On this date in 1894, Antonin Dvořák, then serving as director of the newly-established National Conservatory of Music in New York, presented a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Garden.
The event, which also featured at least some of Rossini’s “Stabat Mater,” was given to benefit the New York Herald Tribune’s Free Clothing Fund. The program was performed by members of St. Philip’s Colored Choir, with the participation of vocal soloists Sissieretta Jones and Harry T. Burleigh.
Jones was a graduate of the New England Conservatory, a soprano equally at home in the singing of grand opera, light opera, and popular music. She wound up touring internationally and sang for four consecutive U.S. presidents. One critic dubbed her “The Black Patti” – a reference to Italian singer Adelina Patti – an epithet that Jones, a modest woman, disliked.
However, given the limited opportunities for black singers at the time, ultimately she decided to capitalize on the association, founding the Black Patti Troubadours, a successful revue that ran for 20 years. By 1895, she had become the best-known and highest-paid African-American performer.
As for Burleigh, American art music might have developed very differently without him. Born in Erie, PA, in 1866, he was accepted into the National Conservatory, a progressive institution for the time. On Dvořák’s insistence, students were not to be discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity.
There, he studied with, among others, Rubin Goldmark, the hidebound pedagogue who would later give lessons to Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. He also played double-bass and timpani in the school’s orchestra, which Dvořák conducted.
One day, the story goes, while seated at his desk, Dvořák was transfixed by the most soulful, plaintive air, being sung by Burleigh in an adjacent corridor. This was his first exposure to the African-American spiritual, and it had the force of an epiphany. Thereafter, Burleigh was a regular guest at the Dvořák home.
Reflecting on his own debt to the folk idioms of his native land for his part 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.
African-American spirituals, of course, would profoundly influence Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. Interestingly, another Dvorak pupil, William Arms Fisher, was responsible for transforming the work’s famous Largo into the neo-spiritual “Goin’ Home.” Since the symphony was intended, in part, as instructional, an attempt to lead American composers by example, Burleigh’s significance becomes inescapable.
Burleigh himself went on to a distinguished career as a composer and arranger. Not only did he popularize a great many spirituals, he also wrote hundreds of original songs. Isn’t it ironic that one of the great, unsung figures in American music wound up changing the course of our music through singing?
Here’s one of the works that received its premiere on that 1894 Madison Square Garden concert – Dvořák’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”
Burleigh’s setting of “Goin’ Home”
Sissieretta Jones:
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Dvořák (doing his best Sean Connery impression), Burleigh, and Jones
