"People weren't prepared" — Judith Still and Dr. Guthrie Ramsey on William Grant Still

Music historian, pianist, composer, and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Guthrie Ramsey joins Judith Anne Still, daughter of the late composer William Grant Still, to discuss her father’s life and music, how his experiences as a Black man informed his compositions, and how, despite his many “firsts,” his music was largely unrecognized until recently.


Music from this episode:

STILL, Symphony No. 4 (“Autochthonous”), The Philadelphia Orchestra

STILL, Out of the Silence, First Philadelphia Orchestra performances, Jeffrey Khaner, flute


Links from this episode:

William Grant Still Music - http://www.williamgrantstillmusic.com/

Dr. Guthrie Ramsey on Twitter —  https://twitter.com/DrGuyMusiQology

William Grant Still and the Adventure of Discovery — https://www.philorch.org/about-us/learn-more/Blog/william-grant-still-and-the-adventure-of-discovery/

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s HearTOGETHER series is generously supported by lead corporate sponsor Accordant Advisors. Additional major support has been provided by the Otto Haas Charitable Trust.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): Hello and welcome back to the HearTOGETHER Podcast from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc., I’m your host, Khadija Mbowe— a socio-cultural content creator, classically trained soprano, and loving provocateur. Together, we’re here to clear out dusty assumptions about concert music and explore its potential to reflect and connect our world today. 

On this episode, we’re diving into the life and works of the great 20th century composer, William Grant Still. You just heard a bit of his Fourth Symphony, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra as part of their 2023-24 season opener. Just a heads up that this episode contains some pretty blunt descriptions of racial violence, so listen with care. 

I first encountered Still when I was in music school, but not in the curriculum. I was particularly motivated to find music by black composers, and found him in the depths of the library. It was like uncovering treasure. Though Still’s music sometimes sounds simple in its completeness, it’s far from easy to perform. 

Today, Still’s mastery is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves –  a testament to the diligent work of one of our guests today, William’s daughter, Judith. She’s been at the forefront of preserving and promoting his legacy ever since his death in 1978 (at age 83).

JUDITH STILL: By the time he died, he had no recordings, no publications, no performances, maybe 15 small recitals in a year. And I said to myself, that is not going to continue. 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): William Grant Still was a remarkably prolific composer, so Judith’s first task was collecting and protecting the hundreds of pages of work her father produced during his lifetime. 

JUDITH STILL: First we had to build a building to put all the music because we have 800 square feet of my father's music. He just wrote music all the time, and so we needed a very large building, two story building. So now we've got everything in there, but it's very daunting. I want to tell you. 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): On this episode you’ll also hear from Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, a music historian, pianist, composer, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in African American musics, he’ll help us understand how Still fits into the broader  landscape of music history. 

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: We see this time and time again with extremely accomplished black artists, particularly those people who wrote and painted in idioms that weren't seen as in the popular sphere. Oftentimes, they work and work and work, and it's not until the very end of their life or posthumously, they get the readings and the big exhibitions and things like that that they deserve. So unfortunately, William Still's story in that regard reflects so many of the black artists of the 20th century

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): William Grant Still was born on May 11, 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi, but spent most of his childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father, William Grant Still, Sr., was a teacher and bandleader, who died of an acute illness when Jr. was just an infant. Growing up, Still’s mother, a literary-minded schoolteacher named Carrie, emphasized achievement and always pushed him to excel. Her second husband, Charles Shepperson, nurtured young William’s musical inclinations, bringing home opera recordings and encouraging his stepson to take up the violin— by the end of his life, Still also played cello, oboe, clarinet, and saxophone.

A ferocious intellect, Still graduated high school early and enrolled at Wilberforce College at just 16. The school didn’t offer a music degree, so Still supplemented his education by joining the glee club, forming a string quartet, and composing on his own. In 1916, he moved North to Ohio to attend Oberlin College. He went on to spend time in Boston learning from George Chadwick, director of the New England Conservatory, before ultimately going west and settling in Los Angeles.  

As extraordinary as this journey may seem, it wasn’t unique — Florence Price also grew up in the same hotbed of black achievement. 

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

The thing about Little Rock, Arkansas at that moment is that it was one of the few places in the South that the reconstruction, this terrible reversal of all of the gains that black people had made and their institutions had made prior to after the emancipation, it was slow to come there. It was a place where black people could be educated, where a black middle class, such as it were, such as it was, could thrive.

