NEC Symphony + David Loebel: Beethoven, Copland, Dawson

Ludwig van Beethoven | Overture to Fidelio, op. 72

Aaron Copland | Suite from "Appalachian Spring" (1943-44)

INTERMISISON

William L. Dawson | Negro Folk Symphony (1934)

The Bond of Africa
Hope in the Night
O, Le' Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!

Program note

“I’ve not tried to imitate Beethoven or Brahms, Franck, or Ravel but to be just myself, a Negro. To me, the finest compliment that could be paid my symphony when it has its premiere is that it unmistakably is not the work of a white man. I want the audience to say: ‘Only a Negro could have written that.’”
--William Levi Dawson, 1934

An almost exact contemporary of Aaron Copland’s, Alabama-born William Levi Dawson is perhaps best remembered today for his popular choral arrangements of spirituals. The recent reemergence of Dawson’s first and only major orchestral work, Negro Folk Symphony, speaks to his talent, courage and tenacity, even as it is sadly emblematic of the frustrations that hindered the careers of Black composers of his generation.
     Negro Folk Symphony could hardly have had a more auspicious debut. The premiere performances in 1934 by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski—in both Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall, one of which was nationally broadcast on the radio—were huge successes, greeted by enthusiastic ovations and positive reviews. Nonetheless, the symphony fell into undeserved invisibility almost immediately and—except for a 1963 recording conducted by Stokowski—has only reentered public view in recent years. In this respect it shared the fate of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, which received a highly visible debut by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra a year before that of Dawson’s work. It is impossible not to believe that the racism endemic to the American classical music world in the 1930s played a major role in the long neglect their music suffered.
     Negro Folk Symphony is unified by a “Leading Motive,” first stated by the French horn at the very outset; Dawson described it as symbolizing “A link (that) was taken out of the human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent to slavery.” To emphasize the “folk” character promised by the symphony’s title, the first movement (“The Bond of Africa”) includes a theme derived from the spiritual Oh My Little Soul Gwine Shine Like a Star. The second movement (“Hope in the Night’) begins with music depicting, in Dawson’s words, “…the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed by the whip for two hundred fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born.” A contrasting middle section depicts slave children at play, “unmindful of the heavy cadences of despair.”
     Two spirituals—O Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star! and Hallelujah, Lord, I Been Down into the Sea—form the basis of the symphony’s triumphant finale.
— David Loebel

NEC Symphony