World Premiere: November 20, 1934
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat, clarinet in E-flat, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and string
Duration: 36 minutes

The distinguished composer, conductor and educator William L. Dawson was born in Anniston, Alabama in 1899, and ran away from home when he was fifteen to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. After graduating in 1921, Dawson moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he obtained his baccalaureate from the Horner Institute of Fine Arts, taught at Kansas Vocational College and Lincoln High School, and played trombone in local jazz bands. In 1927, he settled in Chicago, where he played bass with such outstanding jazz artists as Louis and Lillian Armstrong, Johnny Dodds and Earl Hines, furthered his education at the Chicago Musical College, played principal trombone in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, and directed music at Ebenezer Baptist Church. In 1931, Dawson joined the music faculty of the Tuskegee Institute, and during his 25-year tenure brought the Tuskegee Choir to international prominence through tours across the country and abroad, concerts for Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and an appearance at the grand opening of Radio City Music Hall in New York City in 1932. His contributions to music and education were honored with honorary doctorates from the Tuskegee Institute, Lincoln University and Ithaca College. His Negro Folk Symphony was premiered in 1934 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski, and his many arrangements of spirituals are among the finest and most frequently performed works of their kind. William L. Dawson died in Montgomery, Alabama on May 2, 1990.

Dawson began his Negro Folk Symphony in 1931 in Chicago, just before joining the Tuskegee faculty. It was a remarkable undertaking that testified not just to his personal ambition and unquenchable creative spirit, but also to his pride in his heritage and belief in the power of music to bridge social divides. Racial prejudice was rampant in the country during those years — Dawson was excluded from some performances and ridiculed by orchestral musicians, and Little Rock native Florence Beatrice Price registered as “Mexican” to avoid discrimination in the Boston community when she entered the New England Conservatory of Music in 1903; she earned vindication when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, premiered her Symphony in E minor on June 15, 1933, the first performance of a symphonic work by a black woman composer by a major American orchestra. 

The catalyst for Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony may have been William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony, which became the first such work by a black composer played by a major American orchestra when Howard Hanson premiered it with the Rochester Philharmonic on October 29, 1931. Dawson said that in his Symphony he wanted “to be just myself, a Negro. To me, the finest compliment that could be paid to my Symphony is that it unmistakably is not the work of a white man. I want audiences to say only a Negro could have written that!” He found a champion for the work in Leopold Stokowski, Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, whom he met when he was in New York on a tour with the Tuskegee Choir. Stokowski offered encouragement and suggestions for the gestating Symphony, and led its successful premiere in Philadelphia on November 16, 1934.

“This Symphony is based entirely on Negro folk-music,” Dawson wrote (in the third person) in a note for the premiere. “The themes are based on what are popularly known as Negro spirituals, and the practiced ear will recognize the recurrence of characteristic themes throughout the composition. [Most are original with Dawson, however.] This folk-music springs spontaneously from the life of the Negro people as freely today [1934] as at any time in the past, though the modes and forms of the present day are sometimes vastly different from older creations. In this composition, the composer has employed some themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.”

The first movement — The Bond of Africa — opens with a call from the solo horn, a recurring theme that Dawson called the “missing link [representing a link that] was removed from a human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent into slavery”; strings respond with a lyrical melody and woodwinds with snapping rhythmic phrases. These ideas are developed and intertwined before the tempo quickens for the horn’s presentation of a broad theme tinged with blue notes. The movement’s thematic material is completed by a nimble oboe melody based on the traditional spiritual Oh, My Lit’l Soul Gwine-a Shine. The rest of the movement is given over to buoyant but intricate elaborations and combinations of these themes, with the “missing link” motto acting as a formal anchor as it echoes throughout.

Hope in the Night begins with three strokes on the gong that Dawson said are a “symbol of the Trinity that guides the destiny of man” and continues with a doleful passage initiated by English horn “suggesting the monotonous life of the people who were held in bondage for 250 years.” A contrasting theme depicting, Dawson explained, the “merry play of children yet unaware of the hopelessness beclouding their future” is reminiscent of the lively juba dance that slaves performed to the rhythmic accompaniment of clapping, tapping and slapping their own hands, arms, legs, torso and cheeks when they were forbidden to have any percussion instruments because plantations owners feared they would be used to send signals. Both of these themes are developed and combined with the “missing link” and main themes from the first movement before they return intact to round out the movement, which ends with a coda of ominous chords punctuated by three bell chimes.

O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!, the Symphony’s uplifting finale, begins with a theme modeled on the traditional call-and-response: oboe –bassoon–clarinet–trumpet. The movement’s secondary theme, whose rhythm recalls the “missing link” motto, is derived from the spiritual Hallelujah, Lord I Been Down into the Sea. It is threaded through much of the dramatic development section, where its affinity with the “missing link” phrase is strengthened. Peaceful harmonies provide a cushion for the return of the call-and-response main theme in the high woodwinds to begin the recapitulation. The Symphony closes with a brilliant summation by the full orchestra.