Speaker 1: Ephemeral as production of iHeart three D audio for full exposure.
Speaker 1: Listen with that phone. It's both likely and tragic that
Speaker 1: you've probably never heard this piece of music before. It's
Speaker 1: the third movement of William Grant Still's Second Symphony, also
Speaker 1: titled Song of a New Race. Still was one of
Speaker 1: the few black composers to successfully break through the classical
Speaker 1: music world in the early to mid twentieth century. Some
Speaker 1: would even say Still was the most important Black composer
Speaker 1: of his time. My grandfather, William gret Still, is commonly
Speaker 1: known as the Dean of African American composers. That's mostly
Speaker 1: because he has a very long list of firsts, like
Speaker 1: he was the first black man to conduct a major
Speaker 1: radio orchestra. That's Celeste Headley, a journalist, last month the
Speaker 1: Atlanta City Council, musician, author, radio personality. I'm Celest Hedley.
Speaker 1: This is on second thought public speaker. According to Pew Research,
Speaker 1: about a third of American teenagers send more than a
Speaker 1: hundred texts a day, and among many other things, an
Speaker 1: old friend and colleague of mine, I like your hair
Speaker 1: that length and it looks healthy. I actually use like
Speaker 1: proper champoo now. I don't use like three in one.
Speaker 1: If two of that was because of me teasing you,
Speaker 1: then I'll take it as she spoiled for us just
Speaker 1: a minute ago. William Grant Still was her grandfather. He
Speaker 1: was my favorite person. My father died when I was
Speaker 1: very young, like less than a year old, and so
Speaker 1: my grandfather stepped into that role for me. I didn't
Speaker 1: quite realize he was famous until he died. When celest
Speaker 1: and I worked together many years ago, her grandfather often
Speaker 1: came up as a topic of casual conversation, and both
Speaker 1: Celeste and I were trained classical musicians, so we spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking shop. But somehow, prior to
Speaker 1: meeting Celeste, I knew really next to nothing about William Grant.
Speaker 1: Still never in my conservatory training did still music really
Speaker 1: come up, either for research or for performance purposes. As
Speaker 1: Celeste told me, that's sadly pretty common. Much to her dismay,
Speaker 1: Still all too often gets boxed in as a quote
Speaker 1: black composer. Therefore his works may only get played during
Speaker 1: Black History Month, and that's a big problem. We need
Speaker 1: to just stop treating it like black music. Stop only
Speaker 1: performing the Afromaeric con Symphony, stop only performing it during
Speaker 1: Black History Month. Start playing the freaking music. It's available.
Speaker 1: You can get the art songs, you can get the
Speaker 1: chamber works. The piano pieces are amazing. Let's study the
Speaker 1: music itself. I went to school with Aaron Dworkin, who
Speaker 1: went on to found the Sphinx Competition. And Aaron and
Speaker 1: I were sitting there talking about one of grandfather symphonies
Speaker 1: and one of our friends, who's black and a trumpet player,
Speaker 1: was like, the reason they don't play still more is
Speaker 1: because it's just not as good as Beethoven. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: be honest. And I was like, what what are you
Speaker 1: talking about? Nobody's Beethoven except Beethoven. So like, this is
Speaker 1: the sort of stereotypes and racism, which is it just
Speaker 1: embedded in our curriculum. We are going to have to
Speaker 1: intentionally get it out of there, you know. I remember
Speaker 1: the NPR Show performance today from a p M American
Speaker 1: Public Media. This is performance today. I'm Fred gild and
Speaker 1: they have their Essential Library where they add, you know,
Speaker 1: one or two pieces each episode. I never knew about
Speaker 1: this piece of music written in ninet by American composer
Speaker 1: William Grant Still, and they did my Grandfather's piece for
Speaker 1: the Sweet for violin and piano. It was like minutes
Speaker 1: minutes into the radio piece before they even mentioned that
Speaker 1: he was black, Like almost the entire thing was just
Speaker 1: them talking about the music. And I cried, like I
Speaker 1: got so moved that they were talking about the music
Speaker 1: and not his color. It was a moment for me,
Speaker 1: and that's really what he wanted. And he could get
Speaker 1: so irritated that people were always calling him a black
Speaker 1: composer because he was like, what do you call Copeland
Speaker 1: a Jewish composer? Every time you introduce him, Like, talk
Speaker 1: about the music. So that's what we're gonna do today.
Speaker 1: But of course it would still be impossible to talk
Speaker 1: about still without also understanding where he came from and
Speaker 1: how race played a role in his career. But all
Speaker 1: of that is purely historical, and the Celest says all
Speaker 1: judgment of steels music should remain independent of his identity
Speaker 1: or life experience. I asked Celeste to start at the beginning.
Speaker 1: He became interested in music at a very young age.
Speaker 1: He took violin lessons with old Mr Price in Little Rock,
Speaker 1: Arkansas when he was still very very young child. He
Speaker 1: would make his own instruments. He would get, you know,
Speaker 1: old cigar boxes and stuff and make little violins. He
Speaker 1: knew fairly early on that he wasn't a great performer.
