Episode Details

At the 1939 New York World's Fair, the theme music for the futuristic Democracy exhibit played continuously for millions of visitors, yet the man who composed it could not safely attend without police protection except on a designated Negro Day. That contradiction sits at the heart of this deep dive into William Grant Still, the Dean of Afro-American Composers, and the question of how a self-taught teenager from Arkansas forced the symphony hall to accept a radically new cultural language.

We trace his dual musical diet of RCA Red Seal classical records and his grandmother's spirituals in Little Rock, his self-taught mastery of seven instruments by age 15, and his path from Wilberforce University and a janitor's job at Oberlin to free composition lessons from George Whitefield Andrews and study with the avant-garde Edgard Varese. We then follow him through the Harlem Renaissance, the pit orchestra of Shuffle Along, arranging for W.C. Handy, James P. Johnson, Artie Shaw, and Paul Whiteman, the 1931 premiere of the Afro-American Symphony by the Rochester Philharmonic, and his history-making but bruising years in Hollywood and opera.

• Why commercial arranging in the 1920s served as a paid laboratory for charting syncopation and Black musical idioms for large ensembles
• How the Afro-American Symphony placed a 12-bar blues theme, a tenor banjo, and muted brass inside the four-movement European symphonic form
• Conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936, walking away from Stormy Weather in 1943, and marrying Verna Arvey in Tijuana to evade California's anti-miscegenation laws
• Troubled Island at New York City Opera in 1949, its libretto begun by Langston Hughes, and the polarized critical expectations that led the press to pan it
• Conducting the New Orleans Philharmonic in 1955, A Bayou Legend's 1981 national television broadcast, and the nearly 200 works of which many remain lost