigue that went on before."

35. Still, Diary, October 4, 1949, Still-Arvey Papers.

36. Still was arguably a modernist himself (see Murchison's chapter, above). In terms of his rigorous approach to composition, he was an intellectual as well, one with strong neoclassical leanings. In his music Still aimed for both formal sophistication and emotional expressiveness: "I am unable to understand how one can rely solely on feeling when composing. . . . [A] fragment of a musical composition may be conceived through inspiration or feeling, but its development lies altogether within the realm of intellect." William Grant Still, "An Afro-American Composer's Viewpoint," in Henry Cowell, ed., American Composers on American Music (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1932), 182-183, and reprinted in Spencer, Reader, 232, and Fusion 2, 52.

Moreover, in a talk on orchestration delivered at Eastman in 1932 which seems to focus on his then-current work for the "Deep River Hour" radio show, Still spoke repeatedly of the need for "clarity, balance, and a tasteful variety of tone color" to achieve successful, effective orchestration. The statement suggests the high neoclassicism of many modernists. William Grant Still, "On Orchestration," Fusion 2, 35-39. (The essay is the text of the Eastman lecture.) In spite of his neoclassical approach, Still deplored the modernist notion of music as strictly objective as well as the charge of "slushiness" directed at his own work.

37. Still, Diary, October 24, 1949, and February 21, 1950, Still-Arvey Papers.

38. Letter, Still to Howard Hanson, September 20, 1950, Still-Arvey Papers. The letter continues with a reference to a report of an interview with Leonard Bernstein. The report refers to Still's "music, and the music of certain other Americans, whereupon Bernstein replied, 'We don't admit those composers.' " The State Department had suggested the substitution of two short operas, "The Telephone" and "The Medium," by Glan-Carlo Menotti.

39. William Grant Still, "Politics in Music," Opera, Concert and Symphony, August 1947, reprinted in Spencer, Reader, 144-149.

40. Still, "Fifty Years of Progress in Music." Leonard Bernstein never conducted Still's music, then or later.

41. These articles are listed in the Bio-Bibliography . The item numbers and annotations are given here: B196, "Editorials." (Hollywood) Citizen-News, September 25, 1951. Report that Still 'asked Rep. Donald L. Jackson to let him testify before the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. . . . Communists, said the Negro composer, do not speak for the Negro race.'" B242, "'I Pity Negro Communists.' Los Angeles Tidings, June 13, 1952. Lengthy article on Still's views pertaining to communists and their attempts to use members of his own race for the communist cause."

42. "Negro Composer Warns His Race About Reds' Lies," Arkansas Gazette, April 7, 1952. Still-Arvey Papers.

43. Both Still and Arvey visited and corresponded with Cowell while he was in San Quentin. See also Michael Hicks, "The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell," Journal of the American Musicological Society 44, no. 1 (1991): 92-119; and letters in Still-Arvey Papers.

44. William Grant Still, "Communism in Music," speech read to San Jose Chamber of Commerce, May 22, 1953. A tape at WGSM shows that Still deviated slightly from the prepared text, which was revised further and published under his name as "Music: Cog in the Machinery for World Domination" in the American Mercury, August 1954. On August 29, 1953, Arvey wrote to Joseph C. Keeley, editor, American Legion Magazine, offering him a revised version of the same speech. In a cover letter, she wrote, "You will note that although I wrote the article . . . my husband's name is on it for the reason that it was he who delivered it in its original form as a speech. . . . [A]s the views expressed are shared by both of us, I didn't think it mattered whose name appeared as author."

Arvey drew much of her material from Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (New York: American Business Consultants, 1950), a privately published collection of citations from witnesses sympathetic to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The citations associate prominent entertainers with communism on very flimsy grounds. Langston Hughes has a long list of citations in this report; those for Downes and Copland are likewise quite long. Harris, who was not similarly prominent, is not mentioned.

In an oral history given for the Library of Congress in 1996, David Raksin identifies himself as having been assigned to take Still's place on Stormy Weather after Still left the film in 1943. His statement exemplifies the confusion that continues to surround the innumerable charges and countercharges characteristic of the anticommunist movement. Still had resigned from Stormy Weather, giving as his reason that he disapproved of the image of African Americans projected in that film. This was the "studio job" mentioned in his San Jose speech. Raksin reports in error that Still was fired. Benny Carter was hired after Still departed; Emil Newman is listed as Music Director on the film credits. Others may have been involved as well. Thus, as with most of the persons named in the speech, the charge against Raksin, Carter, Newman, or whoever, was and remains an unconfirmed allegation.

