Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance by Jean E. Snyder (review)

In a career lasting more than fifty years, composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949) played a crucial role in the development of American music. During the first half of the twentieth century he composed over two hundred works, including spiritual settings, secular songs, and a smaller number of instrumental pieces. Determined to demonstrate the artistic worth of African American folk music traditions, Burleigh became one of the first composers to set spirituals as art songs for solo voice and piano. The success of his 1917 setting of Deep River motivated other composers to create similarly sophisticated arrangements, helping to initiate the surge in African American artistic production that eventually became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, Burleigh enjoyed acclaim as an internationally known baritone, and was a long-serving editor for the music publisher Ricordi.

Despite these accomplishments, Burleigh remains a peripheral, often overlooked, figure. He typically appears in music histories only as the young voice student at the National Conservatory of Music who introduced Antonín Dvořák to American spirituals. The prominence of this episode has obscured Burleigh's other endeavors, relegating to the sidelines a distinguished career that deserves attention in its own right. In this new biography, Jean E. Snyder combines an obvious love of Burleigh's music with a knack for biographical detail to provide one of the first exhaustive accounts of the musician's artistic and personal life. Snyder's experience with Burleigh's work is extensive. As noted in the preface, she first became aware of his spiritual arrangements as a singer in the late 1970s. Her dissertation, "Harry T. Burleigh and the Creative Expression of Bi-Musicality: A Study of an African American Composer," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh) appeared in 1992. She has since participated in recordings of Burleigh's music and has organized conferences on his life and work (pp. xi–xii). The only other full-length biographical treatments of Burleigh are Anne Key Simpson's Hard Trials: The Life and Music of Harry T. Burleigh (Com posers of North America 8 [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990]) and Craig von Buseck's Nobody Knows: The Forgotten Story of One of the Most Influential Figures in American Music (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014). Snyder positions her book as a successor to Hard Trials, covering many previously neglected events, and presenting new interpretations of familiar events, supported by primary sources unavailable to Simpson.

Chapters 1–7 provide a chronological narrative of Burleigh's life through his years as a student at Jeannette Thurber's National Conservatory of Music in Manhattan. The remaining eleven chapters unfold topically rather than chronologically. Chapters 8–13 focus on various aspects of Burleigh's professional and personal life from the mid-1890s until his death in 1949. Chapters 14–17 center on Burleigh's music, and a concluding chapter assesses his legacy. Snyder justifies this arrangement by noting that "Burleigh operated in so many arenas and contexts simultaneously that the topical approach offers a clearer understanding of his involvement and influence in a variety of spheres" (pp. xiv–xv). While this approach makes the book more navigable for readers who wish to learn about a specific facet of Burleigh's life, it occasionally disrupts the narrative continuity established in the first part of the book. Periodically, names and events crop up that are not fully introduced until subsequent chapters. In chapter 8, for example, we learn that J. P. Morgan supported Burleigh's controversial appointment as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church (p. 118). But we do not learn until chapter 12, specifically devoted to a discussion of St. George's, that Morgan's support carried weight because he served as the church's chief warden at the time (p. 214).

The first three chapters address Burleigh's...