William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions (review)

William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. By Catherine Parsons Smith. (Music of the African Diaspora, 2.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. [xvi, 368 p. ISBN 0-520-21542-7 (cloth); 0-520-21543-5 (pbk.). $50 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

William Grant Still (1895-1978) opened new vistas for African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century, becoming the first black composer to fuse the blues and jazz successfully in symphonies and extended orchestral forms. In addition, he composed solo and chamber works, as well as choral music, art songs, and operas, and he established himself as one of the first black composers to write for film and television.

Despite his celebrity within the African American community and his publicized successes, American music historians largely ignored Still until the final decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, tensions and dialogue within the academy over representation of women and minority composers within the musical canon brought awareness in some circles of the need for more inclusiveness. The publication of the third movement of Still's Afro-American Symphony (1930) in the widely used Norton Anthology of Western Music (3d ed., 2 vols., ed. Claude V. Palisca [New York: W. W. Norton, 1996], 2:822-38), as well as his posthumous induction into the American Classical Hall of Fame (1998), conferred on Still the distinction of becoming the first black composer of art music to have his works elevated to the American musical canon.

Among academic dissertations and theses on the composer are Leon Everette Thompson's "A Historical and Stylistic Analysis of the Music of William Grant Still and a Thematic Catalog of His Works" (D.M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1966), Benjamin Griffith Edwards's "Life of William Grant Still" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1987), Paul-Elliott Cobbs's "William Grant Still's The Afro-American Symphony: A Culturally Inclusive Perspective" (D.M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1990), and Gayle Minetta Murchison's "Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland between the Wars: Style and Ideology" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998). Other significant literature includes William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music (ed. Robert Bartlett Haas [Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972]; 2d ed., ed. Judith Anne Still [Flagstaff, Ariz.: Master-Player Library, 1995]), Verna Arvey's memoir In One Lifetime (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1984), Carol J. Oja's "'New Music' and the 'New Negro': The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony" (Black Music Research Journal 12 [1992]: 145-69), and William Grant Still: A Bio-bibliography, by Judith Anne Still, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin (Bio-bibliographies in Music, 61 [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996]).

Catherine Parson Smith's William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions is a welcome addition to this growing body of research. The volume contains a brief chronology of Still's life by Quin, separate essays by Willard B. Gatewood and Gayle Murchison, five essays penned by Smith, and five primary documents culled from writings by Still, Arvey, Harold Bruce Forsythe, and Irving Schwerké. Collectively, these materials shed light on Still's aesthetic development (primarily in the 1930s) within the context of the "much-contested personal, professional, and cultural landscape in which he worked" (p. 1), and they help delineate the underlying processes whereby he sought fusion of European and African American vernacular musical traditions in order to create a genuinely new, American voice.

While Gatewood's opening essay, "The Formative Years of William Grant Still: Little Rock, Arkansas, 1895-1911," contributes little new biographical information on Still, it provides a context for understanding the middle-class black community of Little Rock, where he was raised. Murchison's more substantial essay, "'Dean of Afro-American Composers' or 'Harlem Renaissance Man': The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still," examines Still's relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, especially Alain Locke and The New...