They could educate their children, they could be dentists, they could have all of these occupations that we now associate with upward mobility. Now, that was short-lived, but during that time, the parents of people like William Grant Steel, the parents of people like Florence, were able to kind of create a cocoon around their children so that they could just aspire to great heights. I think William Grant Steel graduated high school at age 16, I think Florence Price graduated at age 14 and was shortly thereafter appointed a teacher. So she was teaching as a teenager and went off to the New England Conservatory by herself cross country as a young black woman passing as Mexican so that she could be educated. I asked my 95 year old mother who read Linda Brown's book on Florence Price. I said, how could they send her away like that Uns chaperoned across the country to achieve this? She said that she was trained for that. This is what they trained her to do. So they were learning early on that this would be their plight, that this would be their mission, and so that's what was coming out of Little Rock. 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): Always hungry for opportunity, in 1916, William Grant Still connected with W.C. Handy, the self-proclaimed Father of the Blues. During their years of collaboration, Handy exposed Still to the beauty and nuance of the form that would go on to inform and infuse much of the composer’s work.

JUDITH STILL:

He got his start. Mr. Jefferson, his stepfather met WC Handy on the train and asked Handy to give his stepson a job. So that's how my father started working with Handy. And then they traveled around the South Handy's band playing for groups of white men in the late evenings, on weekends and so forth. And it wasn't always very safe for them to do that because one time they were coming back from one of their gigs and they saw a large group of white men dragging a 14 year old black boy down the road. So they hid in a thicket and they had to watch these white men lynched this 14 year old boy,

That stayed with him. So my father was so upset. He went back to his apartment and he dropped the floor next to the bed and prayed that God would give him some means to work against that kind of thinking. 

MUSIC BREAK

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): That was another clip of Still’s 4th Symphony, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra in October 2023. The piece speaks to the fusion of musical cultures in North America, honoring the optimism, energy, and love Americans embody. Its subtitle, “Autochthonous” refers to the idea that the music has its roots in our own soil, and portrays the spirit of the American people. Fittingly, William Grant Still has been described as a “distinctly American composer”. 

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

Well, when you listen to William Grant Steele's music, it's very clear that it could not have been written in any other place than in America where you had this convergence of cultures that he was exposed to and not just exposed to. I don't want to make it seem as if it were just happenstance. He was a very, from my understanding, a very diligent person in finding himself in a musical environment and going into a deep study about what it meant and getting all of the codes and the languages. For instance, when he was hired by WC Handy, then he was able to plunge into the blues as a, not so much as a cultural phenomenon, but as a musical one that he could recraft. So this kind of recrafting of the European forms of, say, the symphony and how they were supposed to go, he innovated those in ways that only an American composer could have. And of course, now it turned the entire global musical world on its ear and made it accessible for people around the world to understand what it meant to be an American composer.

JUDITH STILL: 

Oh, yeah. Well, in reference to what you just said, there were areas that my father wanted to get into, but there was no background or way for him to get into them. For example, Latin music, when he wanted to do the, he had to get people in music from Panama and places of that sort to come to the house and share the music with him so that he could understand the idioms. Composers weren't doing anything with other cultures in those days. 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): But for all his own curiosity and openness, William Grant Still lived in a decidedly rigid and compartmentalized era and was often hemmed in by racist expectations.   

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

For instance, when he studied with VARs and went into more what they would call Alia toric or a tonal experimentation, he got in where he could fit in, he started studying orchestration and symphonic forms where he had the opportunity. People weren't prepared for a black composer to be handling those types of materials. In fact, he went up against the same attitude that black painters who worked in abstraction did that people believe, and even some of people from the black community believe that that was not what a black composer should be composing. So not only is he trying to break in into a white institution called the composer in America, he was also needed to negotiate what people believed he should and should not be writing. So can you imagine that

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): Among William Grant Still’s compositions are tone poems, suites, ballet scores, vocal works with orchestra, film scores, and five symphonies. He performed in clubs, Broadway pit orchestras, and for a few years was recording director of Black Swan Records, an American jazz and blues record label in Harlem. But all this shapeshifting wasn’t purely a matter of sonic exploration. 

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: It was just musicians. Black musicians like themselves found themselves in situations where they had to play everything. You had to play what white people wanted to dance to. You had to try to get into these circles where composers were comparing notes and talking to one another about how to manage symphonic writing. So yeah, he was doing a lot of moving across those categories. There's some points in his life where he is like, okay, I got to get a gig. I got to do this kind of writing because this is what's going to pay me in an Devi while I work on this other concert literature.

