They too compose America: the Black Music Repertory Ensemble and contemporary formal music

American Visions, August-Sept, 1996 by Henry Chase

In 1995 the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected 10 new members, honoring them with the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the nation. Some of the names of the new inductees, such as satirical cartoonist Jules Feiffer and playwright August Wilson, may have sounded familiar - but who is Olly Wilson?

Say "American music" or "black music," and the names Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald roll off die tongue. Once we leave the vernacular tradition, however, only William Grant Still (see American Visions August/September 1995) rings the occasional bell of memory in a land where rock `n' roll has ruled for four decades and where black music has been defined as the blues, jazz and gospel for even longer. But in an earlier age, classical music and its close cousins were scored with a black accent.

At the turn of the century, not only did the black Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor compose operas and symphonies, but his works, such as "Twenty-Four Negro Melodies for the Piano," explored black themes. In the 1830s, Francis Johnson took his marches and quadrilles on tours of the United States, