Birth of First Negro Symphony

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19578, 26 August 1933, Page 12

Birth of First Negro Symphony

CULTURED THEME ARTISTICALLY DEVELOPED

Way down in Alabama “singin’ lives like a terrace-bustin’ rain and like a crop of cotton.” Out of this milieu comes brilliant Levi Dawson, leader of the Tuskegee choir which has been giving concerts in New York and points north, besides singing on the opening night of Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Dawson has lately consigned to Leopold Stokowski, leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first symphony ever composed by a Negro writing Negro music. The orchestra will soon put it in rehearsal. “It is not religious, but classical in the modem idiom,” explains Mr. Dawson, who goes on to defend the Negro idiom higher forms of art: “The cultural theme is melancholy, a sort of wail, a type of hymn, related to jazz in its rhythm. “It is an attempt to develop Negro music, a something they have said again and again couldn’t be developed. I made up my mind four years ago to quit talking myself, to let others do the talking. Ever since then I have been writing the music. I have never doubted the possibilities of our music, for I feel that buried in the South is a music that somebody, someday, will discover. “They will make another great world music of the folk-songs of that section. It is destined to rank, some day, I feel from the bottom of my soul, with the music of Brahms, with that of the Russian composers.” Mr. Dawson declares he is reassured in his faith every time he takes a walk. His interviewer in the New York Herald Tribune writes t “All he had to do when he became discouraged was to listen to the singing about him in Alabama. From the cotton patches, from the houses, he heard new melodies, songs that minute being born. Sometimes he copied them down.” The composer has not escaped the usual tribulations of his race. The interviewer continues: Mr. Dawson wrote the ‘Symphony No. 1’ in Alabama, but all the time he was working he heard the Chicago

Civic Orchestra playing in his ears. It is a body he knows well; he played first trombone in it for four years. He had no difficulty with the orchestration, because he plays almost every instrument used in a symphony orchestra, and he can orchestrate almost as rapidly as he can write. He says all of his relatives ‘were born playing a banjo.’ “Mr. Dawson was graduated with first honors by the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, Kansas,, but because he was a Negro he was not allowed to sit on the platform the day that Henry J. Allen, Governor of Kansas, distributed the diplomas. He sat in the gallery, and his diploma was delivered to a proxy. However, on that occasion the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra played one of his compositions. “Mr. Dawson was born thirty-one years ago in Anniston, Alabama, the son of the late George Dawson and of Eliza D. Dawson.” "The boy went to work shining shoes, toiled in a grocery store, and day after day saved pennies, until finally he had enough to pay his way to Tuskegee. “He studied a year in Topeka, Kansas, then went to Kansas City, w'here he taught music In Lincoln School while he studied. He got his job with the Chicago Civic Orchestra because he was the only one of the applicants who could play the alto cleft for the trombone. ‘I couldn't play it either,’ he said, 'but I got away with it.’ He went to Tuskegee to direct the choir two years ago.”