Tag Archives: black composers

The Story Behind a Custom Piano in a Museum

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Madame Evanti’s Custom Built Fischer Piano. Evans-Tibbs collection, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.5

Madame Evanti’s Custom Built Fischer Piano is located at the Anacostia Community Library in Washington, DC. Now if you are anything like me you might have questions like: 

Who is Madame Evanti, and why is her piano special enough to be in a museum? What is the Anacostia Museum and why was it assigned for the blog posts this week?  

Anacostia Museum, which opened in 1967,1 is created for and about the community of Anacostia, a neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. that is home to many influential artists and leaders. The museum does feature many important artifacts from the Anacostia community but has also branched out to incorporate a larger diaspora.

The goal of the museum is to interpret and celebrate African American history and culture.2 This means incorporating not only locally and regionally found expositions, but nationally and internationally as well. Because of this global and local lens, the museum has impressive features on the family archives of  19th-century African American locals and works from black DC artists.2 This archival work is reparative documentation of history that has previously been erased from history but is now story-telling of the east-of-the-river communities in DC that will be remembered and recognized. Starting with Madame Evanti. 

Portrait of Lillian Evanti made in Buenos Aires, Argentina, undated. Evans-Tibbs collection, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.6

Lillian Evanti is famous for being the first African American to sing in a professional European opera company.3 She was born in 1890 to a well-education and affluent African American Family in Washington D.C.. Due to her family status, she was fortunate enough to attend Howard University and graduated in 1907. She became composer, lyricist, and teacher but was limited in her professional opportunities due to discrimination. She moved to Europe and made her debut in Nice, France in 1924.4 Her success in Europe is impressive and historically significant, but it is not as heavily discussed as the great strides she afforded for the arts in America upon her interspersed returns home. 

Madame Evanti was a founding member of America’s National Negro Opera Company (NNCO).4 She starred as Violetta in the opening production staging of Verdi’s La Traviata. Throughout the 1930s, Evanti advocated for the establishment of cultural center in Washington for classical and contemporary music, drama and dance. Her labor, testifying to a congressional committee in advocacy for a national performing arts center, contributed to the creation of the Kennedy Center.4

Madame Evanti is also a good-will ambassador through the State Department.3 She traveled to Latin America to perform, but her travels inspired something bigger. Evanti was also a composer. Below is a recording of one of her compositions. Her song Himno Pan-Americano is an anthem of peace dedicated to the Pan-American Union (now known as the Organization for American States).3

So much history and story-telling to be told, and it was all behind a piano. 

H.T. Burleigh – Life and Legacy

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Harry Thacker Burleigh (Photo by Carl Van Vechten, Courtesy Van Vechten Trust)

Harry Thacker Burleigh, better known as H.T. Burleigh, was the first and most influential Black composer to rise to large success post- Civil War. He was widely known for his perservation and arrangemtn of traditional Black spirituals and plantation songs. Without his work, most likely most of the songs that come to mind when we think of “spirituals” would be lost in the past. A singer and composer as well as an arranger, Burleigh composed more than 300 works.1 His work was hugely influential and brought Black music to the Western classical music stage for the first time.

Born on December 2, 1866 in Erie, Pennsylvania, Burleigh showed an early passion and talent for music. He grew up learning these spirituals and folk songs from his maternal grandmother and singing in the church choir. However, he was unable to afford formal musical training until 1892, when he attended the National Conservatory of Music in New York City.2  During his time there, he studied under and work closely with composer Antonín Dvořák, who was director of the conservatory.3 This relationship was very influential in fostering Burleigh’s love of spirituals and folk songs. Burleigh was dedicated to preserving the traditional flavor and sprit of these songs, and Dvořák was supportive of this. Dvořák was so inspired by this musical tradition that he wrote themes inspired by many of Burleigh’s melodies, for example in his “From the New World” Symphony no. 9 in E minor.4 Burleigh was an incredibly accomplished musician despite being discriminate against every step of the way. A popular baritone singer, he sang as the soloist at St. George’s Church for 50 years and was the soloist at Temple Emanuel for 25 years.5 He even sang at a command performance for King Edward VI of England and received an honorary Doctorate of Music from Harvard and Masters of Music from Atlanta University. He was the first Black American to serve on the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers board of directors, and received the Spingarn Acheivement Medal in 1917 from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.6  I mention all these accomplishments because I believe it is important to spotlight Black Americans such as H.T. Burleigh who paved the way for so many others. His work brought Black music into the spotlight and made accessible to the average concert-goer for the first time. His arrangements of spirituals for solo voice were incredibly influential in American music – Burleigh, for the first time, brought Black music to the western classical music stage. He presented these spirituals as fine art songs, and Black music was more accessible to the concert world than ever before. While they strayed from their original performance style greatly, Burleigh was still dedicated to preserving the traditional roots and “flavor” of these songs in composed form.

