MUSIC & POETRY — Nicholas Phan

The below is my program note for the second performance of CAIC’s 2022 Collaborative Works Festival, which took place at Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University on September 8, 2022 and will be broadcast from Sept 28, 2022 – October 2, 2022.

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In the first half of the 20th century, as The Great Migration saw waves of Black Americans journey from South to North, Chicago became an important cultural center for Black American classical music. The combination of a robust independent music infrastructure that developed in the city’s “Black Belt” on the South Side as a result of segregation, and the relative progressiveness of the world-class music conservatories in the Loop that admitted Black students, made Chicago an important mecca for African American classical musicians. Black musicians from all over the country came to study at institutions like the American Conservatory of Music, Chicago Musical College, and Northwestern University up in Evanston, including Florence Price (1887 – 1953), Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882 – 1943), and Margaret Bonds (1913 – 1972).

In 1918, composer Nora Holt (1884 – 1974) made history at the Chicago Musical College (now known as Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University), when she became the first African American to earn a master’s degree in composition in the nation. Keenly aware of the importance of lifting up her fellow Black musicians, Holt would become an important music journalist, in addition to her performing and compositional work. She gained a national platform as a music critic for the Chicago Defender, and in 1921, she published the music journal Music & Poetry declaring:

“This magazine is launched with the hope of interesting all who have or anticipate accepting music as a profession. And next, but quite important, of encouraging and nursing creative talent...awarding applause and support to all sincere artists who reveal the heart of a people through their native talent. For art is greater than an individual and only that art endures which paints the soul of a race through its expression.”

The title of tonight’s program is inspired by Holt’s visionary publication. Holt would compose roughly 200 works, many of them songs championed by the great African American tenor Roland Hayes. She stored the manuscripts away when she left to go on a performing tour of Europe in 1926. Upon her return, she found that her storage facility had been ransacked – her manuscripts stolen, never to be found again. The Sandman, the song which opens tonight’s program and she lists as her Opus 30, is her only surviving song.

In this spirit of organizing to lift up her fellow classical musicians, Holt joined with fellow composer and philosophical leader Robert Nathaniel Dett in 1919 to form the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), the first chapter of which was the Chicago Music Association (CMA). Against the backdrop of the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, which had begun just two days earlier, sparked by the brutal murder of a 17- year-old Black teenager by white beachgoers, Chicago hosted NANM’s first national conference from July 29–31. As one of the organization’s founders and leaders, Holt used her national platform as music columnist of the Chicago Defender to report on the Chicago chapter’s activities, establishing it as arguably one of the most important organizations for Black classical musicians through the years of World War II.

In organizing recital performances of world-renown musicians as well as lectures on music that were reported on in the Defender, the Chicago Music Association provided one of the few platforms for performance that were available to Black classical musicians in segregated Chicago. Since 1919, CMA and NANM have gifted awards to over 200 talented young musicians, including Marian Anderson, who was NANM’s first award recipient. Other awardees over the past 104 years include Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Grace Bumbry, Leon Bates, Ashley Horne, Lois B. Moore, Joseph Joubert, Awadagin Pratt, Jubilant Sykes, Elisha Nelson, Arthur D. Griffin, Jr., Everett N. Jones III, Alisha McFarland, Jeremy Jordan, Rebecca Eaddy, Edward Kelly Sanford, Prince Namatai Nyatanga, Keenan McCoy, Leonard Hayes, Justin Austin, Annelle Gregory, Maguette Ndiaye, and many more.

The composers on the first third of this evening’s program - Cecil Cohen (1894 – 1967), Holt, Dett, and Price - are all from this earlier generation of composers who helped fortify and establish the infrastructure that made it possible for Black classical musicians to receive an elite musical education in Chicago. With the exception of Cohen (who was born in Chicago), all migrated to Chicago to study and work, with Price becoming an important fixture in the community, shattering a seemingly intractable ceiling when her Symphony No. 1 in e minor became the first symphony by an African American composer to be performed by a major American orchestra at its world premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.

The middle portions of this evening’s program are composed by a younger generation born in Chicago, which carried on this tradition throughout the middle years of the 20th century: both Irene Britton Smith (1907 – 1999) and Betty Jackson King (1928 – 1994) would remain in Chicago and become respected teachers in addition to their composition work: Smith taught in the Chicago Public Schools for more than 40 years, King was a respected teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory School and would become president of NAMN from 1979 – 1984.

Margaret Bonds would eventually leave her hometown to settle in New York and Los Angeles, where she would become one of the most well-known African American composers of the 20th century. Both Bonds and Smith attempted to study with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. Smith successfully studied with Boulanger in 1958, whereas Boulanger famously turned Bonds away as a student upon seeing her song settings of Langston Hughes’ poetry, declaring that she should continue in her work and that there was nothing she could teach her.

The final group of composers on tonight’s program are two who are currently living in Chicago and one who moved to Chicago for the final years of his life to lead another of the city’s important Black music institutions, the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago (CBMR). Composer and conductor Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932 – 2004) spanned many genres, writing numerous works for television and film in addition to ballets for both the Dance Theater of Harlem and Alvin Ailey. From 1998 until his death in 2004, he was principal conductor and Coordinator of Performance Activities at CBMR. A recent alumnus of the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, baritone Will Liverman (b. 1988) is also establishing himself as a composer – his opera The Factotum will premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in February of 2023. Shawn Okpebholo (b. 1981) is currently a professor at Wheaton College Conservatory of Music and is one of Chicago Opera Theater’s current Vanguard Emerging Opera Composers-in-Residence.