Speaker 1: Later on in his life, we met one of the
Speaker 1: women who grew up near him in as a neighborhood
Speaker 1: in Little Rock, and she said, when Billy played the violin,
Speaker 1: it almost made you cry. And he said that wasn't
Speaker 1: a compliment. He then, after he left high school, went
Speaker 1: to college. He went to Wilberforce as a premed major.
Speaker 1: At that time, for black people, there was no respectable
Speaker 1: job as a musician. That was the era of Scott
Speaker 1: Joplin and his mother. She didn't want him playing in brothels,
Speaker 1: so he would sneak the music in. He would put
Speaker 1: scores inside his books so it looked like he was studying,
Speaker 1: and he was actually reading scores. And he started musical
Speaker 1: ensembles there, and that's where he first began composing. And
Speaker 1: then he ended up at Oberlin University where he studied
Speaker 1: for quite a while on a full scholarship. He then
Speaker 1: went to New York and he began playing popular music
Speaker 1: like he was the first person to make an arrangement
Speaker 1: of the st Louis Blues with W. C. Handy. He
Speaker 1: became very good friends. As W. C. Handy, he began
Speaker 1: recording things like more tim Panaley songs under pseudonyms. He
Speaker 1: worked at the Black Swan Recording Company, which was the
Speaker 1: first black owned recording company in America. He was a
Speaker 1: musical director there, and at that time, you can see
Speaker 1: pictures where there's like a big horn installed in the
Speaker 1: wall and all the musicians are sitting there playing and
Speaker 1: they're aiming their instruments at the horn in the wall
Speaker 1: so they can be recorded. He did all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: He played in the orchestra for Shuffle Along, which became
Speaker 1: a very very pivotal musical. He was having to make
Speaker 1: his living doing some popular things, like he orchestrated things
Speaker 1: for Paul Whitman, the King of Jazz, this white dude,
Speaker 1: he's called himself the King of jazz. And this whole
Speaker 1: time he was studying classical music. He took lessons from
Speaker 1: George Chadwick at Boston Conservatory, he took private tutoring with
Speaker 1: Edgar Varez, and he was writing classical music the whole time.
Speaker 1: But it took him a while to actually be able
Speaker 1: to support himself through classical music. As you can imagine.
Speaker 1: As Celest mentioned, there weren't a ton of opportunities for
Speaker 1: black composers at that time. William Grant still knew it
Speaker 1: would be an uphill battle, and in fact it ended
Speaker 1: up being a path riddled with barriers. He experienced difficulties
Speaker 1: all along the way, and some of them were over
Speaker 1: when he was he was touring with Hubie Blake. Sometimes
Speaker 1: there were no restaurants that they could eat while they
Speaker 1: were on tour, or hotels to stay in. Those kind
Speaker 1: of stories that are awful but that were used to hearing,
Speaker 1: you know. When he was younger, he was really optimistic though,
Speaker 1: and he felt that his music might serve as a
Speaker 1: bridge between the races. That music is ideally suited for
Speaker 1: addressing racism because it transcends language, right. He had some
Speaker 1: really hot, big dreams and high ideals about his music
Speaker 1: when he was younger. Over the course of his life
Speaker 1: you can see doors shutting for him, and by the
Speaker 1: time I came along, he was a little defeated. It
Speaker 1: had been a long life of constant, constant tribulations. Just
Speaker 1: an example, there was one point at which they had
Speaker 1: paid for the recording of music by American composers. He
Speaker 1: was the only black composer included. They sent the discs
Speaker 1: overseas so they could get impressed, right, you know, this
Speaker 1: isn't the age of digital files. And every single disc
Speaker 1: arrived safely except for his, which coincidentally, we're all smashed.
Speaker 1: I mean throughout his entire life, you hear things like that.
Speaker 1: When he went to get his honorary doctorate from Oberlin,
Speaker 1: he decided to drive from l A to Ohio. He
Speaker 1: couldn't stay at the white hotels because he's black, he
Speaker 1: couldn't stay at the black hotels because his wife's Jewish.
Speaker 1: He drove straight from l A to Ohio without stopping,
Speaker 1: and you see him in the pictures and he's like, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's just this. I mean, it's like photographic evidence.
