His Sonata Teutonica which first brought him before the public is of extraordinary strength, length and talent. He has written other sonatas for piano and for violin, songs, chamber music and orchestral works.
Negro Spirituals versus Jazz
This brings us face to face with one of the most discussed questions of the day: the influence of Negro music and jazz on serious composition. The pure Negro music is the Spiritual and not jazz, which may be the typically American idiom we have been waiting for.
It is not Negro but is developed from the Negro dance rhythm, from a real folk music; it is the result of Negro music played upon by American life and influences; through it we may learn to free ourselves musically, and show the true American spirit of adventure and daring which until now has been absent in our native compositions. The path has been travelled from the songs of Stephen Foster, Negro Minstrels, “coon songs” and “cake walks,” to jazz with its elaborate orchestration unlike any other existing music, and its complicated rhythms. Jazz rhythm is contrapuntal rhythm. Europe says that it is our one original and important contribution to music! This is a strong statement, but as “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” their serious 20th century composers have flattered us by writing jazz, and we have Piano Rag by Stravinsky, a Syncopated Sonata by Jean Wiener, jazz by Darius Milhaud, Casella, Honegger, and even Debussy was tempted into writing Golliwogg’s Cake Walk.
In Los Angeles (April, 1925), Walter Henry Rothwell with his Philharmonic Orchestra played an American Caprice by Henry Schoenefeld (1857) one of many works in which the composer has used Indian and Negro themes.
Henry Thacker Burleigh, Most Noted Colored Composer
His arrangement of the Spiritual, Deep River, has made Harry Burleigh’s name known on two continents, and its success has led many into that field. Burleigh (1866) was one of the foremost among the Dvorak pupils, and has held the position of leading baritone in St. George’s Church for many years, as also at the Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue. His name is found on practically every program where Spirituals are sung.
Of Burleigh’s race is R. Nathaniel Dett (1882), conductor of the Hampton Singers, also director of the music department of Hampton College. His name was introduced by Percy Grainger, who played his characteristic Negro dance called Juba Dance in Europe and America. Dett’s greatest works are his arrangements of the Spirituals for chorus. Grainger wrote of him: “There is in his treatment of blended human voices that innate sonority and vocal naturalness that seem to result only from accumulated long experience of untrained improvised polyphonic singing, such as that of Southern Negroes, South Sea Polynesians and Russian peasants. These things are branches of the very tree of natural communal song.”
David Guion, a young Texan, is well known in this field and also for his piano setting of Turkey in the Straw.