Current research twelve years after the William Grant still centennial.(Biography)

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-MAR-05

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In 1995, the world celebrated William Grant Still's centennial. The centennial of a composer's birth date or death date offers an opportunity for retrospection. Customarily, numerous concerts devoted to the honored composer are slated, bringing his or her works before a new audience for that calendar year. A centennial also offers an opportunity for new assessment as scholars appraise past research and outline new areas of inquiry. Consider, for example, the number of performances, recordings, and publications in 1985 for the tercentenary anniversaries of Scarlatti, Handel, and Bach (Williams 1985). The magical centenary number provided similar results for William Grant Still. The one-hundredth anniversary of his birth stimulated a burst of scholarship and performances as scholars, performers, and conductors began to interpret and reinterpret various aspects of his life and music. Since the centennial twelve years ago, there has been a renaissance in Still studies. The purpose of this article is to provide a bibliography of this new scholarship and a selected discography to serve as a bibliographic tool, a reference guide of articles, books, recordings, dissertations, and master's theses that have appeared since 1995.

Reference Works

The scholarship generated by the Still centennial promised to document further Still's life, critique his musical compositions, and suggest areas in which further studies are needed. Still has long been included in important biographical dictionaries on music in general and on African-American music specifically. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Smith 2000a) includes the most up-to-date article on Still's biography, an overview of his accomplishments and importance as a composer, and a selected works list. Still has always been included in biographical reference sources specializing in African-American composers, such as in Eileen Southern's (1982) germinal Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians. Published seventeen years after Southern's pioneering work, the International Dictionary of Black Composers includes an article on Still's biography and a selected works list of landmark musical compositions (Murchison 1999). Still is now recognized as an important figure in American cultural life in reference works outside the field of music. An extensive article appears in the standard biographical dictionary American National Biography (Leab 1999).

Reference books devoted exclusively to Still appeared during or immediately following the centennial year. In 1995, Judith Anne Still, Celeste Anne Headlee (the composer's daughter and granddaughter, respectively), along with others, edited and published the second edition of William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music (Still, Headlee, and Headlee-Huffman 1995). An updated and revised version of Robert Haas's 1972 book, the Still-Headlee volume includes many essays from the first edition as well as several new ones, including eleven essays by Still and his closest creative collaborator (and second wife), Verna Arvey. These essays provide information on his childhood, career, method of composition, and musical aesthetic. The volume expanded Still studies by presenting for the first time original essays on specific works written by Anne K. Simpson, Donald Dorr, Paul Harold Slattery, Louis and Annette Kaufman, Jean F. Matthew, and Carolyn L. Quin. The analytical articles by Slattery, Matthew, and Quin focus on either a specific work or a group of related works. Dorr's essay on Still's operas is particularly valuable because it marks one of the first attempts to assess Still's importance as a composer of American and African-American opera. The centennial year also saw the publication of Dominique-Rene De Lerma's (1995) William Grant Still: A Register of His Works--A Tribute on the Centenary of His Birth. De Lerma has devoted his career to compiling numerous important bibliographies of African-American music, recognizing that before scholarly studies of African-American music can develop at a rapid pace, researchers must have reliable, thorough bibliographic tools.

The following year, Greenwood Press published William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography, a research guide that has proven invaluable as a starting place for anyone wishing to do research on Still (Still, Dabrishus, and Quin 1996). Judith Anne Still provided a biographical sketch, a poignant and loving memoir of her father's life and career. Dabrishus (then head of the University of Arkansas's Special Collections, where the William Grant Still--Verna Arvey Papers are archived) and Quin (a musicologist and Still scholar) prepared a thorough bibliography. The book offers a complete bibliography of writings by both Still and Verna Arvey, pianist, journalist, librettist, and Still's first major biographer. Quin provided a detailed catalog of the works, listing all Still's compositions and their dates of publication and first performances. She also prepared an annotated bibliography of the critical reviews of these performances. Her bibliography is extremely valuable because it facilitates research into the Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) of Still's work. Quin also compiled a "Preliminary List of Arrangements and Orchestrations," the most extensive catalog to date of Still's arrangements for jazz, musical theater, film, and television. Throughout his years in New York during the early 1930s, Still arranged music for radio figures such as Paul Whiteman and Willard Robison. After his move to Los Angeles in 1934, Still found employment providing music for Hollywood films, including the landmark Stormy Weather (1943) and Frank Capra's recently restored Lost Horizon (1937). Thus, Quin lays important groundwork for research of the early days of radio music and film music. Indispensable, this bio-bibliography places bibliographic control over diverse print and musical sources.