45. Sokol does not report the production of a Weill opera by the New York City Opera until five years later ( Lost in the Stars, 1958). However, Marc Blitzstein's Regina was produced in 1953, about a month before Still gave this speech. Halász too was fired in 1953.

46. Some examples: Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa (1912); Horatio Parker's Fairyland (1915); Charles Wakefield Cadman's Shanewis (1918); Howard Hanson's Merry Mount (1934); Aaron Copland's The Tender Land (1954). While some of these have had revivals, none has entered the operatic canon.

47. The introductory essay to Bernard F. Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), summarizes the events that led up to the prosecution of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to cooperate with the investigations of leftist activities and cites a few of the apparent contradictions in the selection and treatment of witnesses. For a more detailed account, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980).

48. See "Finding His Voice," above.

49. Smith, interview with Arvey, Los Angeles, 1981; Arvey, IOL, 116. Arvey incorrectly reports that the performing forces (orchestra, white chorus and Negro chorus) were identical. Wayne D. Shirley, "William Grant Still's Choral Ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree, " AM 12 (Winter 1994): 426-461, documents the genesis of this work in some detail. I am grateful to him for pointing out that Harris did not, as Arvey reports, specify two choruses. He did, however, suggest that, since both choruses were already on stage, they should both sing his piece. The two works also called for different solo voices, a point not mentioned by Arvey.

Earl Robinson, like Blitzstein, was a member of the Composers' Collective. The Ballad for Americans "made use of both folk and art music traditions while synthesizing the patriotic, egalitarian, democratic strains of Popular Front culture." Lieberman, "My Song Is My Weapon," 40. By 1949, Arvey was writing to Still, in New York for the premiere of Troubled Island, warning him of a Times staff member she thought might be a "Commie."

50. Sokol, The New York City Opera, 82-86. Reis's minutes for the meeting at which the board decided to fire Halász are reproduced in full in Sokol's book. See n. 11 above for Arvey's earlier correspondence with Reis.

51. Still, Diary, October 24, 1949, Still-Arvey Papers.

52. Lieberman, "My Song Is My Weapon." Lieberman points out that former communists who wrote about their experiences in the party often put its failure down to "manipulation, corruption, and betrayal" (xxi), much in keeping with the atmosphere of deception cultivated by the party itself. In a curious way, the Stills' plot theory mirrors this atmosphere of deception.

53. For information on Jacob Arvey, see Milton L. Rakove, Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers: An Insider's Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 112-113, 144-145.

54. "Frailest Leaves," 445, Forsythe Papers.

55. Letter, Verna Arvey to Carl Van Vechten, March 24, 1943, Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.

56. Jon Michael Spencer, "The Terrible Handicap of Working as a Negro Composer," in The New Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem Renaissance (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), chap. 3, 72-106.

57. See Forsythe, "William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions," below.

58. The black middle class is described as "surely one of the most disparaged social groups in all of modern history" by Andrew Ross in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 76; quoted in Ingrid Monson, "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 396-422. The trashing of this class goes back as far as E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1957).

59. For example, Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 76, argues that "uplift" meant in practice the adaptation of elite white social practices that widened class distinctions within the African American community and engendered class-based hostility within the race. Gaines does not appear to be familiar with Still's work. In The New Negroes and Their Music, Spencer argues in Still's behalf: "There is no evidence in his remarks that his intent to 'elevate' this music was indicative of a clandestine contempt for it or for the common folk who created it. To the contrary, Still viewed himself as fulfilling the wishes of his forebears who wished for the advancement of their children and the race as a whole" (84).

60. Lawrence Kramer, "Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music," BMRJ 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 53-70, argues that white American and European composers of the modernist period employed Africanist (including African American) musical usages in ways that enclose and subordinate them, thus reflecting the dominant social structure. By subordinating the "black" usages without disturbing primary European-based formal structures, Kramer proposes, a definition of American whiteness as superior to African or American blackness was reinforced.

