My voice teacher calls the Oberlin Conservatory library “an undergraduate candy store.” Now, I don’t know of any candy store with 345,000 items and multiple floors, but she’s right, you will always come out of that library with a sweet surprise. For me, this was finding a thin green book on the bottom shelf of the second floor. William Grant Still’s “From the Hearts of Women” was nestled between other anthologies, a song cycle I had never heard and didn’t exist in our audio archive. At first glance, I was glad to find repertoire that fit my voice, but as I continued to work through this cycle, I started to find connections with this composer who had attended Oberlin a century before me.
In the 1910s, William Grant Still dropped out of medical school. He attended the school where I am a student today—Oberlin College and Conservatory. Oberlin was the first coeducational college, one of the first to admit black students, and has the longest consecutively running conservatory in the United States. I imagine that Still sat in the same pews that I do in Finney Chapel to listen to organ concerts and walked along the same weathered brick paths through the square. Half a century after attending Oberlin, he wrote a song cycle, and another half-century later, I found it in the library.
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Still was a groundbreaking figure in the Black music community. While at Oberlin, he could not afford to pursue both a performance and a composition degree, even while working as a janitor. But when composer George Andrews took note of Still’s work, he waived Still’s tuition in order to teach him. Still went on to become the first Black man in America to conduct a major symphony orchestra (the LA Philharmonic), a major orchestra in the deep south (the New Orleans Philharmonic), and a white radio orchestra in New York City. He was the first Black American man to have a symphony performed by a major U.S. Orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major U.S. company, and the first to have an opera televised over a national television network. When I began researching his accomplishments, I was surprised he hadn’t crossed my path in any music history courses.
It is largely due to my participation in The Denyce Graves Foundation Shared Voices Program that I found myself sitting on the floor of the library that day. No other foundation has such a strong commitment to creating diversity in the classical voice world, and their encouragement of all cohort members during our inaugural year took many forms. One aspect of the program is its focus on championing the music of underrepresented composers and performers of color, especially Black and African American composers. We all were tasked with researching and performing music for our performance event, a Community Day at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture, entitled “Hidden No More.” Earlier that year, my cohort members and I attended a Zoom session with Dr. Fredara Hadley from The Juilliard School. Her “Getting it Right: Strategies for Researching Black Music” session equipped us with various tools and techniques for researching black music and musicians. This session led me to many archives like Ebony Magazine and Grove Music to pull together photos and facts about William Grant Still’s life while I was working through this 1961 song cycle.
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This project I embarked on really opened my eyes to the fact that William Grant Still’s work and name are still largely unknown. I found a connection with an Oberlin alum that ignited a passion for uncovering art songs by composers of color. This spring, I am including a song cycle, “Threnody,” by Zenobia Powell Perry, an American composer, performer, and civil rights activist whose music has never been performed at Oberlin. It is so exciting to introduce her to my peers and to have her beautiful music forever accessible in the audio archive at Oberlin. I hope that with time, more and more singers will explore their own connections to their schools and communities and find works that they love to sing and perform.
Maybe the most shocking thing about my experience with William Grant Still is that it wasn’t difficult to find music and information on his life and accomplishments. Sure, it isn’t as easy as locating information about Mozart or Schumann, but it’s there. If you’re anything like me, you might be a lot closer to a hidden composer than you think, and they might take you places you never imagined.