JUDITH STILL: Oh, we had some hard times. At one point, ASCAP had to support them because of Copeland and Bernstein. My father couldn't get any performances or publications. So ASCAP moved in and supported him for those years, and we had some friends, my mother's mother was wealthy and a friend of theirs, Mrs. Blackman, who was a half white and half black. She was a descendant of the father of George Washington who the slaves of George Washington later had children, and he was a descendant of those. So we had friends who helped us occasionally when we had a hard time, and that was good, and they were happy to do it because they knew my parents were something special. 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): Judith’s parents, a Jewish woman and a black man—both musicians— defied the conventions of their era, but understood the risks. After seeing another interracial couple burned alive for the crime of loving one another, they decided to keep Judith out of school until age 8. In the face of so much violence and hatred, spirituality offered a haven. 

Here’s a clip from William Grant Still‘s Out of the Silence, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2021. The piece is part of his Seven Traceries, a set of mystical piano pieces intended as musical portraits of God, which were subsequently orchestrated by the composer. 

MUSIC BREAK

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): William Grant Still was a trailblazer, known for numerous “firsts” throughout his career. 

He was the first Black composer to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major company, and the first to have an opera on television. He was also the first Black conductor to lead a major orchestra, and the first to conduct an orchestra in the Deep South. 

Yet Still was hardly a darling of the concert music establishment during his lifetime. One notable exception was Leopold Stokovski, who led The Philadelphia Orchestra in performing the world premiere of Still’s Symphony No. 2 in 1937 — calling him “one of our greatest American composers.” 

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

You have to understand how hard he worked to be accepted into that category. I've been recently reading some of his emergence and how hard he fought to get to the musical resources to get his music heard, to support himself in lots of different kinds of jobs, including musical ones, to be able to get to the concert career he had that he frankly deserved. So nobody handed anything to him. He had to work very hard. So when I hear a statement like that, I also want people to start commenting on that these things weren't given to him, that he'd had to work very hard to get there.

JUDITH STILL:

Oh, absolutely. You are so right. And of course there were friends like Dr. Howard Hanssen who really gave him his start. Hanssen played his first important piece, and that was the beginning. It was a long road up for him, and unfortunately, my father died completely unknown in 1978 because of certain enemies of his who worked hard to destroy his career

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

Because Judith is absolutely right in that cloistered world, if people want to blackball you, they can. If people want to give you a break, they can and they will, and sometimes they hold that against you. Can you imagine trying to create a career under those circumstances? He was simply an amazing person with a lot of perseverance. And one of the things that I find so fascinating about William Grant Still in that regard is that I believe the thing that really brought him through all of those conundrums was his deep love for music. It obviously consumed him. It is what he thought about all the time. I can imagine him being the type of person where there's a symphony playing in his head while he's talking to you, and he's trying to get out of the conversation so he can get back to those sounds that are going in his head because he was so preoccupied with musical materials.

I've read accounts of friends saying that I used to have these conversations with him, but I just kind of got the feeling that he couldn't wait to get to what he was actually thinking about musically. And so just imagine that needing to stick to your musical guns and trying to live your aspirations, and you're the same musician, the same curious musician throughout your life is going from opportunity to opportunity, trying to get your music heard, but the attitudes around you are changing, and you have to not only deal with the art that's in your head, but also with the changing attitudes of the people who could actually make breaks for you 

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): In the 21st century, as institutions lean into programming more underrepresented composers, William Grant Still is finally starting to get the recognition he deserves. Looking ahead, his daughter Judith has a number of ambitious goals for the future. 

JUDITH STILL: 

to popularize the music if possible, and protect it. So many people call and write and send emails, and they want to arrange the music, and they want to use the music in this form and that form, but I don't let them mess with the music. It should stand as it was written. What I hope to do is to start the two build. We have 35 acres in Arizona. I want to build the largest interracial sort of cultural center in the country. According to the psyche. It's going to ruin New York because everybody will come to Flagstaff. So that's, in any case, I think we should have a place where this wonderful music that has been largely ignored over the years and reach the public, especially my father's operas, his opera Costa, is going to be the opera of all time. When they finally do it

DR. GUTHRIE RAMSEY: 

Well, often we talk about the programming of the music of black composers as benefiting the composer's, music and the composer. I like to flip it and say that these institutions actually need those composers because it opens up audiences eyes and ears to music that they had not been exposed to. It inspires young people who may not be from privileged backgrounds to aspire creatively to what those artists like Florence Price and William Grantsville had to offer. It gets new audiences in the seats that helps the institutions to remain viable in contemporary culture, and it also serves as a model around the world that this country can finally support the life and the careers and the music and art of the people who were born right here.

JUDITH STILL: 

Exactly. Exactly. You're so right. That's very insightful.

(KHADIJA MBOWE VOICEOVER): Thanks so much for tuning in to the HearTOGETHER Podcast from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc. I’m Khadija Mbowe — see you back HERE next month! Meantime, here’s a bit more of William Grant Still’s 4th Symphony, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra.