Dawson's 'Negro Folk Symphony'

Synopsis

Today’s date in 1899 marks the birthday of famous African-American composer, choir director and teacher, William L. Dawson, in Anniston, Alabama. After musical studies in Kansas City and Chicago, from 1931 to 1956 Dawson taught at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed the Institute’s Choir into an internationally-renowned ensemble.

His arrangements of African-American spirituals, which he preferred to call folksongs, are justly famous, but in 1934 he produced his masterwork, a Negro Folk Symphony, modeled on Dvorak’s New World Symphony, but exhibiting his own distinctive mastery and development of his themes. His goal, he said, was for audiences to know that it was “unmistakably not the work of a white man.”

“The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. In this composition, the composer has employed themes … over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee,” he wrote.

Dawson’s symphony was successfully premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who took the new work to Carnegie Hall, where its 35-year-old composer was repeatedly called to the stage. The symphony was revised in 1952 with added African rhythms inspired by the composer’s trip to West Africa.

Music Played in Today's Program

William L. Dawson (1899-1990): Negro Folk Symphony; Symphony of the Air; Leopold Stokowski, conductor; DG 477 6502