WILLIAM GRANT STILL: “WE ALL RISE TOGETHER OR WE DON’T RISE AT ALL” (part 5 of 5)

Posted on October 3, 2018

Mural by Noni Olabisi, the William Grant Still Art Center, Los Angeles, CA: “William Grant Still conducting his powerful operatic score [“Troubled Island”], with his spiritual “eye” in the middle of his forehead, which expresses the need for a new era of interracial understanding, loving-kindness and God-consciousness on the earth.”  From WilliamGrantStill.com.

One word that could sum up Still’s life and work could very well be “integration.” Integration—of musical styles and influences, of races and cultures – was actually Still’s explicit byword at least from around 1949.  He arrived at his most integrated composing style, which he called “universal,” starting in the late ‘30s, once he had lived in Los Angeles for a while.  He explained the process of his development:

While I still intended to devote myself to giving expression, to a very large extent, to the use of the Negroid idiom…I did not want to confine myself to that particular idiom because I think [that] here in America we have so many idioms.  The Indian music, the Creole music, and so on.  I would like to write music that expresses America…rather than confine myself to writing just Negro music.  [Even so], the Negro, being part of America [is important, and I am] not leaving him out.
(Brown, 1984 publication of 1967 interviews, quoted in DjeDje, 2011).

Going beyond simple expected binary constructions has always challenged conventional thinkers, and Still’s life, from his ancestry on, was about nothing if not challenging and complicating binaries.

He wrote “…in New York, I began to feel that one way to serve God would be to serve my race.  Then that in itself began to seem a narrow objective, so I decided that I wanted to serve all people” (WGS, Boyhood). Whether or not others understood or approved, music, rather than direct political action, was how he served;

…critics during the civil rights era wanted [Still] to be more open and forthcoming about his position on race.  Many did not understand…that he was using his music to initiate change [emphasis mine]. Because of the ethnicity of his family (his wife was white and his children looked white), Still did not feel comfortable presenting himself as an extremist…[Still] did not have a problem identifying himself as a black person: “He was proud of his heritage and the contributions blacks had made to America, but he also had a respect for all cultures and people. (J.A. Still 2006, as reported by DjeDje, 2011).

The family’s experiences in Los Angeles may also have played into Still’s actions:

In the midst of Los Angeles’s population shifts and ethnic tensions…Still’s use of intercultural elements in the forties and later was prophetic [italics mine] and significant because this may have been his way of proposing solutions to social problems.  By embracing and integrating musical elements of different ethnic groups (Africans, African-Americans, American Indians, Latinos), Still was calling for interhuman understanding. (DjeDje, 2011).

Reflecting years later, Still explicitly connected his vision of the music of America to its unique makeup:

I am for integration.  We are all Americans, in our hearts, in our music, in our very being….We have in the United States a great many idioms, some aboriginal, some springing from the people who came here from other lands. Someday probably the separate idioms in America may merge, or a composer will come along who will make an overall use of them and we will then have a distinctly native idiom, recognizable as such (WGS, A Composer’s Viewpoint, 1970, in Haas).

The overarching philosophy of integration motivates The American Scene: Five Suites for Young Americans, indeed could serve as a thesis statement for it. Still dedicated the suite to the Pasadena Interracial Women’s Club, an organization founded on the intentional sharing of cultures. 

In 1957, The American Scene was composed for the “Standard [Oil] School Broadcast” on radio.  This music-appreciation broadcast, which reached throughout the west coast, was the oldest educational radio program in the United States, and produced at that point by Still’s friend, Adrian Michaelis.  The composer, conductor, and arranger Carmen Dragon conductor several segments from it—Florida Night, Levee Land, New Orleans Street, and Grand Teton —for the broadcast.

The suite wasn’t performed in its entirety, however, “until November 18, 1990.  The conductor, Jack Abell…wanted to do a premiere of WGS that would be known for its importance in future years.  He thought that WGS would rise into the public consciousness in future decades“ (J. A. Still, 2018).

