{"id":1454,"date":"2019-08-26T11:24:24","date_gmt":"2019-08-26T15:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1454"},"modified":"2019-08-26T12:27:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-26T16:27:40","slug":"harry-burleigh-and-cultural-appropriation-take-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2019\/08\/harry-burleigh-and-cultural-appropriation-take-two.html","title":{"rendered":"Harry Burleigh and Cultural Appropriation &#8211; Take Two"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"269\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/burleigh2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1460\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>The annals of the Harlem Renaissance include <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2019\/02\/dvorak-harry-burleigh-and-cultural-appropriation-a-postclassical-podcast.html\">heated debate<\/a><\/strong> over the practice of turning African-American spirituals into concert songs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zora Neale Hurston Hurston heard\nconcert spirituals \u201csqueezing all of the rich black juice out of the songs,\u201d a \u201cflight\nfrom blackness,\u201d a \u201cmusical octoroon.\u201d She listed Harry Burleigh among the\noffenders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But without Burleigh there\nwould be no \u201cDeep River\u201d as sung by Marian Anderson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Angel Gil-Ordonez, the inspirational music director of <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/postclassical.com\">PostClassical <\/a>Ensemble<\/strong>, calls Burleigh one of our \u201clost causes,\u201d along with Bernard Herrmann, Lou Harrison, and Silvestre Revueltas &#8212; with <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/postclassical.com\/performances\/native\/\">Arthur Farwell<\/a><\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/postclassical.com\/performances\/native\/\"> <\/a>coming up in October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What Angel means, really,\nthat these are <em>delayed<\/em> causes \u2013 that Burleigh\nwill ultimately become known as an American musical hero, that Herrmann will\nremembered for more than his supreme film scores, that Harrison will be widely\nperformed east of California, that Revueltas (notwithstanding being Mexican) will\ntake his place as a twentieth century master &nbsp;\u2013 and that Arthur Farwell\u2019s \u201cIndianist\u201d\ncompositions, in parallel with Bartok abroad, will transcend their stigma of \u201cappropriation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am not sure what, exactly, \u201crich\nblack juice\u201d might be, but there is a lot of it when Kevin Deas sings Burleigh\u2019s\n\u201cSteal Away\u201d \u2013 as he did last Thursday night in a PostClassical Ensemble\nprogram we called \u201cThe Spiritual in White America.\u201d It sounded like <strong>this<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Steal-Away-TPC-2019.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>That was at the Phillips Collection\n\u2013 which in addition to its landmark collection of twentieth century American\npaintings boasts a venerable music series situated in an intimate, wood-paneled\nmusic room enhanced by a rotating selection of great visual art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In such a space, the impact\nof Burleigh\u2019s settings \u2013 both solo and choral \u2013 was immense. On the same\nprogram, we heard readings by Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonin Dvorak\n(whose assistant Burleigh was in New York\u2019s National Conservatory). That is: we\nsampled a debate over appropriation. In the ensuing discussion, a member of the\naudience called this the most memorable music-education experience he had\nencountered since the days of Leonard Bernstein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Burleigh\u2019s spiritual arrangements\n(some of which deserve to be called \u201ccompositions\u201d) were juxtaposed with remarkable\narrangements by composers black and white, including William Dawson and Michael\nTippett. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hurston is correct: none of\nthese concert versions of plantation song evoke the wild grief and ecstasy of\nenslaved human beings laboring under the lash of white America. She rightly misses\nthe \u201cjagged harmony,\u201d the dissonance and spontaneity of singing in the field,\nwhere \u201ceach piece is a new creation.\u201d Nor \u2013 as the African-American composer\/impresario\nNolan Williams pointed out in an acute post-concert discussion \u2013 does the\nspiritual in concert truly evoke the sheer devastation of stolen lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And yet, in live performance,\nBurleigh\u2019s relative simplicity and directness of expression impart a timeless\ndimension. More than subsequent concert renditions, they manage to convey the immediacy\nof the vernacular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Take \u201cDeep River.\u201d It was first set down (in an 1877 Fisk Jubilee Songbook) as a \u201cchurch militant\u201d spiritual. So far as I am aware, the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the first to capture \u201cDeep River\u201d for the concert hall. He slowed it down and \u201cdignified\u201d it as a 1904 solo piano piece. To my ears, the eight-minute Coleridge-Taylor \u201cDeep River\u201d is diffuse. And its decorum registers what Hurston called \u201ca flight from blackness.\u201d Burleigh\u2019s final setting for voice and piano (1915) is by comparison singularly concentrated: thirty-one measures lasting less than three minutes. But everything is there. Even the chromatic harmonies, even the keyboard counter-melodies are radically concentrated. It attains an elemental force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Powell-Deas.mp3\"><\/audio><figcaption>Harry Burleigh&#8217;s &#8220;Deep River&#8221; (Kevin Deas with Joseph Horowitz), preceded by Maud Powell&#8217;s  1911 recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor&#8217;s arrangement<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Here<\/strong> is\nKevin Deas singing Harry Burleigh\u2019s \u201cDeep River\u201d three days ago at the Phillips\nCollection. It has been my privilege to accompany him in concert for some dozen\nyears. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The annals of the Harlem Renaissance include heated debate over the practice of turning African-American spirituals into concert songs. Zora Neale Hurston Hurston heard concert spirituals \u201csqueezing all of the rich black juice out of the songs,\u201d a \u201cflight from blackness,\u201d a \u201cmusical octoroon.\u201d She listed Harry Burleigh among the offenders. But without Burleigh there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1454","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1454"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1479,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions\/1479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}