African American Music Appreciation Month: June 2021

A summer 2021 hello to All my readers around the world. My summer project  for 2021 is on poetry and music. So, I've put on my old Hip Hop hat and braids and relaxed a little in order to flow into a sonic groove.

                               Delores   (My musician persona re-emerging )

This June, I decided to start practicing piano again. It's been quite a few months since I limited my focus to engagement with multi-faceted aspects of music and in particular, music performance

One major question keeps echoing over and over: How DID I manage at least 100+ hours at the piano each month as a young musician??????

Wow, what a difficult task now to inhabit the space and routine of a serious musician, let alone a very COVID impacted musician. 

(I won't discuss my pre-vac and post-vac experiences. But I do want to sat Thank you to both president Trump AND president Biden for making the vaccine available to the general public. My health care providers for taking that extra effort: really . . .thank you!

 

Grateful for a vaccine, but it not an easy experience                                          

Gone for the summer are the professor's politically correct hairstyles, and backgrounding of topics musical in objective traditional music history discourse! This is my summer project story.

It's only been a few weeks and yes, it has been hard to get into a routine as a musician. I taught other subjects ONLINE during the upsurge of COVID 19;  with the increase in time needed for ONLINE academic interaction, music performance became a distant blur for me. Getting back into the groove is quite an experience. 

First I had to find a place to practice. 

Thank you to Pastor Keith Joseph and music Director Leona Ducre of the East Village Community Church in San Diego California. (My neighbors thank you also). As staff workers quietly said from time to time, "I didn't know you had to repeat segments of a song so many times!!" Yes, as I said, it has been interesting getting back into the mindset of a performing musician.

However, I did post a few recent videos of my favorite Afro-classical composers. 

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) : Juba (From the Southland, 1910) 

African American baritone and also composer of Black Art Song, Burleigh studied with the composer Antonin Dvorak at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvorak became the school's director in 1892 and expressed his admiration for African American folk music. Dvorak's From The New World Symphony (No. 9 in E minor) used themes inspired by Negro and Native American folk melodies. (1)

The 2nd movement melody for From the New World Symphony with added lyrical text by William Arms Fisher became the popular psuedo-Negro Spiritual "Goin' Home."(2)   It was popular in America even into the 1990s. I remember it was performed in Black churches when I as a child and have played variations based on the melody myself. 

Burleigh, a now fairly well known American composer, is better known for his luscious piano accompaniment to African American vocal art songs. Burleigh's art songs were and still are popular in Black churches of the 21st century.. His musical legacy is also continued today with the research and performances of the renowned Harry T. Burleigh   https://www.burleighsociety.com/                                                                                

Of course it goes without saying that many historic Blacks who were born in other countries were impacted by African American music during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Ragtime, "Hot Music"/Jazz followed the path of earlier Black musics and became a globally recognized repertoire.  Perhaps the most popular folk form was and is the Negro Spiritual. https://centerforworldmusic.org/2017/09/african-american-music/  (See my article for the Center For World Music about one such spiritual and its various artistic expressions in different Black music genres).

A composer of mixed race, we now sometimes refer to as Bi-POC, Samuel Coleridge Taylor actually traveled to the U. S. from Great Britain on a number of occasions to study and perform his interpretations of Negrp slave melodies. His works were apparently well received in the Black community. And after attending a Fisk Jubilee concert in the states, he composed his piano arrangements of Twenty-Four Negro Melodies Transcribed for piano, 1905. ( 3) 

 (Listen to "Don't Be Weary Travelers" which is one of the transcribed piano arrangements.)

Afro British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor's piano compositions, for me, allow for more intense emotional engagement. I like his works, and often perform those based on Negro spirituals as well as secular melodies.

 

Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor "Don't Be Weary 

Traveler" from Twenty Four Negro Melodies Transcribed for Piano 

 

Samuel Coleridge -Taylor: Valse Suite For Piano:"Three Fours Op. 71 No.5"

 

As I prepare to teach the African American music history class (Afras 385) this coming Fall semester at San Diego State University, I am shaping a Chrono-Topical experience for students. We will explore Black music in the context of American music, limited topics in Black global music,  and soci-cultural influences (yes, including COVID 19).  Our fall Afras 385 project is to explore African American music musicians on-the-real lived artistic expression.

Hopefully, back in the classroom on campus again at San Diego State University, we can be in community as we study and engage in the music. I enjoy the live interaction with instrumentalists, vocalists, composers, choir directors,  DJ/sound mixers, dancers, and poets/rappers as we inhabit the lens of researchers, journalists and participants!  

                      Delores Fisher, pianist/blogger

 

END NOTES 

         1. Eileen Southern. "The New Century," The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W.Norton, 1997), 267.

         2. Ibid. 268.

        3. Ibid. 295

On with the summer!

delores fisher