61. See "The Afro-American Symphony and Its Scherzo," above.

1. Organized in 1875 by a former slave as Huntsville Normal School, it was known from 1878 to 1919 as State Normal and Industrial School. It became a land grant college in 1891. Its current name is Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, Huntsville, Alabama.

2. Still "leave one," a typographical error.

3. Still "loned," a typographical error.

4. Still left Wilberforce University in 1915 and married Grace Bundy on October 4 of the same year; "1916" is an error.

5. W. C. Handy, 1873-1958, composer and music publisher, "Father of the Blues." For his relationship with Still, see "In Retrospect: Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still," BPiM 7 (1979): 199-234; 8 (1980): 65-119.

6. Associated with the Clef Club, an organization of male African American musicians in New York.

7. Opening dates in brackets are taken from Gerald M. Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), unless otherwise noted.

8. William Service Bell was a baritone. Still's song Good Night, composed in 1917 while Still was at Oberlin College, is dedicated to Bell. Bell sang it at a concert on October 21, 1921, at the Newark (N.J.) YWCA; his accompanist was Tourgee DeBose. Bio-Bibliography, W58.

9. George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), composer and longtime director of the New England Conservatory.

10. Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), avant-garde composer.

11. Luckey [Luckeyth, Luckyeth] Roberts (1887-1968), jazz pianist and band leader, composed fourteen musical comedies; the identity of the one orchestrated by Still is uncertain, though the opening date of Charlee, November 23, 1923, seems about right. A second Roberts show at about the same time is mentioned by Bordman, but its opening date is not given.

12. The Plantation was a nightclub in Harlem. Will Vodery was the music director of record.

13. For a biography of Carroll (1893-1947), see Ken Murray, The Body Merchant: The Story of Earl Carroll (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976).

14. Donald Voorhees (1903-1989) conducted five editions of Earl Carroll's Vanities, starting at age twenty, and many other shows. He is best known as the conductor of the "Bell Telephone Hour" for twenty-nine years, the last nine of them on television, from 1940.

15. J. Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, February 27, 1928, 26:3, reproduced in the New York Times Directory of the Theater (New York: Arno Press in cooperation with the Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1973).

16. The first performance on WJZ is listed in the New York Times (January 1, 1933) as taking place on Tuesday, January 3, 1933, 9:30-10:00 P.M . Frank Black was the musical director at WJZ; it is not known who made the decision to bar Still as a conductor.

17. Ouanga, 1932.

18. Howard Hanson (1896-1981), composer, directed the Eastman School of Music from 1924 to 1964, organized annual festivals of American music, and conducted many of Still's works from the :1920s on.

19. Marya Freund (b. Poland 1876, d. Paris 1966), known for singing the music of many twentieth-century composers.

20. "Puritan Epic" is crossed off the title page of the score at WGSM and "From the Heart of a Believer" is substituted. Perhaps Still began with the latter title, changed it for the competition, then changed it back again.

21. Alain Locke and M. Gregory, eds., Plays of Negro Life: A Sourcebook of Native American Drama (New York: Harper and Row, 1927).

22. Another slip by Still. Still's diary shows 1930 as the year of composition, not 1931. The work was premiered on May 22, 1931.

23. There is no evidence that these performances took place.

1. Arvey to Schwerké, [1937 May].

2. Or rather "To my friend, Irving Schwerke." Still never did quite believe in the accent on the final letter of Schwerké's name.

3. Ramona H. Matthews, "Schwerké, Irving."

4. I was assured of this fact by Verna Arvey when I interviewed her in February 1982.

5. I was given photocopies of Schwerké's letters to Still by Verna Arvey in 1981; this paper represents a very belated acknowledgment of my debt to her.

6. Still's first two letters have the added use to the researcher of giving a sample of Still's longhand writing style. (The remainder of Still's side of the correspondence is typescript.) Still, who in fact wrote a beautiful longhand, seems to have been ashamed of it: what little of his later correspondence is not in typescript is in his idiosyncratic (and also handsome) print hand. He did occasionally rely on longhand in informal situations: these letters give us one of our most extensive samples of that hand.

7. Dated from Schwerké's reply of October 9. Still's letter is undated: Schwerké may have gotten the date from the postmark.

