Mon 4 Feb, 12.00pm - 1/5. Darker America.
Donald Macleod explores the life and music of African-American composer William Grant Still. Today, Still's early years, including the encouragements of his single-parent mother, his obsession with music and his transformative period of study with modernist composer Edgard Varèse, who became his mentor.
Well I have to say, this completely overturned any preconceptions I might well have had regarding this composer, but whose name I have to admit with much embarrassment had totally passed me by until checking this week's Radio Times.
The music and the life behind it gave much cause for thought; here was a black American composer from a non-privileged background whose music took on the Euroclassical tradition at the time it was being filtered through early modernist influences, either adapting the latter into self-consciously devised vernaculars that spelt part of interwar Americana (Copland, Harris, Hanson), or seeking conscious escape from them (the American Experimentalists from Ives onwards). Still seems to have represented an intermediary position, to judge by today's music, rather as did Gershwin, with whose music Still's had certain traits in common, and it will be interesting to find out what became of him and his music - which, again to go by today, was well crafted and, at this early stage, mildly adventurous in a post-Stravinsky/Ravel kind of way. Interesting it was to to learn that at this stage (the 1920s) an African American composer was giving deep thought to the provenance of black music in America, given its broken links to Africa.
And how many people do we know of who actually studied with/under Varèse???
Donald Macleod explores the life and music of African-American composer William Grant Still. Today, Still's early years, including the encouragements of his single-parent mother, his obsession with music and his transformative period of study with modernist composer Edgard Varèse, who became his mentor.
Well I have to say, this completely overturned any preconceptions I might well have had regarding this composer, but whose name I have to admit with much embarrassment had totally passed me by until checking this week's Radio Times.
The music and the life behind it gave much cause for thought; here was a black American composer from a non-privileged background whose music took on the Euroclassical tradition at the time it was being filtered through early modernist influences, either adapting the latter into self-consciously devised vernaculars that spelt part of interwar Americana (Copland, Harris, Hanson), or seeking conscious escape from them (the American Experimentalists from Ives onwards). Still seems to have represented an intermediary position, to judge by today's music, rather as did Gershwin, with whose music Still's had certain traits in common, and it will be interesting to find out what became of him and his music - which, again to go by today, was well crafted and, at this early stage, mildly adventurous in a post-Stravinsky/Ravel kind of way. Interesting it was to to learn that at this stage (the 1920s) an African American composer was giving deep thought to the provenance of black music in America, given its broken links to Africa.
And how many people do we know of who actually studied with/under Varèse???
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