REVIEW: William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance
Above, William Grant Still photographed by Carl Van Vechten.
April 14, 2024
The Orchestra Now visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday for an exploration of Sight & Sound: William Grant Still & and the Harlem Renaissance. Tying in with the Met Museum’s current exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, Leon Botstein and Bard University’s graduate orchestra, which draws talented student musicians from around the world, delivered an invigorating performance of the seldom heard second symphony of this little understood composer.
The Met’s show, which opened to rave reviews, shatters preconceptions, proving in work largely drawn from private collections that modernism in 20th Century art has been viewed through a racially selective lens, and that Black creativity in fact had an international reach. Denise Murrell, Tisch Curator at Large, introduced the program with a tour of the themes and highlights of the exhibition.
William Grant Still was an interesting character. A classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, he attended Oberlin, and played oboe in the pit orchestra of the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. He penned an opera, Troubled Island, initially with librettist Langston Hughes, in 1939. But, Still and Hughes fell out over political differences: Still broke with the political tide, harboring staunch anti-Communist views, proudly “naming names” in the 1950s.
Still’s Symphony No. 2 in G Minor, “Song of a New Race,” from 1937, was conceived as a companion to his more popular First Symphony from 1930, the “Afro-American.” Botstein, placing the piece in context, posited that the first symphony satisfies the stereotypes white audiences expect from a Black composer’s music, whereas the second symphony — in which the composer aimed to represent a forward-looking post-racial era — remains the “ugly duckling.”
The work, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, sounds straight out of Hollywood. TŌN’s string section played with polished expressivity, bringing a silvery sheen to the lush string writing. The woodwind and brass sections harbor many future symphonic players, with strong soloists peppered throughout. Still, being an oboist, features the instrument prominently, and in the orchestra’s principal oboe chair, Quinton Bodnár-Smith, was in fine form.
Concerts in this valuable series conclude with a Q & A. One audience member lamented that the majority of the musicians did not appear to be Black, and questioned whether it was not “cultural appropriation … even racist” for the orchestra to present the work of a Black composer in this context. Botstein defended his orchestra’s multicultural and international makeup, and further explained his institution’s outreach into the community, such as in the educational system, and with the Bard Prison Initiative.
Would the questioner have preferred the symphony not be played at all? Questions, and open wounds, abound. What is clear, however: William Grant Still envisioned a future without racial division, but we have not yet achieved it.