Archives

Researchers are fortunate that Still's music and personal papers, along with those of Arvey, are archived and easily accessible. William Grant Still Music in Flagstaff, Arizona, preserves many of Still's scores, sketches, notebooks, and other primary documents. The bulk of Still's and Arvey's musical works and personal papers and artifacts are housed in the Special Collections of Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas--Fayetteville. A finding aid is available online at the library's Web site (http://www.uark.edu/libinfo/speccoll/stillarveyc.html). The collection is rich in musical scores, family papers, diaries, correspondence (Still and Arvey were prodigious letter writers), speeches, photographs, sound recordings, and other materials. It even preserves the music typewriter Still used to produce copies of his scores. Duke University's Special Collections purchased copies of Still's scores from William Grant Still Music, and these are available for study in Durham, North Carolina. (see http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sgo/ for an overview of the collection and online finding aid). Many collections at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress's Music Division also archive Still manuscript materials.

Several archives preserve Still's popular music. The Paul Whiteman Collection at Williams College houses letters and scores that Still produced while under contract with the bandleader. Two archives preserve music that he composed and arranged for Willard Robison. Richard Sudhalter donated his collection of Robison materials to the Institute for Jazz Studies (IJS), Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., also contains several arrangements and compositions that Still made for this radio personality. Materials Still produced for Donald Voorhees survive in the Voorhees Collection with the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Symphony, and there are Still arrangements in the Red Nichols Collection in Special Collections at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Numerous jazz collections such as the WFAA and WBAP Radio Collections in the Special Collections division of the Music Library of the University of North Texas, and archives such as the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans and the IJS have in their various collections stock arrangements Still produced during the 1910s and early 1920s. The Eubie Blake Collection at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore has the complete Shuffle Along score, for which Still is reported to have contributed some of the orchestrations. The Blake Collection also includes other Still arrangements and orchestrations.

Primary Sources

Verna Arvey wrote the first published biography of Still, a short monograph issued as a promotional item in 1939 by Still's publisher, J. Fischer and Bro. She later wrote the earliest book-length biography of Still, the memoir In One Lifetime (1984). As Arvey reports, there were several difficulties involved in writing this book. She originally intended it to be a memoir of them both--her life, his life, and their life together. At some point during the editorial process, the focus of the project shifted (Arvey suggests that she lost control over her own manuscript), and the editorial decision was made that it should be a memoir of Still alone. Although not a scholarly book, it is an important place to begin biographical research on Still, for Arvey was with the composer for forty-four years, thirty-nine as his wife. She is the one authority closest to the composer and stands as a firsthand witness and his amanuensis. Her account is reliable, infused with the struggles and sometimes disappointment the Stills faced--Still, as he faced racism and the two of them, as they had a mixed (Still was Protestant and Arvey was Jewish) and interracial marriage. Arvey duly chronicles Still's life and career with accuracy, although she does not always provide specific dates. Their daughter, Judith Still, owner of William Grant Still Music, has also written a collection of essays about her father, William Grant Still: A Voice High-Sounding (1990), providing personal insights into her father's life and career.

Still was an author or coauthor of numerous articles, speeches, and lectures, many of which were published in magazines, journals, and newspapers--including Variety, Opportunity, and the Pittsburgh Courier, to name just a few. Two early books contain a few essays and interviews by Still: Haas's (1972) William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music and Domique-Reno de Lerma's (1970) collection, Black Music in Our Culture. For years, however, many of Still's articles were difficult to access. Jon Michael Spencer (1992) alleviated this problem with a special issue of his journal, Black Sacred Music: a Journal of Theomusicology (now defunct), offering a broad selection of Still's published articles and reprinting some articles for the first time in twenty to fifty years since their original publication. The volume also includes important articles Still cowrote with Arvey, who was a professional writer and journalist as well as a concert pianist and Still's librettist. Spencer's collection represents the most extensive collection of Still's writings to date. Because Still wrote extensively about his career and music, these writings are especially important for understanding both his musical style and his aesthetic. In them, he did not hesitate to address issues of race, class, and politics.

Secondary Sources

There is no lack of academic study of Still. Recent biographical work has begun evaluating Still in all his complexity. The most scholarly study of Still's life, Benjamin Griffith Edward's dissertation "The Life of William Grant Still," appeared in 1987. This work represents the most extensive, comprehensive, and critical biography of Still to date. It presents a fairly balanced portrait of Still's early and midcareer; however, the turbulent decades of the 1950s and 1960s are not as well treated as the earlier years. Problematically, the figure of Verna Arvey remains in the background. Edward's volume has yet to appear in updated book form. Nor has any other full-length biography appeared.

Two shorter publications advanced Still...

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