Speaker 1: I could go story after story after story, but it
Speaker 1: was constant. So how was still able to push through
Speaker 1: and overcome these challenges well, at least in part with
Speaker 1: a little help from his friends. First of all, he
Speaker 1: had some very powerful champions. He was good friends with
Speaker 1: the post Takowski. The person who got his very first
Speaker 1: big concert performance was, of course, his mentor at that time,
Speaker 1: Edgar Varez. There were people who were fighting for him
Speaker 1: and speaking up for him all along the way, and
Speaker 1: frankly they were white, which think is informative as we
Speaker 1: moved forward with racism. It's important to remember that the
Speaker 1: people who have the most power to bring about change
Speaker 1: are actually white people. My grandfather's life is a testament
Speaker 1: to that. Of course, there are still many other reasons
Speaker 1: why still became so highly regarded m I mean, there's also,
Speaker 1: of course the question the fact that the music is
Speaker 1: just very good. It's extremely high quality. And the other
Speaker 1: thing that's very unique about his music is we have
Speaker 1: to remember he was writing melody at a time when
Speaker 1: that was not considered I don't want to say fashionable,
Speaker 1: but that is not what people were writing. We're talking
Speaker 1: about the middle of the twentieth century when he was
Speaker 1: really denigrated for writing melody, and reviewers would call his
Speaker 1: music simplistic, or that he was trying to write pop music,
Speaker 1: or that he was appealing to the audience, and they
Speaker 1: said that like it was an criticism he was pandering
Speaker 1: to the audience by writing tunes. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff going on. For context, in the early twenty century,
Speaker 1: classical music was changing folks like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold
Speaker 1: Schoenberg were challenging the norms of things like melody and
Speaker 1: traditional song structure. Modernist composers like Edgard Varrez took this
Speaker 1: even further, adopting what seemed like completely randomized approaches to
Speaker 1: creating music. Vaez, perhaps strangely enough, was one of Still's mentors.
Speaker 1: It was a skilled composer, but I think he wrote
Speaker 1: one piece for two airplane engines. This was a time
Speaker 1: when people really were questioning, I think, in a healthy way,
Speaker 1: what constitutes music. Does it have to have a melody
Speaker 1: to be music? No, But then what distinguishes music from
Speaker 1: just a random collection of sounds? Right? These are the
Speaker 1: questions that were occupying people in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and they also dug into this idea of sort of
Speaker 1: flouting expectations of going for a dissonant chord rather than
Speaker 1: what people would expect of really leaning into those tried
Speaker 1: to ones. And my grandfather has actually talked about what
Speaker 1: is quite a bit, and he expressed a lot of
Speaker 1: gratitude for ed Gard Fardez. He also said that although
Speaker 1: he rejected that idiom, that style of dissonance and a
Speaker 1: tonality It really freed him up as a composer into
Speaker 1: learning how to use dissonance. It's not like all of
Speaker 1: Grandfather's music is tonal. It's not. It's just that he
Speaker 1: learned to use dissonance in a really intentional way. He
Speaker 1: learned to surprise people. If the audience was expecting you
Speaker 1: to resolve down to a four chord, he would surprise
Speaker 1: you and go the other way and and use that
Speaker 1: in a strategic way to create these pieces that had
Speaker 1: landscape and direction. I think that's one of the things
Speaker 1: I really like about Grandfather's music is that a it's
Speaker 1: not long winded, right, it's not Mahler. He says what
Speaker 1: he needs to say and he gets out, but it's
Speaker 1: always moving forward. It always has a place to go.
Speaker 1: You could say maybe that's part of African American heritage,
Speaker 1: because obviously they're very much pardon the punt, driven by rhythm,
Speaker 1: but it's also just part of his personal style that motion.
Speaker 1: As we just heard, William Grant Still was largely dedicated
Speaker 1: to melody, rhythm and motion. There's probably no better place
Speaker 1: to see this than what's Still's most famous p his
Speaker 1: first symphony, also called the Afro American symphony that was
Speaker 1: written in nineteen and he said about it that in
Speaker 1: that symphony he wasn't trying to portray like the upper
Speaker 1: class of African Americans. He was trying to portray the
Speaker 1: sons of the soil, he said, those who still had
Speaker 1: a strong connection to their ancestors in Africa and hadn't
Speaker 1: completely assimilated. Every movement, and there are four movements. Has
Speaker 1: a quote from a Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem, why should
Speaker 1: the world be overwise and counting all our tears and size? Nay,
Speaker 1: let them only see us while we wear the mask.
Speaker 1: Paul Lawrence Dunbar, very very famous early twentieth century Black poet.
Speaker 1: So the first one is where you hear that first theme,
Speaker 1: which is like na da na naa, And then that
Speaker 1: trumpets come in with their mutes. If you're a brass player,
Speaker 1: you have to have all your mutes if you're playing still,
Speaker 1: because he's gonna use all of them. And that original
Speaker 1: melody is played when you very first begins. It's just
Speaker 1: this solo English horn and it sounds awesome. And that
Speaker 1: at first poem is all night long, while the moon
Speaker 1: goes down, love and I set at her feet then
Speaker 1: for the long journey back from the town had but
Speaker 1: the dreams make it sweet, so it's like a bitter sweet. Right.
Speaker 1: Then we get the adagio, which is the second movement.
