Context and Creativity: William Grant Still in Los Angeles

William Grant Still (1895–78) is one of the most well-known composers of art music in the United States. Since the mid-1920s, music critics and writers have noted both his talent and creativity. In addition to the numerous awards and commissions he has received, the elaborate manner in which music organizations across the United States celebrated the diamond (1970) and centennial (1995) anniversaries of Still’s birth also demonstrates his seminal importance to art music (Spencer 1992; Southern 1997, 431). His significance becomes even more apparent each February during Black History Month in the United States, when conductors of major symphony orchestras choose compositions by Still to commemorate the occasion.

As an established composer, many publications document his life history; see works written by himself (W. G. Still [1972] 1995); his wife, Verna Arvey (1984); his daughter, Judith Anne Still (J. A. Still [1972] 1995, 2006b); music scholars Jon Michael Spencer (1992), Catherine Parsons Smith (1996, 1997, 2000, 2008), Beverly Soll (2005), and Gayle Murchison (2005); and others (see J. A. Still, Dabrishus, and Quin 1996). In addition, histories, articles, dissertations, and other publications on African-American, American, and European art music include discussions of Still (see Southern 1997; Machlis and Forney 2003; de Lerma 2006–7; and ProQuest 2009). Nevertheless, like most celebrated individuals, those who write about them pick and choose their emphases. Much is known about Still’s early life, formative years in the South, and musical training and early successes on the East Coast. However, his time in Los Angeles, the place where he permanently settled (in 1934), spent the majority of life, and died (in 1978) at the age of eighty-three, has been only briefly researched, and never as a topic that had a major impact on his development and creativity as a composer. Yet, living in Los Angeles was one of the most fulfilling aspects of Still’s life. His comments in a 1967 interview provide insight:

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: Prior to coming here, I thought that I would only be satisfied living in the East, but after coming here, . . . California did something to me.

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: What do you think it was? The [climate] or something else?

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: I don’t know, [but] I think [that] it was something more than that. And I can’t tell you what it was. There was just something about this section of the country that seemed to satisfy me, more so than any [other part of the country]. I had never been anywhere [else] that felt like home. When I came here, it was like coming home. Now don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But I was perfectly well satisfied here. (Brown 1984, 10)

Catherine Parsons Smith (1996, 2000, 2008) is one of the few scholars to include discussion of Los Angeles when focusing on Still. In fact, Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (2007) provides an excellent portrayal of Los Angeles’s sociocultural and musical environment. However, very little of the work concerns Still because the time period, the Progressive Era (1880–1930), predates Still’s relocation to the West Coast. Lack of interest in Los Angeles may be because researchers believe Still’s greatest success, the composing and premier performance of the Afro-American Symphony (composed in 1930 and premiered in 1931), occurred before permanently settling in Southern California. Or scant mention of the city could be due to the dismissal of Los Angeles, by many in the music community, as an important harbinger of serious musical and cultural life.

On the matter of the city, which some sociologists define as a large, dense, and heterogeneous setting (Eames and Goode 1977), research trends vary. While some music scholars mention place when conducting research on individuals living in urban areas, few elaborate on urbanism (the culture of cities) as a primary issue in their discussion. For example, since 1980, several articles in Ethnomusicology have been concerned with music making in cities, but only a few authors (e.g., Simonett 2001) include urbanism as part of their discussion. Instead, researchers generally dismiss context...