Music: Black Composers Series

In 1987 Columbia Records released a boxed set of nine LPs, composed by African-American composers. Despite the fact that Black performers are relatively common (André Watts, Leontyne Price, Marian Anderson, etc.) the number of composers of classical music who are African-American is surprisingly small.  Music of course has no color of its own, but the dominance of African-Americans in most genres of music makes their absence in classical music all the more surprising.

During the Classical and Baroque eras of course Blacks were enslaved in the United States, and not treated to conservatory educations despite whatever talents they may have displayed.  The French composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739-1799) was one of the few from that era... and his father was a wealthy white planter while his mother was his father's 16-year old Senegalese slave.

In the modern era, Fela Sowande (1905-1987) was a Nigerian who gained considerable fame in London for his African-themed classical music.  William Grant Still (1895-1978), Ulysses Simpson Kay (1917-1995), George Theophilis Walker (1922-2018), Hale Smith (1925-2009) and Adolphus Hailstork (1941- ) are all Americans, and about the only composers of note.

Back in the day, I managed to collect four of the nine LPs, and when I was getting ready to sell my collection I made a 3-CD boxed set of those recordings. I cleaned them up as best I could, but they were used when I bought them (and sounded like it!).  My turntable at the time also made a thumping noise with every revolution.  The set has always disappointed me.

For some reason today I thought about this set, and wondered if the series had ever been reissued on CD.  Turns out yes, yes it was in 2018:


It's been expanded with a 10th disc of spirituals by the same conductor & orchestra, all in surface noise-free digital.  I can't wait for it to arrive.  Hopefully the accompanying booklet will further fill in my limited knowledge of this important undertaking.

It arrived already. Now to spend some heavy time with it.

Lovely recordings, some really outstanding sonics for the late 1970s.

And the music is advanced.  Very engaging composing, most of it, although there is a mass and some other vocal material I don't think I'll be spending much time with.  But the William Grant Still and Adolphus Hailstork pieces are divine.  I'd already laid in some other recordings by these gentlemen based on how much I liked these.

Which reminded me of the other 20th Century contemporary classical I bought a couple years ago when I was on a bender:

• Michael Gandolfi
  
• Jennifer Higdon
  
• Michael Daugherty
  
• Barbara Harbach
  
• Ellen Taafe Zwilich
  

Got my weekend listening all laid out.

Zwilich's "Rituals for Five Percussionists and Orchestra" (2002) is a fascinating cross-cultural amalgamation, using some percussion and scales of Balinese gamelan music with orchestral threads tying it together. It's incredibly well informed, rather like Ravi Shankar's late compositions finding similarities between Indian classical music and modern 20th Century minimalist classical.