Negro Folk Symphony

Program notes

About the Work

William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony is a landmark of American music, and its rediscovery in recent years has been one of the happier stories in the concert hall. Composed in 1934, it was given a triumphant premiere that year by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with a performance at Carnegie Hall soon after. Audiences broke with convention to applaud after the second movement and gave standing ovations at the end, and the work made Dawson one of the very first African American composers (after William Grant Still and Florence Price) to have a symphony championed by a major orchestra. Yet it then fell into neglect for decades, and is only now reclaiming its place.

Dawson’s aim was to create a symphony that was both fully symphonic and authentically rooted in the African American folk tradition. He built the work around spirituals he had cherished since childhood, weaving their melodies into a large three-movement structure of real power and lyrical beauty. After travelling in West Africa in 1952–53, he revised the score, deepening its rhythmic life with what he had heard there. The symphony’s three movements bear evocative titles (‘The Bond of Africa,’ ‘Hope in the Night’ and ‘O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!’), tracing an arc from the trauma of enslavement and the severed ‘bond’ with Africa toward endurance and, finally, triumphant affirmation. It is a fitting, powerful culmination to this festival programme.

What to Listen For

Listen, throughout, for the spirituals at the symphony’s heart, folk melodies that surface in the orchestra, sometimes plainly, sometimes grandly developed. Dawson described a motif representing the link ‘taken out of a human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land’; listen for it in the horn at the very start of the first movement.

The first movement, ‘The Bond of Africa,’ moves from darkness and longing to surging energy. The slow movement, ‘Hope in the Night,’ is the emotional core, brooding and sorrowful, evoking the suffering of the enslaved, with a long, aching central song. The finale bursts out in jubilation, driving the symphony to an exuberant, life-affirming close; listen for the African-inspired rhythmic vitality Dawson added after his travels. It is music of great sweep and heart, and a moving end to an evening celebrating the Black American voice.