8. Still, whose spelling is generally impeccable (though without accents), writes here—and only here—"sincerly."

9. The version published in this volume, dated October 1930, is too late to be the precise text Schwerké saw.

10. Schwerké is thinking in French (as, later in this letter, "dedicace"), not forgetting his plurals.

11. The two songs were doubtless "Winter's Approach" and "Death of a Rose," published by G. Schirmer in 1928. Neither the "snapshot" nor the manuscript is now in the Schwerké Collection.

12. If Still had written Schwerké about Sahdji, the letter is lost. This remark does suggest that we are missing some of the early letters of Still to Schwerké: surely Still would have remembered if he had written Schwerké a letter containing a works list.

13. Deo volente —" God willing."

14. Still to Schwerké [1931 March? (letter beginning "On presenting the scores. . .")].

15. Undated letter [March 1931?] beginning "I am sending you scores . . ."

16. This letter is not in the correspondence as we now have it. (Perhaps Still put it in a scrapbook?)

17. Dated in pencil by Schwerké.

18. "The beginnings of American music are not to be found in the lore of the American Indians or Negroes, or in the hybrid jazz. Its origin must be sought in quite another field, that is, the psalm-singing of Colonial New England. . . . [T]he psalm-singing of New England became the starting point of the musical art of America." "American Music 1579-1931: A Brief Sketch." American Music Festival in Bad Homburg, July 6 to 8, 1931 [program book], 45-46.

19. The footnote (on page 52 of the copy of the program book in the Schwerké Collection) reads in part: "Our book Kings Jazz and David, published in 1927, gives a reprint of data on jazz which was published some years before the War, and in which the word jazz is seen to be a direct descendant of the French verb jaser, nothing more nor less."

20. The shipping of the score of Africa had involved similar problems: Schwerké probably felt that Still should have learned from that experience.

21. We do not have the original of this letter. (Perhaps Schwerké framed it.) A typed transcript—presumably by Schwerké—is fastened onto the dedication page of the 1931 manuscript of the Afro-American Symphony .

22. Still's first Guggenheim opera would finally be Blue Steel . That he here describes the opera he intends to do as "African" is evidence that he is still contemplating an operatic version of The Sorcerer . See "Finding His Voice" above.

23. Furtwängler to Schwerké, July 24, 1931.

24. Letter dated March 29, 1932. Still's letter to Schwerké of February 28, 1932 ("won't it be great if Mr. Furtwangler decides to perform the symphony?") establishes that it was the Afro-American, not Africa, that Furtwängler was examining.

25. Rhené-Baton to Schwerké, September 21, 1932.

26. I am assuming that Still's letter given below—a letter inconveniently undated—precedes that of February 28, 1932, and replies to a previous letter of Schwerké. This is done partly to preserve the flow of narrative, for which it is important that Still's letter of February 28 be followed immediately by Schwerké's letter of March 7. But it is most likely that each of the two letters is written in response to a different letter, and it seems unlikely that the undated letter, with its immediate exclamation "AFRICA to be performed in Paris . . . ," would postdate the much more elaborate letter of February 28.

27. La Guiablesse was in fact performed at Eastman on May 5, 1933.

28. The work was the job of arranging for and conducting Willard Robison's radio program, the "Deep River Hour."

29. The "in" in this sentence has been added in ink.

30. Still's letter is dated by Schwerké as "20-IV-32"—probably from postmark, not from date of receipt. The photographs are no longer with the letter.

31. Arranging for the "Deep River Hour."

32. Presumably the program books from the Bad Homburg festival.

33. Dated by Schwerké.

34. Only the first and third movements were performed at this concert. The performance was billed as a "première audition," which it was not.

35. Still replied, on receipt of the package: "My dear Irving: You certainly do things well. I was amazed to see so many things concerning AFRICA. Back of the many kind things you said I could read your desire to help me, regardless of how helping me would affect you. That's true friendship. And I'm thankful for it. I pray that God will bless you, Irving. [signed] Still."

36. Letter dated March 2, 1933, by Schwerké.

37. Later than October 10, the first New York performance of Porgy and Bess; a few days earlier than October 28.

38. Irving Schwerké, Views and Interviews (Paris: Les Orphelins-apprentis d'Auteuil, 1936). Probably Schwerké gave Still's letter to whoever was taking care of orders for the book (though note that Schwerké autographed Still's copy).

