{"id":1309,"date":"2019-02-24T17:43:19","date_gmt":"2019-02-24T22:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1309"},"modified":"2019-02-25T22:18:35","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T03:18:35","slug":"dvorak-harry-burleigh-and-cultural-appropriation-a-postclassical-podcast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2019\/02\/dvorak-harry-burleigh-and-cultural-appropriation-a-postclassical-podcast.html","title":{"rendered":"Dvorak, Harry Burleigh, and Cultural Appropriation — a “PostClassical” Podcast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Could Harry Burleigh — Antonin Dvorak\u2019s African-American assistant — be considered an Uncle Tom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, the question comes up whenever\nBurleigh comes up: it\u2019s a symptom of the times, and of our crazy obsession with\n\u201ccultural appropriation.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it is addressed head-on over the course of the most recent PostClassical Ensemble<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>WWFM podcast, featuring a supreme exponent of the spiritual in concert: the African-American bass baritone Kevin Deas. (To see what he and others have to say, hang on for a dozen paragraphs — or simply access the podcast at https:\/\/www.wwfm.org\/post\/postclassical-feb-15-deep-river<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would call Harry Burleigh (1866-1949) a\nforgotten hero of American music. It was mainly Burleigh who turned spirituals\ninto concert songs to be sung alongside the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms. The\nproject became controversial during the Harlem Renaissance \u2013 Carl Van Vechten,\nLangston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston were among those who worried or\nasserted that Burleigh vitiated the music he adapted. And today Burleigh is\ncontroversial all over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I have long celebrated Burleigh in public performance, because I often have occasion to lecture on American music, I can cite many examples from personal experience. There was, for instance, the impressively poised African-American freshman at a Midwestern college who opined that \u201cjust because Burleigh was black, he didn\u2019t necessarily have the right to do that.\u201d As she had never heard of Marian Anderson, I played for the class a recording of Anderson singing Burleigh\u2019s iconic \u201cDeep River\u201d arrangement<\/a><\/strong>. After that, I shared with them Anderson\u2019s historic Lincoln Memorial concert<\/a><\/strong> of 1939, when \u2013 having been denied access to Constitution Hall because of the color of her skin — she sang Burleigh for more than 75,000 listeners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It must be acknowledged and pondered that\nBurleigh frequently inhabited a white milieu. His arrangements were initially\nsung by famous white recitalists \u2013 because in 1917 famous vocal recitalists\nwere white. He himself sang in synagogue and church choirs that were mainly\nwhite. His friends included J. P. Morgan, at whose funeral he sang. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By way of background: Not so very long after\nDvorak and W.E.B. Du Bois extolled the sorrow songs as the likely fundament for\na future American music,  artists and\nintellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance scoured the African-American musical\npast. One starting point was the cottonfield. One outcome was a now legendary\ndebate over the uses of a past known and acknowledged, wracked with pain and\nyet protean with possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is little remembered that, like Dvorak, Du\nBois was a Wagnerite. As a graduate student in Berlin, he came to know and\nembrace The<\/em> Ring of the Nibelung<\/em>. In the tradition of Wagner, Herder, and other\nGerman theorists of race, he linked collective purpose and moral instruction to\n\u201cfolk\u201d wisdom: the soul of a people.  To\nDu Bois it was merely obvious that for black Americans the sorrow songs comprised\na usable past that, subjected to evolutionary development, would yield a\ndesired native concert idiom — the same trajectory anticipated by Dvorak and\nBurleigh. Formal training and performance, for Du Bois, did not impugn the\nauthenticity of folk sources; rather, a dialectical reconciliation of authority\nand cosmopolitan finesse would result. Concomitantly, ragtime, the blues, and\njazz threatened Du Bois\u2019s cultural\/political agenda. A child of the Gilded Age,\nborn in tolerant Massachusetts in 1868, he endorsed uplift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alain Locke, sole offspring of a well-to-do Philadelphia family in 1885, was like Du Bois a distinguished black Harvard graduate. His philosophy of the “New Negro,” a signature of the Harlem Renaissance, aligned with Du Bois\u2019s high-cultural predilections. \u201cNegro spirituals,\u201d Locke wrote in 1925, could undergo \u201cintimate and original development in directions already the line of advance in modernistic music. . . . Negro folk song is not midway in its artistic career yet, and while the preservation of the original folk forms is for the moment the most pressing necessity, an inevitable art development awaits them, as in the past it has awaited all other great folk music.\u201d Like Du Bois, Locke championed the tenor Roland Hayes, who succeeded Burleigh as the pre-eminent exponent of the spiritual in concert. Like Du Bois, he mistrusted the popular musical marketplace in favor of elite realms of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opposing camp included Harlem\u2019s loudest\nwhite cheerleader: Carl Van Vechten, who deplored Hayes\u2019 refinements in favor\nof Paul Robeson\u2019s \u201ctraditional, evangelical renderings\u201d of the Burleigh\narrangements. This \u2013 and Van Vechten\u2019s celebration of the blues and jazz \u2013\nignited a furious rebuttal from Du Bois, who discerned a decadent voyeur in\nlove with black exoticism. But Van Vechten\u2019s revisionism was supported by the\nblack writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Many of Hughes\u2019s poems\nkey on the dialect and structure of the blues. He heard in jazz \u201cthe eternal\ntom-tom beating of the Negro soul.\u201d He deplored the \u201crace toward whiteness\u201d in\nthe uses of black music. Hurston deplored a \u201cflight from blackness.\u201d She heard\nconcert spirituals \u201csqueezing all of the rich black juice out of the songs,\u201d a\n\u201csort of musical octoroon.\u201d If to Hurston the sorrowful spirituals Du Bois\nespoused sounded submissive, to Locke the blues sounded \u201cdominated\u201d by\n\u201cself-pity.\u201d Pitting authenticity against assimilation, the debate identified\nconflicting vernacular resources, old and new, rural and urban. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If certain black Americans rejected American\nclassical music, American classical music rejected them. Even though Hayes and Robeson\nenjoyed phenomenal success in recital, opera companies and orchestras resisted\nsingers and instrumentalists of color. Notoriously, Marian Anderson had to wait\nuntil 1955 to sing at the Metropolitan Opera \u2013 an invitation engineered not by\nnative-born Americans, but by the immigrants Sol Hurok, Rudolf Bing, Max\nRudolf, and Dmitri Mitropoulos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of which came up in the course of our two-hour \u201cPostClassical\u201d podcast: \u201cDeep River: The Art of the Spiritual,\u201d celebrating Burleigh and his legacy. Here is what Kevin Deas sounds like singing Burleigh\u2019s fervently inspired transformation of \u201cSteal Away,\u201d a performance at the Washington National Cathedral that I was privileged to accompany at the piano:<\/p>\n\n\n\n