Speaker 1: In some of his notebooks, he called that sorrow. And
Speaker 1: if you look at the structure, especially the chord progressions,
Speaker 1: it's really structured a little bit like a spiritual It's
Speaker 1: much more chromatic than the first one is there are
Speaker 1: fewer functional chord progressions. Then you get to the third movement,
Speaker 1: and the third movement is a huge change. So you
Speaker 1: heard the role in the timpanies Boom Dun Dun, dun, Dune,
Speaker 1: dune Dune. That one's called an amato. He called it
Speaker 1: humor in his notebooks. So the story was when he
Speaker 1: was in the musical Shuffle along with Hubie Blake. The
Speaker 1: musicians played it so many times that they got sick
Speaker 1: of it, right, so they'd write little, you know, additions
Speaker 1: and improvisations that they'd play along with it. And the
Speaker 1: one that my grandfather wrote was the melody for I
Speaker 1: Got Rhythm. Gershwin came and saw the show. We know
Speaker 1: that he saw it a bunch of times. Ubi Blake
Speaker 1: was mad about that for the rest of his his life.
Speaker 1: You can hear if you listen just not very long
Speaker 1: into the third movement, you'll hear the horns playing just
Speaker 1: a tiny little quote if I got rhythm, which, knowing
Speaker 1: my grandfather, that's his little wink, he was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, that's how that goes. And then the last
Speaker 1: movement is lent o. It's almost to me like a march,
Speaker 1: and then it ends more upbeat. It's like hope, And
Speaker 1: it's this beautiful poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The poem
Speaker 1: was called od Ethiopia, be proud my race in mind
Speaker 1: and soul. Thy name is written on glory scrool, in
Speaker 1: characters of fire high mid the clouds of famous bright sky,
Speaker 1: Thy banners blazoned folds now fly, and truth shall lift
Speaker 1: them higher. And that movement is very much that sort
Speaker 1: of nobility and seriousness at the same time that there's
Speaker 1: that hope. Though still was always most associated with the
Speaker 1: Afro American symphony, he always sought to prove his versatility
Speaker 1: and avoid being pigeonholed by his style. He tried not
Speaker 1: to right in a particularly African American style. For the
Speaker 1: very beginning of his composing career. His grandmother had been
Speaker 1: a flavor whole life until the end of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: He saw the spirituals, for example, as kind of low class.
Speaker 1: He wanted a distance and self for them. So it
Speaker 1: sort of took him a little while to embrace what
Speaker 1: would be considered the folklore music of black Americans. When
Speaker 1: he did do that, and in his very very first symphony,
Speaker 1: that's the first symphony to include an original blues theme
Speaker 1: and a banjo and a vibraphone. By the way, when
Speaker 1: he did, he wrote original tunes. Like Copeland quoted a
Speaker 1: lot of folklore songs. As an example, here's Aaron Copeland's
Speaker 1: hold Out and here's the original tune Bonaparte's Retreat by
Speaker 1: fiddler William Steppe. Totally fine. Win Right still just wrote
Speaker 1: them all new. He composed in a way that most
Speaker 1: composers do not. The vast majority of composers write out
Speaker 1: sort of the sketch of a piece, and then they'll
Speaker 1: write out a piano score, and they'll expand it for
Speaker 1: whatever size, whether it's band or chamber orchestra or whatever.
Speaker 1: They'll expand it in assigned parts. Grandfather didn't play the piano.
Speaker 1: It was the only instrument in the orchestra. He had
Speaker 1: no idea how to play, although he married a concert pianist,
Speaker 1: my grandmother, so he went the other way. He would
Speaker 1: write the melodic framework, and then he went from the
Speaker 1: beginning to the end of each movement and wrote for
Speaker 1: every individual instrument. The reason that he learned to play
Speaker 1: all those instruments is he really wanted to capture the
Speaker 1: fullness of each instrument, right. He wanted to see, what's
Speaker 1: the sweet spot, what does this particular instrument do best?
Speaker 1: And let me make sure I as sign that to
Speaker 1: the instrument that does this particular thing best. Obviously I'm biased,
Speaker 1: but also as a musician, probably one of the best
Speaker 1: arrangers and orchestrators of the twentieth century. There's no mistaking
Speaker 1: a still orchestration. It's so idiosyncratic for each instrument. And
Speaker 1: he would go sometimes at rehearsals and he'd ask the players,
Speaker 1: do you like your part? Is there anything in there?
Speaker 1: I was an obi player, and an infamous piece for
Speaker 1: obi player. This is the Korean folk song that everybody
Speaker 1: plays right when you're in high school because it has
Speaker 1: a trill for the obos between a B and a
Speaker 1: B flat, which is your pinky at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the obo going U is impossible, and they've had to
Speaker 1: like create a little key that goes da dada just
Speaker 1: to allow you to play it. There's nothing like that.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that's unplayable in a still score, whether conscious
Speaker 1: of it or not. By embracing his heritage, still revealed
Speaker 1: a unique talent, something that not even contemporaries like George
Speaker 1: Gershwin could hope to match. His ability to understand orchestration,
Speaker 1: that being how a variety of instruments all fit together,
Speaker 1: was unparalleled, and Gershwin knew that. So grandfather actually gave
Speaker 1: him at least a couple orchestration lessons. Gershwin said he
Speaker 1: wanted to learn how to orchestrate. Remember Gershwin didn't orchestrate
Speaker 1: Rhapsody in Blue. Ferdy Grofe orchestrated it. Yea. Gershon wasn't
Speaker 1: particularly very patient. He was just known as somebody who
Speaker 1: just didn't follow through on a lot of stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's not surprising anybody that he was quite arrogant.
