Böcker av Catherine Parsons Smith

Once called the dean of African American composers, William Grant Still created a unique version of musical modernism that influenced commercial music, symphonic music, and opera. The acclaimed and enormously popular Afro-American Symphony, like many of his works, drew on Black American musical heritage, and Still was the first Black composer to have his work performed by a major symphony orchestra. Catherine Parsons Smith's biography tracks the composer's interrelated careers in popular and concert music. Still's artistic journey took him from conservatory study with George W. Chadwick to collaborating with Langston Hughes, working as a commercial arranger and composer on Broadway and radio, arranging for artists like Sophie Tucker and Artie Shaw, and serving as the recording director for the first Black-owned record label. But despite his prolific production and multidimensional talents, Still endured financial struggles and declining attention to his work.

In this fascinating social history of music in Los Angeles from the 1880s to 1940, Catherine Parsons Smith ventures into an often neglected period to discover that during America's Progressive Era, Los Angeles was a center for making music long before it became a major metropolis. She describes the thriving music scene over some sixty years, including opera, concert giving and promotion, and the struggles of individuals who pursued music as an ideal, a career, a trade, a business--or all those things at once. Smith demonstrates that music making was closely tied to broader Progressive Era issues, including political and economic developments, the new roles played by women, and issues of race, ethnicity, and class.

During the 1930s and 1940s William Grant Still was known as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers". He worked as an arranger for early radio, on Broadway, and in Hollywood. This text brings William Grant Still out of the archives and examines his place in America's musical heritage.