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Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Music of the Harlem Renaissance

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Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Music of the Harlem Renaissance State University of New York College at Buffalo - Buffalo State College Digital Commons at Buffalo State History Theses History and Social Studies Education 5-2013 Robert Nathaniel Dett nda the Music of the Harlem Renaissance Daniel Weaver Buffalo State College, [email protected] Advisor Felix L. Armfield, Ph. D., Professor of History First Reader Felix L. Armfield, Ph.D., Professor of History Second Reader Carolyn Guzski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Music Department Chair Dr. Andrew D. Nicholls, Ph.D., Professor of History To learn more about the History and Social Studies Education Department and its educational programs, research, and resources, go to http://history.buffalostate.edu/. Recommended Citation Weaver, Daniel, "Robert Nathaniel Dett nda the Music of the Harlem Renaissance" (2013). History Theses. Paper 18. Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/history_theses Part of the Cultural History Commons Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Music of the Harlem Renaissance by Daniel Weaver A Thesis in History Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts May 2013 State University of New York College at Buffalo Department of History and Social Studies Education Abstract While the contributions of writers and poets to the period of American cultural history known as the Harlem Renaissance are relatively well defined and understood, assessing the contributions of musicians has been more problematic. The topic has been covered indirectly through works of American music history and African American history, but there have been comparatively few works linking music directly to the goals of the movement. Much of the insight into music’s place during this period derives from contemporary writers such as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, both of whom featured discussions of music in their writings. Relatively unknown today, Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was one of a group of composers whose work reflects the goals of Locke and other Renaissance writers. This thesis will explore the work of Robert Nathaniel Dett as a composer and educator in the larger context of the Harlem Renaissance. With in-depth biographies of Dett’s life already available, this thesis will focus on the period of his greatest activity during the 1910s and the 1920s while concurrently attempting to establish a larger context for his work by situating it within the course of American music history of the period. Specific topics will include: Dett’s education at Oberlin College and subsequent employment as Music Director at Hampton Institute; how characteristics of Dett’s music aligned with the goals of the Harlem Renaissance; and, Dett’s response to criticism that he was neglecting the authentic heritage of African American music. Table of Contents Abstract Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Dett’s Education and Early Career...............................................................................20 Chapter 2: Influences and Predecessors.........................................................................................27 Chapter 3: Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Harlem Renaissance: Dett’s Music.............................41 Chapter 4: Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Harlem Renaissance: Critics and Detractors...............57 Chapter 5: Dett at Hampton Institute.............................................................................................68 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................78 Bibliography..................................................................................................................................82 Introduction: Music of the Harlem Renaissance In his foreword to Nathan Huggins’s Harlem Renaissance, the 1971 landmark study of African American art and culture during the early part of the twentieth century, historian Arnold Rampersad recognized Huggins’s neglect of the music of the period as one of the book’s few weaknesses. Rampersad immediately added the qualification that: “one can lodge this complain about every book in existence about the Harlem Renaissance.”1 Why is music so difficult to relate to this period—a period traditionally delimited to a single geographical location during the decade of the 1920s? As the career of Robert Nathaniel Dett demonstrated, the ascription of musical meaning is possible, as long as the notion of the Harlem Renaissance is not constrained geographically and chronologically in this manner. Dett never had any significant connection to Harlem as a physical location, and he was active as a composer from about 1901 to his death in 1943. Yet, his music is considered to be one of the most representative reflections of what the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain Locke, advocated as a new assertiveness in embracing the rural folk elements of African American nineteenth-century life and transforming them into enduring art forms. As they pertained to music, the artistic goals of Locke and other Renaissance commentators primarily centered on reconciling a European conception of concert music with the musical materials of nineteenth-century black folksongs, primarily the spiritual. Dett accomplished precisely that in compositions such as Listen to the Lambs and The Chariot Jubilee. 1 Arnold Rampersad, Foreword to Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xxx. 2 The paucity of music in writings on the Harlem Renaissance can be partly attributed to the fact that it did not appear with the suddenness of prose and poetry. In the intervening years between Paul Laurence Dunbar’s death in 1906 and the 1922 publication of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, only three major works by black authors were published.2 In the realm of visual arts, it was not until the 1930s that any significant stylistic school of painting or sculpture began to flourish among black artists. Henry O. Tanner and Meta Warrick Fuller were highly regarded artists, but both were bound to a European tradition that was now out of fashion even among European artists. Consequently, they were not in a position to inspire any younger artists to go beyond that convention.3 African American music, already with at least a fifty-year history in the mainstream of American culture by the 1920s, did not share in the newness of a fledgling literary and visual art style. Possibly for this reason, it has come to be taken for granted when recalling its contributions to the whole period.4 By the same measure, 1929 would seem to be too arbitrary an outer boundary. Even after the Great Depression had severely compromised the productivity of the late Renaissance by destroying the financial foundation of artistic patronage that had flourished during the 1920s, musicians continued to produce a consistent output with achievements such as Dett’s oratorio The Ordering of Moses (1932), and the premier and 2 David Levering Lewis, The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), xv. These were: Pointing the Way, Sutton Griggs (1908); The Quest of the Silver Fleece, W.E.B. DuBois (1911); and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson (1912). 3 Allan M. Gordon, “Interactions Between Art and Music During the Harlem Renaissance,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 141. 4 Samuel A. Floyd Jr., “Music in the Harlem Renaissance: An Overview,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 4-5. Dett commented on the different rates of progress for music and other art forms when he cited the lack of suitable literature that might be used as inspiration for or as a libretto to musical compositions. In this way, he believed that a lack of authentic African-American literature was impeding the development of dramatic music among black composers. 3 publication of William Grant Still’s Symphony no. 1 (“Afro-American”) in 1930, referred to by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. as the “crowning achievement” of the Harlem Renaissance.5 Still, along with later composers William Dawson and Florence Price, built his success on the foundation Dett provided over the preceding twenty years. Just as difficult in determining music’s place in the Harlem Renaissance—one of the term’s first appearances in print was in a New York Herald Tribune article in 1925—is defining the episode itself.6 It meant different things to different people; one could make a generalization that it was a surge in the production of written, visual, and musical art by and about African Americans. The historian Jon Michael Spencer offered this analysis: “[T]he Negro Renaissance can be generally characterized as an epoch in which art and letters with an inner-African ‘mood and spirit,’ derived significantly (if not principally) from the remnant of African rhythm, found expression in European ‘form and technique’ and flourished for the purpose of providing an adequate new answer to the old problem of racism.”7 This serves as an apt summation of what Robert Nathaniel Dett was attempting to accomplish in music composition. Countee Cullen and Claude McKay were pursuing parallel goals in poetry; both were exploring
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