Speaker 1: There used to be a joke around those times of
Speaker 1: Gershwin walking around Harlem, where a stack of ones going,
Speaker 1: can you holn that again? That's how Gershwin was viewed
Speaker 1: from the African American side of music. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: you can't deny he had great taste, had very great taste.
Speaker 1: There's no way of knowing what among his music was
Speaker 1: original and what he borrowed. But looking back, knowing that
Speaker 1: he was able to do that because the black musicians
Speaker 1: were absolutely disempowered and had no chance of getting copyrights
Speaker 1: or publications, they put sort of a darker spin on it. Also,
Speaker 1: like Ershwin still wrote a number of operas, Celeste is
Speaker 1: a singer, so she had a lot to say about opera. Specifically,
Speaker 1: she named Minette Fontaine as her favorite. Still's opera written
Speaker 1: in n I Love a Contralto. I Love a real contralto.
Speaker 1: And there's a character in Minette Fontaine, Marie la Vaux,
Speaker 1: who does this voodoo ritual. The last time I saw
Speaker 1: it was in Louisiana, and she comes out and it
Speaker 1: was this tall statuesque African American contralto and she's like, oh,
Speaker 1: huge spirits, and it's just so effective. The other reason
Speaker 1: I like that is because it's about a mixed race person.
Speaker 1: I'm a mixed race person. It's sort of about sort
Speaker 1: of the racial identities and how they get muddled. Celest
Speaker 1: is also a big fan of another still opera, Once
Speaker 1: You Wanted to make Sure We played for you Today.
Speaker 1: Troubled Island is the one that he wrote with Langston Hughes.
Speaker 1: The lyrics are not surprisingly, absolutely gorgeous. That is due
Speaker 1: for a revival for sure. It's it's outstanding. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so tightly, tightly written. There's just not a single
Speaker 1: note out of place in that opera. Most of the
Speaker 1: ideas and stories and stills operas are completely original. While
Speaker 1: some ideas originate from his family history in the South,
Speaker 1: others come from more unexpected places. He read a lot
Speaker 1: of novels, and he loved movies, and he had a
Speaker 1: Lazy Boy that he loved, and he and I would
Speaker 1: sit there and watch Bonanza, you know. So he liked
Speaker 1: all that storytelling and the drama that we associate with opera.
Speaker 1: He just enjoyed that. In life like you have Costaso,
Speaker 1: which is one of his operas that was premiered in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, and that's set in the American Southwest,
Speaker 1: but when it was under Spanish rule. That of course
Speaker 1: comes from living in l a which was not his
Speaker 1: native city, but which he fell in love with, and
Speaker 1: he loved that Latina heritage all around him. Still wasn't
Speaker 1: just a fan of TV and film. He also spent
Speaker 1: a not insignificant amount of time composing for TV and film.
Speaker 1: His musical stamp can be found on treasures like The
Speaker 1: Three Stooges, Know Why, There's a Couple of Beautiful blond
Speaker 1: Oh Yeah, Lost, Horizon, China Great, The Perry Mason Show,
Speaker 1: and gun Smoke. I don't enough anger inside when he
Speaker 1: can be a killer, they good one day out of
Speaker 1: his life, we've been in a respectable cemetery. I actually
Speaker 1: really like the stuff he did for TV. Sometimes I'll
Speaker 1: watch an old Perry Mason episode or even Three Stooges,
Speaker 1: and you can tell when he did it, like you
Speaker 1: can you're it. The difference between art music and most
Speaker 1: you know, more pop music is not in value, I
Speaker 1: don't think, or in seriousness or impact. But I think
Speaker 1: that art music composers, they have done all the studying
Speaker 1: right to try and get really in depth into things
Speaker 1: like core progressions and blah blah blah blah blah, and
Speaker 1: it makes a difference. That doesn't mean Aretha Franklin is
Speaker 1: a worse singer than you know Maria Callis. They're just
Speaker 1: two different things. And Maria Callis was capable just in
Speaker 1: terms of range and dynamics of more because she did
Speaker 1: all that study and work. And it's the same thing
Speaker 1: that I listened to like the TV stuff, because there's
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, this like richness comes into the orchestration.
