Negro Folk Symphony
William Dawson (1899-1990)

THE STORY

     While Gershwin bridged a divide between jazz and classical music, William L. Dawson bridged a divide between spirituals and classical music. In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The new work brought the audience to its feet—and the audience brought the 35-year-old conductor back to the stage again and again for bows. The work was hailed in the New York press as "the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.”
     Stokowski revisited the work 30 years later when he recorded it with the American Symphony Orchestra. (Dawson revisited it around the same time as well, making revisions after a trip to Africa in 1963 to infuse it with more African rhythms.) But otherwise, this work that had made such an impression when it was first premiered largely fell off the radar—until recently.
     The symphony is vibrant and emotionally charged, taking inspiration for its main themes from “what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals,” Dawson wrote. In his program notes for the Carnegie Hall performance, he continues, "In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother's knee.”
     As a child, Dawson had not stayed at his mother’s knee for long. Born in Alabama, he ran away from home at age 13 to study music at the pre-college program of Tuskegee Institute, where he worked his way through school. He continued his studies in Chicago, earning his master’s degree and then performing as an orchestral trombonist. Dawson returned to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) 10 years after his graduation to officially launch its music school and is credited with developing its internationally renowned choir.

LISTEN FOR

• In the first movement, The Bond of Africa, the opening blues gesture in the solo French horn and, about a minute in, a tender melody in the strings that sounds like it could be straight out of a movie score

• Three soft gong strokes that begin the melancholy lullaby of the second movement, Hope in the Night, followed by a plaintive melody in the English horn; Dawson described this movement as an "atmosphere of the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed with the whip for two hundred and fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born"

• The 19th-century Romanticism of the third movement, O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star! (although he drew on European styles, Dawson was clear that he wanted his music to be “unmistakably not the work of a white man”)

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings