Songs for the Soul: New Recording Celebrates Black Classical Composers

Cover Art by Maya Freelon Asante

Songs for the Soul:

New Recording Celebrates Black Classical Composers

by Mark Anthony Neal

In a country in which the most well known classical composers are the proverbial “dead white men,” the idea that there are generations of Black classical composers might strike some as strange. The recent release of Songs for the Soul, a recording of chamber music by African-American composers performed by the Mallarme Chamber Players is an attempt to counter such beliefs. Released on the Videmus label, a label devoted explicitly to music by African-American, women and underrepresented composers, Songs for the Soul features music composed by Undine Smith Moore, Thomas Jefferson Anderson, William C. Banfield and Anthony Kelley.

The disc opens with Undine Smith Moore’s “Afro American Suite” (1969), initially written for flutist D. Antoinette Handy. Generally referred to as the “Dean of Black Women Composers” Moore was born in 1904 and began playing piano at age seven. Educated at Fisk University, Moore was the first Fisk student awarded a scholarship from the Julliard School of Music. In 1927, Moore began her 45-year career teaching at HBCU Virginia State University, where the legendary jazz pianist Billy Taylor (“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”) and the opera singer Camilla Williams, who debuted with the New York City Opera in 1946, were among her students. Moore’s best known piece is Scene from the Life of a Martyr (1980), written in memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was nominated for a Pulitzer Award. Moore died in 1989.

According to cellist Timothy Holley, the “Afro-American Suite” references several spirituals and folk songs including “Brothers Will You Pray for Me,” “I Heard the Preaching of the Elder, Preaching the Word of God,” “Who is That Yonder,” and “I Got Shoes, You Got Shoes, All God’s Chillun Got Shoes.” As such Moore’s compositional strategy, mirrors popular and practical African-American aesthetic practices that re-contextualized existing compositions for the purpose of making them relevant to their audiences. This was as much the case with Moore’s compositions, as it was with be-bop musicians quoting from Tin Pan Alley songs and the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop producers.

T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Anderson is part of the generation of Black composers that came after Undine Smith Moore. Coming of age in their era just before the Civil Rights Movement, Anderson was able to take advantage of opportunities that Moore and William Grant Still before her, do not have access to. Jefferson earned a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa in 1958 and took various positions at HBCU’s before becoming the Chair of the music department at Tufts University in 1972, where he has been emeritus since 1990. Though no longer teaching, Anderson continues to compose. “Spirit Songs,” his contribution to Songs for the Soul was commissioned by Yo Yo Ma 1993. As Anderson says of the piece, “the work is improvisational in character; however, the music is organized around collective thoughts and notations.” Anderson’s music has been described as “audaciously modern” and he continues to listen to and engage contemporary composers and musicians, as was the case with his recent public conversation with Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. Now in his eighties, Anderson continues to be generous with his time, his wit and his expertise, much the way Moore was for the generation of composers that came after her.

“Grist for the Mill,” Duke University Professor Anthony Kelley’s contribution to Songs for the Soul was inspired after breaking bread with Anderson and his wife Louise. Kelley’s music has been performed by the symphony orchestras in Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland and San Antonio. Heavily influenced by Jazz, Kelley predicts that 21st century music will be more eclectic, an element that can be heard in “Grist for the Mill.” Indeed the piece’s title becomes a metaphor for Kelley’s belief that future composers will incorporate popular music with their own cultural influences.

The centerpiece of Songs for the Soul is William Banfield’s opera Soul Gone Home, which is based on Langston Hughes one-act play of the same title. The play features two characters, a grieving mother and her just dead son. The opera was initially commissioned by the Mallarme Chamber Players and premiered in 2002. Banfield, who is a jazz guitarist and author, as well as a professor at the Berklee College of Music, recalled reading Hughes’s play back in 1988 and immediately thinking “this would be a great opera.” When Mallarme commissioned the opera he immediately thought of his friend, six-time Grammy Award nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, to sing both roles. The resulting product, like the CD Songs for the Soul, is a timeless tour-de-force that illuminates the rich legacy of African-American music and composition.