Harry T. Burleigh is one of the great unsung figures in American music – which is ironic, since it was his singing that changed the course of history.
Burleigh was a student at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where he studied with, among others, Rubin Goldmark, the conservative pedagogue who later gave lessons to Aaron Copland and George Gershwin.
It just so happens that Burleigh’s attendance there coincided with the tenure of Antonin Dvořák as the conservatory’s director. Dvořák overheard the young man singing African American spirituals in a corridor adjacent to his office and was transfixed. This was his first exposure to the spiritual, and it had the force of an epiphany. Thereafter, Burleigh was a regular guest at the Dvořák home. He frequently sang for Dvořák and worked as his copyist beginning in 1893.
Reflecting on his own debt to the folk idioms of his native land in the development of a Czech national sound, Dvořák was eager to share his impressions with American composers, and to encourage them to embrace this unique and neglected resource.
“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies,” he wrote. “This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I first came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.”
This was quite the pronouncement for 1893.
Spirituals, of course, became an important part of the “New World” Symphony’s DNA. Since Dvořák’s masterwork was intended, in part, as instructional, leading American composers by example to a distinctly national sound, the significance of Burleigh’s influence becomes inescapable.
Burleigh also served as a double-bassist and timpanist in the school’s orchestra, which Dvořák conducted. He was born in Stamford, CT, on this date in 1866.
Happy birthday, Harry T. Burleigh, and thank you!
More about Burleigh:
“Goin’ Home”
“Wade in de Water”
Dvorak, Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”
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