39. In March 1934 Still had signed a contract with Robbins Music Corporation, giving them "permanent ownership" of everything he was to write for the next two years, and to Africa and A Deserted Plantation . It was a disastrous contract: in the end Robbins published nothing of Still's but a butchered version of A Deserted Plantation and an arrangement of Foster's "Old Folks at Home."

40. The underlinings in this paragraph are in pencil. They may well be Schwerké's rather than Still's.

41. The notes are no longer with the correspondence.

42. Leonard Liebling was editor-in-chief of the Musical Courier . "Variations" was its column of miscellanea, which mixed comments by Liebling with items sent in by correspondents (Arvey sent in one for the November 28, 1936, issue).

43. Schwerké, after quoting an unnamed writer as saying, "Music is the mirror which most perfectly reflects man's inner being," had written: "Some recent concerts submitted Parisians to an almost indecent amount of new music . . . and I regret to report that none of it revealed the kind of 'inner being' that I, a simple mortal, should like to go after." Views and Interviews, 46.

44. No extant letter of Stokowski to Still suggests "this view of modern music."

45. Schwerké and Hughes did not meet. [Schwerké to Still, January 11, 1938: "The young writer with whom you are collaborating 'phoned me yesterday evening, and as he is leaving tomorrow for America, I shall not have the pleasure of seeing him."]

46. The G minor.

47. Views and Interviews contains no substantial material on any twentieth-century American composer, though it does quote Alexander Steinert and Edgard Varèse entertainingly on the subject of "wicked Paris" and the innocent American music student (153-154).

48. Alexandre Tansman, compositeur polonais (Paris: M. Eschig, 1931). (An English-language version, listed at the front of the book, never appeared.)

49. The article on deFalla in Views and Interviews is in fact brief and may not reflect an interview.

50. There is no Still Third String Quartet (he once wrote to Alain Locke saying that he disliked the form): this is an abstract example.

51. The articles are "Italian Piano Music, Contemporary and Past," Musical Courier 108, no. 22 (June 2, 1934): 6 ff.; and "Musical Potentialities in Cuba and South America," Musical Courier 113, no. 11 (March 14, 1936): 6 ff.

52. This material is no longer with the correspondence.

53. In fact Central Avenue was not "completely destroyed"; the first half of it, given a substantially new libretto, forms the first half of Lenox Avenue . There is a complete piano reduction, with stage directions, of Central Avenue in the Still-Arvey Collection in Fayetteville. Still may have worried that Central Avenue, written while under contract to Robbins Music Corp., might be invoked by that publisher to get rights for Lenox Avenue . (Apologies to Jeffrey Magee, who cited an earlier version of this footnote in the periodical Lenox Avenue [2 (1966): 5-6].)

54. Schwerké dates in pencil "May 1937." June—after Schwerké's letter of June 12—seems more likely.

55. J. Fischer and Bro., Inc.

56. Dedications are, in fact, particularly vulnerable. A story may help here. In the early 1980s I edited Charles Ives's The Fourth of July for the Charles Ives Society. I had done all of the work on the music when I decided to look at Ives's letters to Henry Cowell, whose New Music Editions published the first edition. Ives's letter on the receipt of the published score mentioned only one of the many mistakes in the engraving—some of them rather important—but complained bitterly that the dedication, to Ives's business partner Julian Myrick, had been omitted. In several years of intense work on the musical substance of the work I had seen no sign of a dedication: had I not read these letters the new edition, like the old, would have lacked a dedication.

57. Still's answer is undated. "Spring 1938" can serve as a brief identification.

58. For works through 1931, compare with the "Personal Notes" above and with descriptions in Arvey's essay.

59. I have assumed that "at D" is a slip of the typewriter in my reconstruction of the musical examples.

60. In fact, a full score of Puritan Epic, retitled From the Heart of a Believer, is in the possession of Judith Anne Still.

61. This interpretation of the hero's motives is not clear from the libretto. In any case, it is seduction and elopement, rather than kidnapping, that he plans.

62. Diario de Lisbòa, December 24, 1940. The critic who interviewed Schwerké was Francine Benoit. Roger Vuataz is a Swiss composer and organist, born 1898.

63. Of American publishers of the period perhaps only G. Schirmer, against which Still nursed an obscure but powerful grudge, had the power to promote an American composer's career in Europe. J. Fischer and Bro., Still's helpful and cooperative publisher from 1935 to 1942, was influential in America but not in Europe.

64. Though they, too, tend to represent Still's California years much more thoroughly than earlier periods. This represents partly Arvey's talents as an organizer, but more the universal human tendency to accumulate things when you stay in one place and to throw them out when you move.

1. For Forsythe's off-the-cuff later response to the Afro-American Symphony, see p. 144.

2. Program notes, International Composers' Guild Concert, November 28 [1926], ICG Programs, Music Division, New York Public Library, New York City. Quoted in Carol J. Oja, "'New Music' and the 'New Negro': The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony," BMRJ 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 145-169. Oja reads the program note to suggest four themes, although Still lists six in his letter to Schwerké describing the piece. (See the music examples in "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," above.)

3. "Personal Notes," 1933. The "faults" Still found with this work are amplified along these same lines in Arvey's "William Grant Still," below.

4. Oja, "'New Music' and the 'New Negro.'"

5. Later in 1930, Still forwarded what was presumably a copy of this essay to Irving Schwerké in Paris. Schwerké was to forward it to Varèse. This copy remains unlocated.

6. Religto Medici, ca. 1635, published 1643. Browne was a physician, but the book is a profession of faith rather than a medical treatise.

7. Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) was a prominent member of the avant-garde in New York City in the 1920s. He was Still's teacher for a time. Forsythe claimed to have studied with him as well, though this has not been confirmed. Charles E. Pemberton, with whom Forsythe studied composition, taught at the University of Southern California.

8. Katherine Ruth Willoughby Heyman (1877-1944) made her debut as a pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1899 and concertized widely thereafter. A champion of Scriabin's music, she wrote The Relation of Ultra-Modern to Archaic Music (Boston, 1921) from which Forsythe quotes below. Scriabin's music and his thought were of considerable interest to musical modernists in the 1920s.

9. Except for Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), a sometime slave who became a major advocate of abolition, these are writers of the Harlem Renaissance, most of whom were known to Still and probably to Forsythe as well. Countee Cullen (1903-1946) began an opera project with Still. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) authored the libretto to Still's opera Troubled Island . Wallace Henry Thurman (1902-1934), like Forsythe a westerner, attended the University of Southern California and edited the journal Outlet, to which Forsythe contributed, in 1924. Thurman left Los Angeles in May 1934, the month of Still's arrival there. The associations with Claude McKay (1889-1948) and Eric Walrond (1898-1966) are not so clear.

10. Jean Toomer's first novel, Cane, published in 1923, had a major impact on readers of both races, although Toomer (1894-1967) did not produce other work of comparable quality. Toomer, who was raised as a white and later lived as an African American, chose eventually to identify as "American" rather than with either race. Ralph Kabnis (see text, below), a principal figure in Cane, is portrayed as a black northerner who experiences a nightmare of race relations as a schoolteacher in the South. Cane, with its focus on mysticism, and Toomer's later advocacy of Gurdjieff and his cult, may have been a source for some of Still's ideas, such as his symphony, Song of a New Race, his view of his role as a composer, and his interest in the occult.

Roland Hayes (1887-1977) was a tenor who toured widely, singing both the Western European repertoire and spirituals before largely white audiences. In 1948 he published My Songs, his editions of his repertoire of spirituals.

Paul Robeson (1898-1987), earned the LL.B. but became a bass singer and actor. His radical politics interfered with his artistic career in the United States; he lived abroad for some years starting in the 1950s. His book, Here I Stand, was published in London in 1958.

11. Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), baritone, composer-arranger of spirituals, sang for Dvorak * during his famous stay in the United States. See Jean E. Snyder, "Harry T. Burleigh and the Creative Expression of Bi-Musicality: A Study of an African-American Composer and the American Art Song" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1992); and Anne Key Simpson, Hard Trials: The Life and Music of Harry T. Burleigh (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990).

Considering Still's reported aversion to Wagner's Tristan, it is interesting that Burleigh said he had seen this drama more than sixty-six times.

