Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins

After her performances in Shuffle Along (1921) on Broadway and in Dover Street to Dixie (1923) in London, Florence Mills became one of the most famous jazz and vaudeville singers. Known as the Harlem Jazz Queen, Mills was revered by Black Americans for her international breakthrough and because she used her commercial success as a platform to speak out against racial inequality. Extensive descriptions of her performance style and voice exist in writing, but there are no recordings of her singing. I respond to this archival loss by considering the sound of Mills's voice in two compositions written for her: William Grant Still's Levee Land (1925) and Edmund Thornton Jenkins's Afram (1924). In my analysis, I show that Still and Jenkins imagined a much more musically complicated and politically powerful voice than that found in the racialized and gendered stereotypes permeating both her vaudeville and Broadway repertory and the language of her reception. While scholars have written about how Mills's outspokenness regarding issues of race and omission of sexually explicit roles made her central to 1920s Black political and artistic life, I consider how the sonic properties of her voice positioned her as a leading figure in the New Negro Renaissance.

Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still

At the apex of their careers, composers George Gershwin and William Grant Still produced what they believed were their finest works: respectively, Porgy and Bess (1935), an opera by a white American composer about African American subjects, and Troubled Island (1949), an opera by an African American composer about Haitian subjects. However, both works fared poorly upon their premiere, with critics decrying Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island as “unoperatic.” Besides providing historical context to both operas, this paper argues that the critical rhetoric surrounding them was tinged by racialized notions of what musical “blackness” sounded like, or should sound like, to white ears. This paper focuses on critics’ coinage of “the cheap” or “popular” as a euphemism for music inspired by African American musical traditions like jazz, the blues, and spirituals. The paper concludes that, while the art music canon can be responsive to social justice movements, critics’ scorn of works like Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island contributes to the entrenchment of an implicitly racialized high–low musical dichotomy.

On a Transformational Curiosity in Riemann's Schematisirung der Dissonanzen

This article explores the less examined aspect of Riemann's Skizze, the Schematirisung der Dissonanzen. The article focuses in particular on Riemann's category of Doppelklänge, by examining the conceptual origin of the category in the Skizze and its relation to Riemann's harmonic theories. Doppelklänge are dissonant chords that arise through a combination of two consonant triads in a coordinate relationship. While the Doppelklänge category is short-lived, it nevertheless fascinating for its relation to Riemann's taxonomy of harmonic relations. Specifically, Riemann classifies Doppelklänge according to the Harmonieschritte that relate their component Klänge, reflecting within those dissonant chordal structures the same relations that organize harmonic progression in music. The article then examines how an explicitly transformational reinterpretation of Riemann's Doppelklänge can offer analytic insights into tonal, post-tonal and transitional musical repertoires such as by Chopin, William Grant Still, and Ravel. The article ends by providing an appendix that presents a translation of Schematirisung der Dissonanzen.

Sahdiji, an African Ballet (1931): Queer Connections and the “Myth of the Solitary Genius”

In May 1931 the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Bruce Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, the ballet by Thelma Biracree, and dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, the work was set in Africa and performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago and revived in Rochester through 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring, and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.