William L. Dawson is mostly known these days for his arrangements of African American spirituals, still in common use almost a century after he made them, but he wrote a good deal of concert music, and it has generally been underrated. Seeing a title like Negro Folk Symphony might suggest a potpourri of spiritual themes, but the work is entirely different. It contains spirituals, yes, but they are fragmentary, and in the second movement, they don't appear at all. Dawson offers a melancholy melody of his own on the English ...
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William L. Dawson is mostly known these days for his arrangements of African American spirituals, still in common use almost a century after he made them, but he wrote a good deal of concert music, and it has generally been underrated. Seeing a title like Negro Folk Symphony might suggest a potpourri of spiritual themes, but the work is entirely different. It contains spirituals, yes, but they are fragmentary, and in the second movement, they don't appear at all. Dawson offers a melancholy melody of his own on the English horn. In the outer movements, the web of spirituals is interlocked with a different structure: a kind of developing variation that is influenced by the tonality of the folk material but not by the melodies themselves. The result is quite subtle, and it's easy to see why no less than Leopold Stokowski championed this work, performing it in four back-to-back concerts in Philadelphia in 1934, broadcasting it on CBS Radio, and recording it once. During the modernist tyranny the work was...
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