Nathaniel Dett was a Canadian-born composer who was descended from slaves and dedicated himself to promoting African American music, merging spirituals with western classical styles in his own works. Now, almost 80 years after his death, the BBC Philharmonic will give the world premiere of a newly discovered orchestral composition, described as “an absolute throwback to music of west African slaves”.
The manuscript was unearthed in a US archive by Dwight Pile-Gray, a British conductor and academic, who told the Guardian of the excitement of finding music by “one of the greatest classical composers of African descent”.
He said: “Dett used his knowledge of spirituals and created a fusion with western art music. Through his collections of spirituals, expertise and comprehensive experience, his contribution not only to the musical life of America but to the classical music world has been enormous.”
The newly discovered piece, Magnolia Suite Part Two: No 4 “Mammy”, is an orchestral adaptation of a movement from Dett’s 1912 piano suite, Magnolia. The world premiere will take place on 4 November, with a live broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Pile-Gray, a lecturer at the London College of Music, said: “The work is an absolute throwback to music of west African slaves. It is slow and lyrical. However, I can hear elements of a two-step dance derived from the Juba dance, which was transported to the United States with the arrival of the first enslaved people.”
Born in 1882, Dett was inspired by his grandmother singing spirituals when he was a child and in his mother encouraging him to recite passages from the Bible and Shakespeare. His musical training included the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he completed a masters degree, and where Pile-Gray found the manuscript.
In 1913, Dett became music director of the Hampton Institute in Virginia – now Hampton University – where he founded a choir that received critical acclaim in the US and Europe, performing for President Herbert Hoover at the White House.
In its entry on Dett, the Library of Congress notes that he published 100 compositions – including The Ordering of Moses, an oratorio, using African American spirituals as thematic material – and that his “most enduring musical legacy survives in his numerous arrangements of folksongs and spirituals”.
Dett was also inspired by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, who told the New York Herald in 1893: “In the negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”
Pile-Gray said: “Whilst Dett was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, he heard … a recital in which they played Dvořák’s Quartet in F. The third movement … is based on traditional airs, and this is where Dett got the idea to use spirituals in his compositional output. Likewise, Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 was inspired by hearing spirituals.”
He added: “Dett organised and arranged lots of spirituals in the US and, for African American choirs in the US, Dett is performed very often. Not so much here. We don’t have a culture of spirituals in this country. You may get a choir performing spirituals, but they perhaps don’t understand why it’s important. These spirituals originate from many different places, as do the enslaved African Americans who sang them. They are part of the African American cultural musical inheritance and one of the elements that bound them together.”
He stumbled across the manuscript by chance. He is among academics involved with an Arts and Humanities Research Council scheme, part of a collaboration with BBC Radio 3 that is putting “a spotlight on rarely performed music by composers of diverse ethnic backgrounds”.
He said: “Western art music is created by white European men … In the 21st century, there must be room for composers who aren’t white European men. It’s as simple as that. For our art to continue, to flourish and to grow, then we must be more reflective and representative of society that we live in.”
