Three years after the Civil War, the African-American polymath William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, traveled widely for his education, earned Harvard’s first doctorate awarded to a black person, and went on to become a great and important (and tireless) educator, writer, sociologist, activist and advocate for human rights, notably black civil rights but also women’s rights. This Friday, February 23rd, the Du Bois Orchestra at Harvard celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth in a free concert at 8pm at University Lutheran Church in Cambridge (66 Winthrop Street). It will feature the Ballade for Orchestra by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Wagner’s Act I Prelude to Lohengrin, and Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Tickets are HERE.
Founded in 2015, the Du Bois Orchestra offers Boston-area college and conservatory musicians the opportunity to perform both standard and historically neglected repertoire. Last November, the orchestra performed the Lyric for Strings by George Walker, one of the important African-American composers of our time, alongside two works by Beethoven, the Egmont Overture and the Eroica Symphony. Last season, the orchestra featured works by composers Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), a prolific Afro-French composer who premiered Haydn’s Paris symphonies, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Silvestre Revueltas. These are works by distinguished musicians rarely heard in American concert halls.Inspired by the staunch efforts of Du Bois over his long life, we consider it our mission to combat social exclusion in classical music. We see musicmaking and listening as one important model for constructive societal dialogue. The musicians of the orchestra also engage in community outreach and educational programming, volunteering in prisons, homeless shelters, and working with underprivileged youth. The orchestra just finished a monthlong music workshop with incarcerated youth in Boston in which a team of musicians taught songwriting and composition and gave instrumental instruction. At the 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 eq