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.