Above is an example of Burleigh’s arrangement of one of the most famous spirituals arranged for solo voice, “Wade in de Water”. It’s important to note that Burleigh kept the original dialect in his arrangements, rather than completely Westernizing the songs for the classical stage. Burleigh was adamant about preserving the sacred nature of this musical tradition. As he states in the introduction of his 1917 “Negro Spriritauls Arranged for Solo Voice”,

“Their worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through all these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn ot joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come, and man – every man – will be free.”  – H.T. Burleigh

 

1 Erickson, Shannon. “Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) •.” •, 19 May 2021, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/burleigh-harry-thacker-1866-1949/.

2 Bauer, Pat. “Harry Thacker Burleigh.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 8 Sept. 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Thacker-Burleigh. 

3 Erickson, Shannon. “Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) •.” •, 19 May 2021, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/burleigh-harry-thacker-1866-1949/.

4 “H. T. Burleigh (1866-1949).” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200035730#:~:text=Harry%20Thacker%20Burleigh%20played%20a,adaptations%20of%20African%2DAmerican%20spirituals. Accessed 11 Oct. 2023.

5 Bauer, Pat. “Harry Thacker Burleigh.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 8 Sept. 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Thacker-Burleigh. 

6 Erickson, Shannon. “Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) •.” •, 19 May 2021, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/burleigh-harry-thacker-1866-1949/.

James Bland: The Most Famous Composer You Never Knew

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A headline from The Pittsburgh Courier (a Black newspaper) in 1939. The article is a biography of James Bland and is a response to the possible adoption of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” as Virginia’s state song. Full page available here

TW: Racist descriptions of Black people

If you’re American, I’m willing to bet you’ve heard of Stephen Foster. Even if you couldn’t write a dissertation on him, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard the name, or sung one of his famous songs, like “Oh Susanna”. But have you heard of James Bland? Like Foster, Bland made his fame as a minstrel composer and was major player in the industry in the late 19th and early 20th century, yet Bland is far less known today. The difference? James Bland was Black.

Bland was descended from a long line of free Black people (his father was educated at Oberlin College) and was born in 1854 in Flushing, New York. He was educated at Howard University. He was an extremely successful entertainer, having been part of many famous troupes, including as Sprague’s Original Georgia Minstrels and Callender’s Georgia Minstrels. And of course, he was also extremely successful as a composer. Though well known among those in the industry, Bland did not get the same recognition by the general public. He wrote over 700 songs, but only around 50 were published under his name. Some were even published under Foster’s, as Tom Fletcher, a contemporary of Bland, observed in his book 100 Years of the Negro Show Business:

“Both [Foster and Bland] flourished at the same time, during the early days of show business, but Foster’s friends and heirs kept his name before the public, a privilege Bland did not enjoy. The ideas of the two men on songs were very similar too, and very often a song written by Bland would be credited to Foster with whose name the general public was much more familiar.” (83)

Sheet music for “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” published in 1878

In fact, when “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was proposed as the state song of Virginia in the late 1930s, many believed the song was written by Foster, and, according to the Pittsburgh Courier, when it was discovered to have been written by Bland, a Black composer, the proposition was almost discarded. It wasn’t, however, and Bland’s song was the state song of Virginia from 1940 to 1997, when it was removed due to its racist lyrics which sentimentalize slavery and the Old South.

A recording of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” from 1916

 

James Bland in many ways encapsulates the tension inherent in bringing to light the accomplishments and successes of Black minstrel performers and composers in general. Many of Bland’s most famous works, like “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”, have lyrics that romanticize slavery. Black minstrels sometimes both literally and figuratively had to “black up”, or in other words, cater to the white imagination of what Blackness really was. But it’s important to note that Bland also composed antislavery songs like “De Slavery Chains Am Broke At Last”, and had his own voice and agency – he was not merely an imitation Stephen Foster. And also, minstrelsy was one of the earliest opportunities for Black entertainers, performers, and composers to start their careers, to make make money, and to make their voices heard. What’s more, minstrelsy is far from gone in American popular culture. Which begs the question:

So long as we remember Stephen Foster, shouldn’t we remember James Bland too?

 

Bibliography

Bland, James A. Carry me back to old Virginny. John F. Perry & Co., Boston, monographic, 1878. Notated Music. https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1878.x0004/.

Bland, James A, Orpheus Quartet, James A Bland, Josef Pasternack, Lambert Murphy, Harry Macdonough, William F Hooley, and Reinald Werrenrath. Carry me back to old Virginny. 1916. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-20049/.

Fletcher, Tom. 100 Years in the Negro Show Business. Da Capo Press. New York 1984.

Hullfish, William R. “James A. Bland: Pioneer Black Songwriter.” Black Music Research Journal 7 (1987): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/779446.