12. All African American composers who, among other things, arranged spirituals.

13. Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954) composed several operas and was probably the first African American to conduct a symphony orchestra in his own works (Minneapolis, 1907). Still may have heard his opera Voodoo in New York City in 1927, produced by Freeman's Negro Opera Company.

14. Robert Russa Moton (1867-1940), founder of the National Negro Business League and principal of the Tuskegee Institute, was viewed as very conservative on race relations. In What the Negro Thinks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1929), Moton lists as model composers Burleigh, Dett, and Coleridge-Taylor, an Englishman. Carl Diton published a collection of spirituals from South Carolina in 1925.

15. Ferde Grofé (1892-1972) began as a symphony musician on the West Coast but joined Paul Whiteman in 1920 as an arranger.

16. Contrary to Forsythe's expectation, Still remained consistent in these judgments, which may be generalized as a lack of interest in the German classical and romantic composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner and an enthusiasm (not characteristic of modernists) for nineteenth-century Italian opera, including such composers as Leoncavallo, Mascagni, and Verdi. His interest in Bizet's very popular opera, Carmen (1875), and his indifference to Tristan und Isolde (1865), the first of Wagner's music dramas, follows this pattern. Likewise, Still was uninterested in Scriabin's musical mysticism but found Johann Sebastian Bach's logical approach to composition a useful model.

17. Vladimir Rebikov, 1866-1920.

18. Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1902), Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909), Percy Goetchius (1853-1943), and Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808-1879) were nineteenth-century pedagogues of music theory whose textbooks were still widely used in the United States when Forsythe was writing.

19. Cecil Forsyth (1870-1941), Orchestration (New York, 1914; 2d ed., 1935).

20. The first version adds: "He offers insults so affably that they seem like compliments. He is the only man who ever disliked my music and made me like the way he disliked it."

21. Forsythe is probably referring to Verna Arvey. The source of the quotation remains unlocated.

22. In "William Grant Still: Eclectic Religionist," Theomusicology: A Special Issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 135-156, Jon Michael Spencer makes the case that Arvey introduced Still to spiritualism. Spencer's hypothesis is contradicted by this sentence, by Arvey's statement in In One Lifetime, and by other evidence. Still kept track of his visions in the few pre-1930 (and therefore pre-Arvey) diaries that survive; he also noted visits to psychics in Los Angeles before his marriage to Arvey.

23. This sentence and the next are connected. The original reads " . . . possess, and although he notes . . . ," probably a typing error.

24. George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), composer, was then director of the New England Conservatory. He took Still, who was in Boston for an indefinite period as a member of the Shuffle Along orchestra, as a private student.

25. "His personality earns him enthusiastic admirers and hostile adversaries. It is a sure indication of his creative power."

26. "Guide": appears in the original as "guiding" without a noun to modify. The student choruses to which Forsythe refers are unlocated.

27. Still met Grace Bundy when both were students at Wilberforce University. They separated in 1932 and divorced in 1939.

28. Donald Voorhees (1903-1989) had a long career (1925-1959) as a conductor on radio and conducted on Broadway from the 1920s.

Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) began as a symphony musician on the West Coast and later achieved fame with his own band. He conducted the premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue at Carnegie Hall in 1924. Still arranged for his "Old Gold Hour" broadcasts in 1930.

William H. Challis (b. 1904) orchestrated for Whiteman from 1927 to 1930.

29. See the headnote for Still's program note on Darker America and excerpts from other commentary on it. In the early draft, Forsythe calls Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue "almost sophomoric" in comparison to Darker America .

30. All modernists, most of European or Latin American nationalities.

31. Olin Downes (1886-1955) wrote music criticism for the Boston Post before joining the New York Times in 1924. Compare with discussions of From Land of Dreams in the introduction and in Still's "Personal Notes."

32. Walter Donaldson (1893-1947), a white songwriter, composed "My Blue Heaven" and "Making Whoopee." Al Jolson (1886-1950) was a white actor and singer well known for performing in blackface.

33. Forsythe is referring to the Sonata-Vocalise by Nicolai Medtner.

34. American music critics. Forsythe's writing shows the influence of Rosenfeld, an advocate of contemporary composers.

35. Carl Van Vechten was a white enthusiast and an influential patron of the Harlem Renaissance. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was an influential literary and music critic of the 1920s and 1930s.

