History

William Grant Still, Dean of African American Classical Composers

Published

4 years ago

July 14, 2020

What began as a violin lesson from a private teacher and later with endless hours of listening to Red Seal recordings led to William Grant Still (1895–1978) not only becoming the first African American to conduct a professional symphony orchestra in the U.S. but a prolific composer of operas, ballets, symphonies and other works.

Image Source: By Carl Van Vechten – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID van.5a52662.

Raised in Little Rock, Ark., by his mother, a school teacher, and his grandmother, Still studied medicine at Wilberforce University. This decision was on the advice of his mother, whose concern was for “the societal limitations for Black composers.” But Still’s love for music was so deep that he changed his major as well as the university.

Still first studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, then the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and later studied under Edgard Varèse.

He would perform in orchestras, working in particular with the violin, cello and oboe. This diversity in exposure would lead him to work for the likes of W.C. Handy, Don Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison and Artie Shaw.

Reflected in much of Still’s works were the daily challenges Blacks in U.S. society faced, notably in one of his orchestral works “Darker America” (1924).

In composing this piece, Still’s desire was to expose the serious side of Black music and “the triumph of a people over their sorrows through fervent prayer.”

Musically, this work “marks a middle path between the lighter symphonic jazz arrangements of contemporaries like Gershwin or Whiteman and the dissonant experiments of white modernist composers of the time,” according to critics.

Despite the fact that it gained him recognition and was a major step in finding his own musical perspective, Still later reflected on Darker America, viewing it as an “immature work.”

Another musical milestone for Still was the first symphony by a Black composer to be performed by a major orchestra: “Afro-American Symphony” (1930). This work blends jazz, blues and spirituals into a traditional classical form. While many were giving jazz respect and a place in the concert hall, blues was seen as low-class and vulgar music.

Combined in this piece are spirituals he heard his grandmother sing to him as a child; the Realist influence of mentor George Chadwick, who sought to portray the lives of down-to-earth, common people; and the pride and cultural activism of the Harlem Renaissance.

Still’s career and his musical experiences witnessed many ‘firsts.’ He was the first Black man to conduct a major American orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major company as well as the first to have an opera performed on national television. His having been dubbed “Dean of African-American Classical Composers” was a title earned.

Still’s legacy remains remarkable both for the barriers he broke and the inventive works he wrote that blended European art music with African-rooted popular and folk music. He died of congestive heart failure in 1978.

Sources:

http://williamgrantstillmusic.com/BiographicalNotes.htm

https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186213/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Grant-Still

Tamara Shiloh

About Tamara Shiloh

Tamara Shiloh has published the first two books in her historical fiction chapter book series, Just Imagine…What If There Were No Black People in the World is about African American inventors, scientists and other notable Black people in history. The two books are Jaxon’s Magical Adventure with Black Inventors and Scientists and Jaxon and Kevin’s Black History Trip Downtown. Tamara Shiloh has also written a book a picture book for Scholastic, Cameron Teaches Black History, that will be available in June, 2022.

Tamara Shiloh’s other writing experiences include: writing the Black History column for the Post Newspaper in the Bay area, Creator and Instruction of the black History Class for Educators a professional development class for teachers and her non-profit offers a free Black History literacy/STEM/Podcast class for kids 3d – 8th grade which also includes the Let’s Go Learn Reading and Essence and tutorial program. She is also the owner of the Multicultural Bookstore and Gifts, in Richmond, California,

Previously in her early life she was the /Editor-in-Chief of Desert Diamonds Magazine, highlighting the accomplishments of minority women in Nevada; assisting with the creation, design and writing of a Los Angeles-based, herbal magazine entitled Herbal Essence; editorial contribution to Homes of Color; Editor-in-Chief of Black Insight Magazine, the first digital, interactive magazine for African Americans; profile creations for sports figures on the now defunct PublicFigure.com; newsletters for various businesses and organizations; and her own Las Vegas community newsletter, Tween Time News, a monthly publication highlighting music entertainment in the various venues of Las Vegas.

She is a member of:

Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)

Richmond Chamber of Commerce

Point Richmond Business Association

National Association of Professional Women (NAPW)

Independent Book Publishers Association (IPBA)

California Writers Club-Berkeley & Marin

Richmond CA Kiwanis

Richmond CA Rotary

Bay Area Girls Club

Tamara Shiloh, a native of Northern California, has two adult children, one grandson and four great-grand sons. She resides in Point Richmond, CA with her husband, Ernest.

www.multiculturalbookstore.com

Posts by Tamara Shiloh | Website

Up Next

Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green Takes Defense Skills to New Arena

Don't Miss

Shelter-in-Place Order for COVID-19 Poses Danger to Domestic Violence Victims

Tamara Shiloh

About Tamara Shiloh

Tamara Shiloh has published the first two books in her historical fiction chapter book series, Just Imagine…What If There Were No Black People in the World is about African American inventors, scientists and other notable Black people in history. The two books are Jaxon’s Magical Adventure with Black Inventors and Scientists and Jaxon and Kevin’s Black History Trip Downtown. Tamara Shiloh has also written a book a picture book for Scholastic, Cameron Teaches Black History, that will be available in June, 2022. Tamara Shiloh’s other writing experiences include: writing the Black History column for the Post Newspaper in the Bay area, Creator and Instruction of the black History Class for Educators a professional development class for teachers and her non-profit offers a free Black History literacy/STEM/Podcast class for kids 3d – 8th grade which also includes the Let’s Go Learn Reading and Essence and tutorial program. She is also the owner of the Multicultural Bookstore and Gifts, in Richmond, California, Previously in her early life she was the /Editor-in-Chief of Desert Diamonds Magazine, highlighting the accomplishments of minority women in Nevada; assisting with the creation, design and writing of a Los Angeles-based, herbal magazine entitled Herbal Essence; editorial contribution to Homes of Color; Editor-in-Chief of Black Insight Magazine, the first digital, interactive magazine for African Americans; profile creations for sports figures on the now defunct PublicFigure.com; newsletters for various businesses and organizations; and her own Las Vegas community newsletter, Tween Time News, a monthly publication highlighting music entertainment in the various venues of Las Vegas. She is a member of:

Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)
Richmond Chamber of Commerce
Point Richmond Business Association
National Association of Professional Women (NAPW)
Independent Book Publishers Association (IPBA)
California Writers Club-Berkeley & Marin
Richmond CA Kiwanis
Richmond CA Rotary
Bay Area Girls Club

Click to comment

Black History

Emeline King: A Trailblazer in the Automotive Industry

Emeline King is recognized as the first African American female transportation designer at the Ford Motor Company. Let’s take a look at her life and career at the Ford Motor Company.

Published

22 hours ago

November 26, 2024

Oakland Post

Transportation designer Emeline King. Photo courtesy of Emeline King.

By Tamara Shiloh

Emeline King is recognized as the first African American female transportation designer at the Ford Motor Company.

Let’s take a look at her life and career at the Ford Motor Company.

King’s fascination with cars began during her childhood. Growing up, she was captivated by the sleek designs and mechanical complexities of automobiles. She loved playing with toy cars and considered it an insult if anyone gave her a doll.

King pursued her interest in cars by studying at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. There, she improved her skills in transportation design, gaining the technical expertise and artistic vision she needed to break into the male-dominated industry.

However, her true inspiration came from her father, Earnest O. King, Sr., who worked for Ford as a Fabrication Specialist. She remembered the father-daughter trips to the auto shows, and the Saturday mornings with the famous Black sculptor, Oscar Graves, who her father assisted in some of his commissioned art works.

She said Graves would mentor her in clay relief sculptures. She was always fascinated by the smell of clay that was a constant in his studio.

However, it was her ﬁrst visit to her father’s job that became the catalyst for King to want a career in transportation design. At the company’s annual employee Christmas parties, she got the chance to meet his co-workers and learned about the roles they played in the auto industry. It was a chance to see some great cars, too.

Her career at Ford began in the 1980s, when women — particularly women of color –were scarcely represented in the automotive industry. King’s role at Ford was groundbreaking, as she became the first African American woman to work as a transportation designer at the company.

At Ford Design, she worked on the Ford Mustang SN-95’s interior. She also made several design contributions on other vehicles, too, including the interior components of the 1989 Thunderbird, the 1989 Corporate Steering Wheel, the 1989 Thunderbird Wheel/Wheel cover design program, the 1990 Thunderbird Super Coupe, the 1993 Mach III, the 1994 Mustang, to name a few.

King also served three foreign assignments: Turin Italy; Koln, Germany; and Brentwood, Essex, England — designing Ford cars for Europe.

Leaving Ford after about 25 years of service and along with her many speaking engagements, she wrote an autobiography about being Ford’s first female African American transportation designer titled, “What Do You Mean A Black Girl Can’t Design Cars? She Did It!”

She’s quoted as saying, “I’m now so proud to have written a book that I hope will inspire young girls and boys to never give up. To influence them so that they can stay focused and alert, and so they never look back. There are mentors who are placed in our lives to serve as our ‘Bridges to Destinations’ and allow us to cross over them to reach our dreams. Hoping they gain inspiration from my book, my motto for them is simple: ‘OPPORTUNITY IS NOW, SO GRAB IT! IF I DID IT, SO CAN YOU!”

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

2 weeks ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PostNewsGroup
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/blackpressusatv
X: twitter.com/blackpressusa

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Arts and Culture

MacArthur Fellow Jennifer Morgan’s Work Focuses on Slavery’s Impact on Black Women

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 6, 2024

Oakland Post

Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the fourth in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America.

A life-long New Yorker, professor Morgan, 59, is currently on leave from New York University as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

She is a 1986 graduate of Oberlin College where she majored in Africana studies and received her PhD in history from Duke University in 1995.

Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the 16th and 17th centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world.

Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.

Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, “Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery” (2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men.

In Laboring Women, Morgan argues that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because of their reproductive potential. Enslaved women were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement.

Morgan’s analysis of wills, probate proceedings, and purchasing records reveals how slaveowners understood forced procreation as a strategy to maintain their labor supply (rather than importing more people to enslave as laborers from Africa).

In her second book, “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic” (2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade.

She argues that such data obscured and justified the violence enslavers inflicted upon human beings. Record-keepers largely left gender and parentage out of demographic and accounting records. By refusing to acknowledge kinship among enslaved people, enslavers could rationalize family separation.

Morgan links the so-called neutral data of the slave trade to the consolidation of a hierarchy of race, based on false narratives about the difference and inferiority of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Morgan recovers the humanity and agency of enslaved women.

She demonstrates that enslaved women understood that their captors exploited their ability to produce children to create wealth. Morgan also charts their efforts to resist the commodification of their motherhood.

Morgan is currently at work on “The Eve of Slavery”—a book about African women in 17th-century North America. It is organized around the life of Elizabeth Key, a woman of color who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free white man.

The lives of Key and other Black women who tried to protect themselves and their children offer an intimate window into the development of American slavery.