Speaker 1: You can tell that, uh. Serious composer and art music
Speaker 1: composer wrote that, I think one of the things I
Speaker 1: like about that has had such a sense of humor
Speaker 1: when you look back his original scores, like there's this
Speaker 1: one PC wrote called The Black Man Dances, and not
Speaker 1: only did they not have digital finale or whatever, but
Speaker 1: they also didn't have white out. So when he made
Speaker 1: a mistake at a score, he had to use an
Speaker 1: exact o knife to cut it out and then take
Speaker 1: a new little piece in there with the correction, and
Speaker 1: he would write a little note going on the composer
Speaker 1: screwed up again, And at the end of Black Men Dancers,
Speaker 1: it's all these little characters going he finished, He's done,
Speaker 1: that's finished. He had a really good sense of humor
Speaker 1: that I think really especially comes out in some of
Speaker 1: his movie music. I asked Celeste to describe some other
Speaker 1: characteristics of Stills film and TV music. There's no such
Speaker 1: thing as the violin playing the melodies almost all the time, right,
Speaker 1: Like the melody will get tossed around and inner weaves
Speaker 1: and one voice will come out and another and they
Speaker 1: sort of merge back and forth with one another. But
Speaker 1: it almost hearkens back a little bit to French Imprussian
Speaker 1: Ism at sometimes, just the way that he'll play a
Speaker 1: chord and sort of let it ring and live with
Speaker 1: it for a little while. William Grant still was slowly
Speaker 1: gaining voriety in the film industry, but there was a
Speaker 1: dark side to his success. After he became so highly
Speaker 1: regarded in Hollywood, his music was often used while he
Speaker 1: himself was entirely uncredited. He wrote for a lot of
Speaker 1: different celebrities and stars and programs during that time. None
Speaker 1: of that was credited, you know. He wrote for Ben
Speaker 1: Crosby and the Rhythm Boys. He did a ton of
Speaker 1: work for Artie Shaw and that was never credited. Like,
Speaker 1: one of the most popular pieces Alretis Show ever wrote
Speaker 1: was Fantasy and it's so so still it's very very
Speaker 1: very much William Grant Stow. It's hard to mistake that
Speaker 1: still struggle to get credit for his work was just
Speaker 1: one of the many challenges he faced. One story from
Speaker 1: the ninety nine World's Fair highlights yet another tragic misstep
Speaker 1: in our country's history. The World's Fair was there as
Speaker 1: having in New York. What they decided to do was
Speaker 1: have a contest to see who would write the theme
Speaker 1: music for the World's Fair. This was nine. They opened
Speaker 1: it up nationally so people would submit their compositions, and
Speaker 1: they was going to be anonymous. The organizers would know,
Speaker 1: but the judges would have a new idea who wrote what.
Speaker 1: And my grandfather sent in three pieces. The judges had
Speaker 1: two pieces. They couldn't decide between the two of them,
Speaker 1: and so they said, hey, well, here's what we'll do.
Speaker 1: We'll ask both of the composers to come to New
Speaker 1: York and then we'll decide once we've met them and
Speaker 1: talk to them. And when they looked it up, they
Speaker 1: had both been written by William Grant. Still, when you
Speaker 1: look at the photos, you can see the expressions on
Speaker 1: these men's faces. They are not happy that it turned
Speaker 1: out to be a black dude. And you can imagine
Speaker 1: if it had been my grandfather and any white person,
Speaker 1: he would have lost. So he wrote the music. But
Speaker 1: you know, at that time, they didn't just let black
Speaker 1: people on the fairgrounds. They could only go on Negro Day.
Speaker 1: And on Negro Day almost none of the restaurants opened
Speaker 1: because the restaurants were all owned by white people. So
Speaker 1: if he ever wanted to go on to the fairgrounds
Speaker 1: to hear his own music, he either had to go
Speaker 1: on Negro Day when he couldn't eat, or he had
Speaker 1: to be escorted by security to protect his safety. That
Speaker 1: was like almost nineteen forty. That's not that long ago.
Speaker 1: That was our grandparents and great grandparents time. I mean,
Speaker 1: that was super recent. The efforts to diversify the classical
Speaker 1: music world are continually ongoing. According to the League of
Speaker 1: American Orchestras, between nineteen eight and two thousand fourteen, the
Speaker 1: percentage of non white orchestra musicians increased from three point
Speaker 1: four percent to just about four but without people like
Speaker 1: William Grant still leading the charge, that number might be
Speaker 1: significantly lower today. So did still consider himself a pioneer
Speaker 1: for future musicians of color. I'm not sure he thought
Speaker 1: about black artists to come and tell his later life.