The entire work is made of fifteen short, easily digestible, programmatic units that traverse the country creating an integrated mosaic of different landscapes and various cultures’ contributions to The American Scene:

Suite 1: The East -
  a) On the Village Green, b) Berkshire Night, c) Manhattan Skyline
Suite 2: The South -
  a) Florida Night, b) Levee Land, c) A New Orleans Street
Suite 3: The Old West -
  a) Song of the Plainsmen, b) Sioux Love Song, c) Tribal Dance
Suite 4: The Far West -
  a) The Plaza, b) Sundown Land, c) Navaho Country
Suite 5: A Mountain, A Memorial, and A Song -
  a) Grand Teton, b) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, c) Song of the Rivermen

Judith Anne remarked about The Far West:

I have to say that the far west was my Father’s dream when he was in New York—when he worked in L..A. with Paul Whiteman he immediately loved California. It was still full of open country and Olvera Street, and it was not as clannish and racist as New York.  In 1934:there was integration among many artists and musicians—there were wonderful intellectual discussions. As soon as WGS got his Guggenheim Fellowship, he put what he could in his ‘34 Ford and drove all the way down Route 66 to live in L.A..  On weekends my father could drive right out on the Santa Monica pier to enjoy the ocean, or he could drive to the old Spanish missions to pray, or to the museum in the hills, or to the places where the Afro-Spanish settlers established Los Angeles in the ancient days. When he and my Mother worked together, they had intellectual gatherings at a cabin in Big Bear:  priceless scenery and peace of mind.  I daresay the Far West was in the soul of William Grant Still.

(J.A. Still, 2018).

Regarding the third movement, “Navajo Country”, it’s significant that Still did not merely rely on scholarship done by others to understand Native American, specifically Navajo musical traditions; Judith Anne explained that “my Father and my Mother went to Taos, New Mexico,and probably they visited reservations around Flagstaff.  There was no other direct [emphasis mine] way to study Native American music” (J.A. Still, 2018). William Grant Still researched Native American music as he did the Blues, going to where it was made in order to hear it in its original context.  Only this way could he understand the cultural motives behind the music as well as the music itself. 

Judith Anne has often shared her father’s beautiful motto, which is the title of this section; sometimes alternately quoted as “Together we rise, or not at all”, they are words that are just as necessary today as they were sixty years ago. The diverse musical portraits brought together into the gentle, unpretentious mini-suites that make up The American Scene could serve as a miniature ‘crystallization,’ to borrow Arvey’s term, of Still’s motto in his culminating “universal” period. Yet this work remains rather obscure today, and only three of the five mini-suites have been recorded; one of the three is The Far West. Perhaps someday we will be lucky enough to have a recording of the entire suite made available as part of Still’s ever-relevant contribution toward our country’s understanding of its history and realization of its potential. 

Carolyn Talarr
Community Programs Coordinator

SOURCES CITED

Arvey, Verna, “Memo to Musicologists”, reprinted in William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music.  Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. 

Author unknown, notes to Redlands Symphony program, “Paris, New York, Jazz!” 2017. https://www.redlandssymphony.com/pieces/darker-america

Botstein, Leon.  Concert notes for “Revisiting William Grant Still”, American Symphony Orchestra program, 3/22/2009. http://americansymphony.org/revisiting-william-grant-still_2/

DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell. “Context and Creativity: William Grant Still in Los Angeles.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–27. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacmusiresej.31.1.0001.

Forsythe, Harold Bruce.  “William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions”, in Smith, Catherine Parsons.  William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions.  Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Handy, W. C., and Eileen Southern. “Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still.” The Black Perspective in Music, vol. 8, no. 1, 1980, pp. 65–119. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1214522.

Smith, Catherine Parsons.  William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions.  Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Southern, Eileen.  The Music of Black Americans: A History. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

Still, Judith Anne.  Personal communications, 2018.

Still, Judith Anne.  Commentary on Catherine Parsons Smith’s William Grant Still.  2012.  http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com/CatherineParsonsSmith_files/SmithCommentary.pdf

Still, William Grant, “My Arkansas Boyhood”, and “A Composer’s Viewpoint”, reprinted in Haas, Robert B. et al. William Grant Still and the fusion of cultures in American Music.  Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.  (A later edition exists too, but this is the edition I was working from)

Still, William Grant, interview with R. Donald Brown: “Negro Serious Music,”California State University-Fullerton, Oral History Program, Nov. 13, 1967 and Dec. 4, 1967, 29. Quoted in Catherine Parsons Smith, William Grant Still.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Recommendations for Reading

The entire Haas, Robert B. et al. William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music is invaluable.

Both biographies by Catherine Parsons Smith are must-reads, especially the 2000 (see ‘sources cited’, under Forsythe), not least because that book contains added essays and the only published version of Harold Forsythe’s biographical sketch.  The second book comes with the caveat that one should accompany it with a reading of Judith Anne Still’s commentary (see ‘sources cited’).

Kernodle, Tammy L. “Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s ‘Troubled Island’”.  The Musical Quarterly, 83 (4), Winter 1999, pp. 487-508.

Excellent critical bibliographical article with leads to many more sources: Murchison, Gayle. “Current Research Twelve Years after the William Grant Still Centennial.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 25, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 119–154. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30039288.