the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra’s last formal concert of the season will feature a piece by William Grant Still, a Black composer of operas, ballets, symphonies, and other works who was regarded by the end of his life as the dean of African-American composers.
The orchestra will perform Mr. Still’s pivotal “Afro-American Symphony,” written in 1930 and the first symphony by a Black composer to gain traction in the classical music world. It was first performed in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic, and until 1950 it was the most widely performed symphony composed by an American.
Mr. Still was born in Mississippi in 1895 and grew up in Little Rock, Ark. He studied music in Ohio at Wilberforce University and at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One of his first jobs was in Memphis with blues composer W.C. Handy, and he performed with cabaret orchestras and speakeasies in Harlem.
He came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, collaborating with prominent Black literary and cultural figures. Mr. Still continued studying classical composition, and eventually he blended the two forms into a fresh, new American sound.
While Mr. Still’s music was rooted in the blues, his legacy is found in the “Afro-American Symphony,” which successfully brought the folk element of Black America into the realm of classical music.
Mr. Still died in 1978 at the age of 83. He was considered a peer of American composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, but he never obtained their iconic status.
The Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra will also perform on June 25 a piece by Copland called “An Outdoor Overture.” And guest pianist Ron Levy will join the orchestra that evening performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
Mr. Still’s daughter, Judith Anne Still, was happy to hear the RSO planned to perform her father’s music. She said she thought her father would be attending the concert “in spirit.” “I understand from the soothsayers that he loves to come to performances of his music. It is music, after all, that is the truest voice of the Creator, assuring us that, in music, we can communicate with love and purpose with all peoples who are in the human family,” she wrote. “There are, after all, no races—there is only one human family.”
The RSO concert, on Saturday, June 25, will be at the West Side Presbyterian Church at 8 p.m. Please visit https://www.ridgewoodsymphony.
How about a tribute to Festivus ?