e end of the program, the young people performed original songs accompanied by other inmates who had been shown basics of playing keyboard and violin.
Our Friday evening concert opens with the Ballade for Orchestra by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an Afro-British composer whose deeply expressive romantic music deserves to be heard regularly in the classical canon. In his own time he was not only celebrated by the public but also appreciated by such composers as Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford. Elgar’s publisher August Jaeger (known to history as Nimrod in the Enigma Variations) acclaimed Coleridge-Taylor “a genius”. In 1900 Coleridge-Taylor met Du Bois at the first pan-African conference in London and in 1904, during his first American tour, was received by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House (three years after Roosevelt’s controversial dinner with Booker T. Washington). Du Bois and Coleridge-Taylor became friends and Du Bois made frequent mention of him in his writings. Coleridge-Taylor was in turn deeply inspired by reading Souls of Black Folk. Coleridge-Taylor aspired to create a black musical identity, a kind of black musical nationalism, and his music exhibits bluesy harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and pentatonic melodies. [Coleridge-Taylor’s setting of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” includes the aria “Onaway, Awake Beloved”]
Antonin Dvořák was Coleridge-Taylor’s musical hero: he learned much from Dvořák’s integration of Central European, African-American, and Native American folk songs. Our concert concludes with From the New World, one of the great works in the orchestral repertory. This piece represents the irony at the heart of American classical music: what is perhaps the foundational work of the American classical tradition (Neil Armstrong brought a recording with him to the moon) was not written until a century after America’s founding—by a European. Dvořák’s sojourn in America was brief: he was hired to lead the now defunct National Conservatory of Music because no American musician of equal stature could be found in the 1890s; but he left after three years, homesick for Bohemia. Yet in that short time, Dvořák put American music on the world stage, where it has been ever since.
At the heart of our program is the Prelude from Act I of Lohengrin. Music, and Wagner in particular, was a central part of Du Bois’s experience and philosophy. Unlike almost any other great work of literature, Souls of Black Folk includes notated music, and it is central: every chapter is headed by a Negro spiritual. In the text, the Lohengrin prelude—the music of the swan—represents both the hope and the tragedy of black existence at the beginning of the 20th century, in a way that reflects Du Bois’s own experience: he was a music lover (with a good singing voice, he reported), and in Europe was able to attend many concerts, but at Harvard was rejected from the glee club because of the color of his skin.
In the chapter Of the Coming of John, Du Bois imagines two Southern men named John, one white and one black, who grew up together. But when the black John attempts to sit next to the white John in a New York performance of Lohengrin, he is removed from his seat, although not before he hears the prelude. The music inspires him to return to the South and work for the betterment of his race and humanity. But these efforts are resented by both the whites and the blacks of his town, and he is fired from his teaching position. The story ends, as so many did in that time, with a lynching: when John rescues his sister from rape, he hears the music of the swan as the white men fall upon him, and it leads him into the next world.
In the 21st century, can we hear music again the way Du Bois did, as a signpost toward transcendence and liberation? When we consume it in bits and pieces online, and music is so often piped in for the sake of corporate branding in shops and lobbies, one may wonder. Has classical music lost its soul?
Du Bois worked his whole life to educate the public about the oppressive symbiotic relationship between and