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Sunday, March 6, 2005
Critic’s Notebook: Emory’s Race and Identity in Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
“A Dawson Celebration,” at Emory University, Thursday-Saturday. www.music.emory.edu.
When you chop into an onion, you’re not searching for a core — the valuable stuff comes with the peelings.
In this spirit, Emory University hosted a three-day national conference called “An Exploration of African-American Music and Identity at the Dawn of the 21st century.”
With 41 notable musicians and scholars on hand, curator Dwight Andrews called it a “once-in-a-generation chance” to “help rethink how race is thought about in music.”
The music of William Dawson (1899-1990) served as a launch point, as his papers were recently donated to Emory. Dawson’s most known work, the “Negro Folk Symphony,” from 1934, was performed over the weekend by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
By using the term “composers” as an entry token, the Emory symposium could unite classical, jazz and eclectic artists while ignoring mass-market black music, like hip-hop. (Andrews invited popular but non-mainstream songwriter/bassist Meshell Ndegeocello to perform Friday evening, which underscored the point.)
As expected, the panel discussions segued into excellent music making. Composer-performers brought down the house Thursday, including powerful and fiery displays from pianists Anthony Davis and Geri Allen, saxophonist Oliver Lake and conductor Tania Leon. Dawson’s familiar spiritual arrangements and original choral compositions filled a joyous concert Saturday.
But the talks also revealed the pent-up frustrations of perpetual marginalization. Davis, who composed an undervalued “vernacular” opera based on the life of Malcolm X, seemed to bristle with resentment at his lack of broad acceptance in the establishment concert hall.
At one of the early sessions, George Walker, who was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize in music, in 1996, stood to receive a round of applause. To this, Atlanta composer Alvin Singleton added, “You know, after George won the Pulitzer it did nothing for his career.”
An idea left unexplored was this: classical and jazz accounts for just five percent of the record sales market — one indicator of popularity — and all genres of “serious” music feel embattled by the pop juggernaut. So if black composers felt marginalized, isn’t now the time to gain parity, when everyone is on the fringe?
Composer William Banfield, before showing a crass infomercial about himself, issued the most sensible challenge. He pleaded for black composers’ music “to be placed not on African-American programs but next to Beethoven and Schoenberg, so it can speak for itself.”
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