Speaker 1: But he was always aware of being a pioneer because
Speaker 1: he was always the only one in the room. There's
Speaker 1: this photo may have been the Hollywood Bowl. They gathered
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of famous composers together who happened to
Speaker 1: be in l A at the time, and they wanted
Speaker 1: to get this picture of all the famous composers. There's
Speaker 1: like twelve or something. Stevinsky and somebody else were like,
Speaker 1: I do not want to be photographed with this black dude,
Speaker 1: and they stood in front of him because he's like
Speaker 1: five nine. At the last minute, the photographer goes, wait
Speaker 1: a second, there's a dude in the back, and in
Speaker 1: the picture you can sort of see my grandfather going
Speaker 1: trying to see up of overse jevinsky shoulder. He was
Speaker 1: always the only one, and he knew that he got
Speaker 1: criticized by black people. Went and Marsalis's dad called my
Speaker 1: grandfather and uncle Tom. Because he was supposedly writing white
Speaker 1: men's music. He got criticized by white people because a
Speaker 1: they didn't want him in Carnegie Hall, but also he
Speaker 1: would be criticized the most when he wasn't writing music
Speaker 1: that sounded like black music. Right. If he was going
Speaker 1: to write classical music, it needed to be black. Here's
Speaker 1: your box, you're the black guy. So he was painfully
Speaker 1: aware of that. Despite this, still always managed to maintain
Speaker 1: a healthy work life balance. Family was incredibly important to him,
Speaker 1: and he always made time for his grandchildren. He was
Speaker 1: just the best grandfather ever. He helped me learn to
Speaker 1: play piano. He would play inch worm with me, where
Speaker 1: I'd play one hand and he'd play the other one.
Speaker 1: He used to make honest to goodness toast which had
Speaker 1: like molasses and weak germ. He created. He did a
Speaker 1: lot of the carpentry in the house. He would make toys.
Speaker 1: He collected model trains. He loved dogs, even he had
Speaker 1: a dog, a beloved dog named Shep that he wrote
Speaker 1: a piece four called quit Debt fool Nih. He just
Speaker 1: had such a good sense of humor, and he would
Speaker 1: read me the Uncle Rema stories and correct all the grammar.
Speaker 1: He always had a puzzle book by his bedside. He
Speaker 1: did all kinds of puzzles. He was freaking genius at them,
Speaker 1: and he had beautiful handwriting. He was just the best
Speaker 1: grandfather ever. You know, he doated on his grandchildren. He
Speaker 1: thought we were the greatest thing in the world. I
Speaker 1: have a bunch of pictures of me with my grandfather.
Speaker 1: I'm always attached to him, like I'm always wrapped around
Speaker 1: him because I just loved him to death. By the
Speaker 1: time I came around, of course, I was born in
Speaker 1: sixty nine, but like the last day of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: By that time he was born in he was seventy
Speaker 1: five years old, so he wasn't, you know, running around
Speaker 1: playing ball with me or anything. But he had this
Speaker 1: huge record collection. He had a whole closet full of real,
Speaker 1: the real tapes of performances, and he would sometimes get
Speaker 1: out his player for the reel the reels and conduct
Speaker 1: with them. He was really awesome. When her grandfather passed
Speaker 1: away on December third night, Celeste was just eight years old.
Speaker 1: You can imagine Celeste never expected to lose her grandfather
Speaker 1: so soon, but she also didn't predict how impactful his
Speaker 1: loss would be on the rest of the world. It
Speaker 1: was surprising to me that other people cared that he
Speaker 1: had passed. There were all these headlines about his passing,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what is going on. By that
Speaker 1: point in his life, he really was not getting a
Speaker 1: lot of performances. He was pretty forgotten. I remember there
Speaker 1: was one headline and I still remember it because it
Speaker 1: said a great musician has passed in this generation. Never
Speaker 1: knew him, and that was very true. My mother actually
Speaker 1: put in a ton of work trying to get the
Speaker 1: performances going again, and she's been very successful of that.
Speaker 1: And of course that has coincided with a rising realization
Speaker 1: that we've silenced black voices for hundreds of years, and
Speaker 1: so there's been more interests that way as well. But
Speaker 1: at the time, he just wasn't very well known. They
Speaker 1: were certainly weren't teaching him in schools. When I got
Speaker 1: to University of Michigan, for God's sake, in the master's program,
Speaker 1: the American Music class didn't cover William Grant. Still. I mean, imagine,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a transformative figure. I forgot the fact
Speaker 1: that he's my grandfather. And when I think about the
Speaker 1: number of people who were influenced by his music, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. And it's the University of Michigan when we
Speaker 1: say forgotten. He died thinking he had failed. It was
Speaker 1: really after Troubled Island the opera, which was the first
Speaker 1: opera performed by the New York City Center and the
Speaker 1: first by a black man to be performed by a
Speaker 1: major company, and the critics panned it, and it got
Speaker 1: twenty two curtain calls on opening night, and yet it
Speaker 1: closed within a week because the critics were like, oh,
Speaker 1: these little black guys they tried. After that happened, it
Speaker 1: was almost as though there was this consensus. I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about a conspiracy theory. I'm just saying there appears
Speaker 1: to have been this feeling among people in the positions
Speaker 1: of power and classical music that he'd gone far enough,
Speaker 1: that's enough. Doors just started closing. He couldn't get symphonies performed,
Speaker 1: so he would write for chamber orchestras. He couldn't get
Speaker 1: that performed, so he'd write for band. Couldn't get that performed,
Speaker 1: so he'd write for quartet, and then he'd write for choir,
Speaker 1: and then, you know, towards the end of his life,
Speaker 1: Leopostakowski got him a job writing for elementary school textbooks,
Speaker 1: and at one point the publisher called up Stakowski and said,
Speaker 1: how do we get Ahold Wayne Grant? Still? We need
Speaker 1: his number because we need him to change something. Leoposti
Speaker 1: lost his mind and I was like, you don't ask
Speaker 1: we a gret still to change a note? Are you crazy?
