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Dvorak’s Prophecy Vol.3: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (DVD)

£10.87

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Label: Naxos - DVD

Cat No: 2110700

Barcode: 0747313570058

Format: DVD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 18th March 2022

Artists

Kevin Deas (bass-baritone)

Conductors

Arthur Fagan
James Jeter

Artists

Kevin Deas (bass-baritone)

Conductors

Arthur Fagan
James Jeter

About

A PostClassical Ensemble ‘More than Music’ film series
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff

‘The six Dvořák’s Prophecy films I have created with Peter Bogdanoff are an act of advocacy.

‘As in my companion book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, my premise is that the “standard narrative” for classical music in the US – the one I grew up with, popularized by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein – shortchanges the American achievement. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, who called the “sorrow songs” of Black America “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation,” and Antonín Dvořák, who prophesied that “negro melodies” would find a “great and noble” American school, I begin not with Copland and the modernists, but with Dvořák and his protégé Harry Burleigh, who turned “Deep River” into a sublime concert song. I treat Charles Ives as an American creative genius comparable to Whitman and Melville. The standard narrative makes no room for a morbid Romantic like Bernard Herrmann – to my ears, the most under-rated 20th-century American composer, and not just for his terrific film scores. It omits William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – forgotten following its galvanizing 1934 premiere by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And it fails to reckon with Lou Harrison, whose majestic Piano Concerto may be the most formidable by any American. The films therefore argue for a longer, more eventful New World odyssey, documenting both democratic ideals and the legacy of slavery.

‘If George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – the highest creative achievement in American classical music – embodies a glorious (and controversial) fulfilment of Dvořák’s prophecy, there also exists a buried lineage of exceptional compositions by Black composers following in Dvořák’s wake. Coming first was his assistant Harry Burleigh, whose seminal settings of Deep River are as much compositions as transcriptions. Burleigh’s initiative was sealed by singers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But William Levi Dawson’s oracular Negro Folk Symphony (Naxos 8559870), though triumphantly premiered by Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, gathered dust – and Dawson was never to create the symphonic catalogue he seemed destined to undertake.’

– Joseph Horowitz

Music by Harry Burleigh, William Levi Dawson, Florence Price and William Grant Still

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM stereo
Language: English
Region code: 0 (Worldwide)
Playing time: 78 minutes