The Composers Volume 2

This album is the second and latest in a series of albums consisting solely of music by exceptionally talented and prolific Black classical music composers who have been overlooked throughout history due to racial prejudice — personal and institutional, as well as subtle and otherwise — which inhibited their potential recognition and success. The first album in the series, simply entitled THE COMPOSERS, consists of a few selections by Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, a slave who was perhaps the first Black American classical music composer, and the rest by Florence Price (1887–1953).

This album consists of another composition by Price, with additional strings performed and uniquely and movingly arranged by Mark Cargill. Price was the first Black American woman to get recognition as a symphonic composer. She was also the first woman composer to have her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, played by a major orchestra. Her music has so moved Bryant that he has included her in his very short list of favorite composers, all highly acclaimed white male composers of the Romantic Period, specifically Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky.

Other selections on this album consist of compositions by three other women composers, Margaret Bonds (1913–1972), Betty Jackson King (1928–1994) and L. Viola Kinney (1890–1945), as well as five-piece suites by Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) and by S. Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912).

Dett was inspired by the great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (and vice versa), who told the New York Herald in 1893: “In the Negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” Indeed, Dvorak was such a serious student of Black American musical forebearers that the melodies that thread through his “New World Symphony” and his many other compositions pay respectful homage.

Coleridge-Taylor, a contemporary of Vaughan Williams, was an English composer and conductor famous for rich orchestral works and brilliant instrumental writing who, later in his life, was referred to by white New York musicians as “Black Mahler.” Among his best-known works are the Violin Concerto in G minor, The Song of Hiawatha, and his arrangement of the Black American spiritual Deep River.

Margaret Bonds’ music also married the sounds of Black American spirituals with the structure of Western classical music. One of her best-known musical settings is He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand, which she arranged for soprano Leontyne Price in 1963. She also collaborated closely with the leading Black poet Langston Hughes, writing music that celebrated Black American culture and values during the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

L. Viola Kinney taught music and English in Sedalia, Missouri’s segregated Lincoln High School for 35 years. Her Mother’s Sacrifice on this album won a prize in the Inter-State Literary Society Original Music Context in 1908 and was published in Kansas in 1909. A copy of the composition is located in the Library of Congress, but no other musical compositions by her have been found.

Betty Jackson King had written many choral works, art songs, and arrangements of spirituals, and had conducted choirs and workshops in many states. She had taught at the University of Chicago Laboratory School and Dillard University in New Orleans, and from 1979 to 1984, she was President of the National Association of Negro Musicians, Inc.

Let these amazing composers be more recognized and revered!

— Gerry Bryant