36. "Likewise, this American culture has created a national literature. It divides itself into two groups; at the head of the first group is Paul Rosenfeld, the most brilliant American essayist, remarkable for the breadth of his views, by his interest in all that is new, supported by the generosity of his thought."

37. Along with Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld, Alfred Kreymborg edited New American Caravan (1929).

38. Henry Osborne Osgood, So This Is Jazz (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926).

39. Waldo Frank (1889-1967). All were writers of European extraction who used African or African American materials in their work. Heyward (1885-1940) later used his novel and play Porgy (1924) as the source for the libretto to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess .

40. Stokowski later conducted Still's music frequently.

41. Gustave Schirmer (1890-1967), the third family member to be involved in the business, ran the music publishing house G. Schirmer during the years 1907-1921 and 1944-1957.

42. All contemporary composers, but about a generation older than Still. Given this pattern, "Williams" might be Ralph Vaughan Williams.

43. The scenario is described by Arvey in her "William Grant Still," below.

44. Oscar Sonneck was president of G. Schirmer at the time. Forsythe did not know that Still had finally composed Sahdji in summer 1930.

45. Gorham Munson, Style and Form in American Prose (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1929).

46. The third song, "Mandy Lou," was not published by G. Schirmer, as the other two were. See Arvey, "William Grant Still," below.

47. See "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," above, for a reconstruction of the six themes Still writes of in a letter to Schwerké.

48. "Still, the prestigious orchestrator, has just written an opera whose libretto is by a poet of his race, Countee Cullen."

49. Lawrence, whose family was Forsythe's landlord and who was a cousin of Still's, was one of the pianists who appeared on a concert of music composed by Forsythe, given in Los Angeles in 1931.

50. "Kabnis" refers to the hero of Jean Toomer's novel Cane (1923). A letter from Forsythe to Toomer in JWJ, dated August 29, 1934, expresses Forsythe's extravagant admiration for Toomer's Cane:

Since those earliest days, when I was a pale-yellow youth in short trousers, and "Kabnis" boomed through my brain with such force that I felt carried forward by it, my conception of the genius of Jean Toomer has never faltered. . . . [I]n public "lectures" and private conversation, I have doggedly insisted that you are not so much the finest but the only writer partaking of the Blood, in this country. . . .

An impassioned, solitary worker, . . . I feel that my works, both in music and literature, have been largely influenced by the clear and rich aesthetic vision which as a youth I saw in "Cane."

Forsythe asks Toomer's permission to quote from Toomer's "Balo" in order to "clarify an aesthetic and psychological figure, too complex to describe in a short letter. . . . Also, in the course of the book which is somewhat concerned with the Root-heart of the Spiritual and a clearer valuation of the ethnic-influence in music, it has been found necessary to say some true things about Jean Toomer." JWJ.

No response from Toomer has been found. Toomer later dramatized part 4 of Cane, in which Kabnis appears. "Rashana" was the name of an opera Still planned but never completed. Countee Cullen was to write the libretto, based on a novel by Grace Bundy, then Still's wife. Cullen did not complete the libretto; Bundy's manuscript is unlocated.

1. "Edgar Varese" is not changed to "Edgard Varèse," but "Marya" is corrected from "Mayra," and the spelling of other names is silently corrected.

2. Friedrich J. Lehmann (1866-1950) published a treatise on the violin (1899) and several textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and form. Still's copy of his harmony text is heavily marked. George W. Andrews (1861-1932) published songs, music for piano and organ, and choral works.

3. The conductor was probably Will Vodery.

4. Compare with discussions of this piece in the Introduction and in Forsythe's "A Study in Contradictions."

5. "Land of Enchantment" in some versions.

6. Compare with the analysis in the Still-Schwerké correspondence.

7. The first performance was June 26, 1998, by the Centennial Celebration Orchestra, Ronnie Wooten, conductor. Richard Fields was the pianist.

8. This was Cental Avenue, which was actually completed.

9. The format of this list is slightly changed. For fuller lists that extend beyond the date of publication of Arvey's monograph, consult both Fusion 2 and the Bio-Bibliography . Dates of publication, not composition, are given. Commercial arrangements are not listed.

10. Rearranged in chronological order.