Speaker 1: Throughout his life, still amassed a huge collection of manuscripts, notes,
Speaker 1: and other musical ephemera. I asked celest what happened to
Speaker 1: all of those materials. He left all of his papers
Speaker 1: to the University of Arkansas, which is in Faittteville. Almost
Speaker 1: everything else my mother has, and she has them in
Speaker 1: a giant barn in Arizona with no climate control and
Speaker 1: no protection at all. I don't know what will happen
Speaker 1: when she passes, and I don't know what state those
Speaker 1: things will be in. I hope that they will be salvageable.
Speaker 1: I think she has long had a dream of opening
Speaker 1: a museum, and maybe that's why she's held onto them.
Speaker 1: But opening a museum is quite expensive. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's gonna probably happened in her lifetime. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know if they're still extant. I
Speaker 1: have one of his batons. I have one of the
Speaker 1: tables that he made with his own hands. I probably
Speaker 1: his wing tips shoes. I associate his wing tips shoes
Speaker 1: with my grandfather. He was so you know, he would
Speaker 1: get up every day, and he would dress in a
Speaker 1: three piece suit with vest and wing tips, shoes and
Speaker 1: a tie to go into his own back room and
Speaker 1: make music and write music. It wasn't about what he
Speaker 1: thought about himself. He was trying to show respect to
Speaker 1: the craft that it would have felt disrespectful for him
Speaker 1: to do that, to write music and you know, sweats
Speaker 1: or whatever the mid twentieth century version of sweats was.
Speaker 1: He also had a music type writer that had music
Speaker 1: notes instead of letters that I thought was really really cool.
Speaker 1: He had he used onion, this onion skin paper. Celeste
Speaker 1: maybe didn't get as much time with her grandfather as
Speaker 1: she likely wanted, but his influence on her was undeniable.
Speaker 1: Celest would follow in his footsteps, going on to be
Speaker 1: a successful musician. But I didn't ever want to be
Speaker 1: in classical music. But I had music around me my
Speaker 1: whole life, and I loved it. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: Annie'll Come Out Tomorrow as a young child, I wanted
Speaker 1: to do Broadway. I don't think I'm ever gonna love
Speaker 1: a too analty and dissonance, and I'm sure that a
Speaker 1: big part of that is from his influence and a
Speaker 1: love for melody. My work as a musician is so
Speaker 1: different from my work talking about grandfather's music. I performed
Speaker 1: his music quite a bit, although I refused to perform
Speaker 1: it in February. So that's part of my I think, obligation.
Speaker 1: It's my joy as well, but an also an obligation
Speaker 1: to keep performing this music. But also I do have
Speaker 1: the sort of responsibility to history. You know, if we
Speaker 1: could talk to Mozart's granddaughter, wouldn't you kind of want
Speaker 1: to talk to her and hear what she had to say.
Speaker 1: And I feel like I'm the youngest of the four grandchildren,
Speaker 1: so I'm the last one that knew him in person,
Speaker 1: and so there is this duty. I have a duty
Speaker 1: to keep that story alive and to pass on what
Speaker 1: I know of this composer, who, in the end is
Speaker 1: so pivotal not just in our musical history as a nation,
Speaker 1: but in our racial history, our history as a society.
Speaker 1: And he was an activist in his own way. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I do feel that the musical performance of his works
Speaker 1: is connected to this responsibility that I feel the mantill
Speaker 1: I have kind of taken on. Celeste have done an
Speaker 1: amazing job performing the works of her grandfather at least
Speaker 1: in my humble opinion. So today we're going to go
Speaker 1: out listening to Still's composition Levy land Here, performed by
Speaker 1: Celest Headley with the Northern Arizona University WIN Symphony, treating
Speaker 1: that was thee Lest Hedley singing the music of her grandfather,
Speaker 1: William Grant Still. Find more music by Still online at
Speaker 1: William Grant still music dot com, and be sure to
Speaker 1: call your local classical radio station and request that they
Speaker 1: play more of Still's music, not just during Black History Month.
Speaker 1: This episode of Ephemeral was written by Trevor Young and
Speaker 1: produced with Max and Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. Learn
Speaker 1: more at Ephemeral Dutch show Next Time on Ephemeral. I
Speaker 1: believe that the Okay Laughing Record is the greatest record
Speaker 1: ever made. It's a side of a record where people
Speaker 1: laugh for three minutes. I've listened to it hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of times. Crazy thing is it was a huge, runaway,
Speaker 1: monster hit. Everybody had one, and it stayed in print
Speaker 1: for like thirty years. The question becomes not just what
Speaker 1: is it and how did it becomes such a big hit,
Speaker 1: but why do we know so little about it? Support
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