William Grant Still

• Born: May 11, 1895
• Birthplace: Woodville, Mississippi
• Died: December 3, 1978
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Composer and musician

Still was a leading composer of serious art music during the Harlem Renaissance and an important figure in American music history during the subsequent decades. His contributions to American music include more than 150 compositions, most of which are written in an accessible, often folk-inspired, style.

Areas of achievement: Music: classical and operatic; Music: composition; Music: folk and country

Early Life

William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi, to a family of African American, Native American, and European descent. Both of his parents were children of former slaves. His father, the town bandmaster, died shortly after Still’s birth. His mother, Carrie Fambro Still, a high school English teacher, relocated with her infant son to Little Rock, Arkansas. Her marriage in 1904 to Charles B. Shepperson, a clerk with the Railway Mail Service, ensured Still of a comfortable, cultured, and rather sheltered upbringing in the post-Reconstruction South.

Still’s early music experiences included exposure to black folk music as sung by his grandmother, European classical music through his stepfather’s collection of phonograph records, and violin lessons. After graduating from high school in 1911, Still attended Wilberforce University in Ohio with the intention of pursuing medicine. He soon became involved in the university’s musical life, however, learning to play several instruments, arranging music for the Wilberforce band, and discovering the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Still left Wilberforce in 1915 without graduating and studied briefly at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1917 before serving in the U.S. Navy for a year during World War I.

In 1919, Still accepted a position as a performer and arranger for the influential African American blues musician W. C. Handy. The next few years witnessed Still’s active participation in the burgeoning black music culture of New York City, especially as an arranger for various theatrical venues and radio shows. Still’s musical training, meanwhile, was significantly augmented by private studies in 1922 with the musically conservative George Whitefield Chadwick, director of the New England Conservatory of Music, and from 1923 to 1925 with the ultra-modernist composer Edgar Varèse. Varèse had Still’s first significant concert work—From the Land of Dreams (1924), for chamber orchestra and three female voices—performed at an International Composers’ Guild concert in 1925. With his encouragement, Still became increasingly focused on the composition of serious art music during the late 1920’s. Other compositions of this time period include his symphonic poem Darker America (1924), the vocal work Levee Land (1925), the ballet score Sahdji (1930), and the three-movement orchestral work Africa (1930).

Life’s Work

Still’s musical activities in New York City during the 1920’s, which included performances with numerous jazz and popular music ensembles, coincided with the African American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. He collaborated—not always successfully—with artists including Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce, and Carlton Moss. His communication with Alain Locke throughout the 1930’s, as well as Locke’s manifesto calling for the elevation of African American culture, had a profound influence on Still’s musical development. Although Still had incorporated elements of African American music such as spirituals, the blues, and jazz in several of his compositions from the 1920’s, he had done so in an avant-garde manner, reflecting his studies with Varèse. Feeling that these works did not adequately reflect the “Negroid idiom” that he desired to cultivate, Still consciously adopted a much more accessible compositional style during the 1930’s, merging elements of African American folk music and tonal European art music. The initial result of this venture, his Symphony no. 1 “Afro-American” (1930), was premiered in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Howard Hanson. An immediate success, the Afro-American Symphony, as it is usually called, is both Still’s best-known work and the first symphony by an African American composer to be performed by a major symphony orchestra.

After the failure of his first marriage, Still was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and relocated to Los Angeles permanently in 1934. The result of this fellowship, Blue Steel (1935), was the first of the composer’s eight operas, although it was never performed. Over the next several decades, Still worked on numerous film and television scores, including those for Pennies from Heaven (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and Stormy Weather (1943). In 1936, meanwhile, he conducted excerpts from two of his works at the Hollywood Bowl, becoming the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra. Three years later, he married the white pianist Verna Arvey, with whom he had briefly worked. Their marriage resulted in several collaborations, with Arvey as librettist. The first of these collaborations was her completion of the libretto for his second opera, Troubled Island (1937-1939), which had been started by Hughes. Premiered in 1949 by the New York City Opera, Troubled Island was the first opera by an African American composer to be performed by a major opera company. Among Still’s notable later operas, all of which have librettos by Arvey, are A Bayou Legend (1941), A Southern Interlude (1943), and Costaso (1949).

Despite his attraction to opera, however, Still remained primarily an instrumental composer. In his Symphony no. 2 in G Minor (1937), subtitled “Song of a New Race,” Still continued working in the musical idiom of the Afro-American Symphony, considering the later work a companion piece to the earlier one. Three more symphonies followed, all of which reflect Still’s growing interest in “universal” nationalistic material, including cowboy songs, Native American music, and Hispanic elements. Still produced numerous other works, a few as a result of commissions from major organizations, orchestras, and performers, before his compositional activities began to wane during the 1950’s. Among the most notable of these are the orchestral suite Lenox Avenue (1937), the piano score Seven Traceries (1939), the vocal work And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940), and the orchestral works In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943) and Poem for Orchestra (1944). Still died on December 3, 1978, in Los Angeles.

Significance

Still is arguably the most important African American composer of both concert music and opera in American history. In the same generation as Aaron Copland, although not as prolific or as varied in his musical output, Still made significant contributions to the increasingly distinctive voice of American art music during the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, his successful incorporation of traditional African American elements in his music secures his position as one of the preeminent composers of the Harlem Renaissance, alongside such figures as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The numerous awards and honorary degrees conferred upon him during his lifetime are a tribute to his achievement and significance.

Bibliography

Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Informative narrative on the composer’s life and music, focusing on his work in both popular and art music.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Collection of essays focused on the composer’s early life, development, and involvement in the Harlem Renaissance.

Soll, Beverly. I Dream a World: The Operas of William Grant Still. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005. Includes information and analysis dealing with the composer’s approach and eight individual operas.

Still, Judith Anne, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin. William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Reference work detailing the composition, scoring, and performances of the composer’s works. Includes a biography, bibliography, and discography.