Books, Arts & Manners: America’s Real Music

I have been listening with lingering pleasure to two recordings of the music of William Grant Still—“one of our greatest American composers,” Leopold Stokowski said of him. There is an element of indignation in that pleasure because Still has been elbowed aside by shallower talents such as those of Aaron Copland, who tried but never captured the American idiom. In his great outpouring of music—some two hundred compositions in every category—Still expressed the sweep and melody of this country, the pounding heart of jazz, the surging human protest of the blues, and the attenuated sensibility of popular song.

There is a rich and dramatic simplicity to Still’s music, a rejoicing and a searching, and a transcendentally quiet voice—expressed without the hubba-hubba of modernism or the pretensions of atonality. He could write a Concerto for Clarinet for the Artie Shaw band and the Sunday Symphony, which I have been otically contemplating. This symphony—excellently performed by Carlton Woods and the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (201 N. East Avenue, Fayetteville, Ark. 72701)—and his ballet Lenox Avenue (Legend Records, P.O. Box 1941, Glendale Calif. 91209), with Still conducting—demonstrate the debt owed him by George Gershwin’s larger and smaller works, and they sing to us more pertinently and beautifully.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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I have been listening with lingering pleasure to two recordings of the music of William Grant Still—“one of our greatest American composers,” Leopold Stokowski said of him. There is an element of indignation in that pleasure because Still has been elbowed aside by shallower talents such as those of Aaron Copland, who tried but never captured the American idiom. In his great outpouring of music—some two hundred compositions in every category—Still expressed the sweep and melody of this country, the pounding heart of jazz, the surging human protest of the blues, and the attenuated sensibility of popular song.

There is a rich and dramatic simplicity to Still’s music, a rejoicing and a searching, and a transcendentally quiet voice—expressed without the hubba-hubba of modernism or the pretensions of atonality. He could write a Concerto for Clarinet for the Artie Shaw band and the Sunday Symphony, which I have been otically contemplating. This symphony—excellently performed by Carlton Woods and the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (201 N. East Avenue, Fayetteville, Ark. 72701)—and his ballet Lenox Avenue (Legend Records, P.O. Box 1941, Glendale Calif. 91209), with Still conducting—demonstrate the debt owed him by George Gershwin’s larger and smaller works, and they sing to us more pertinently and beautifully.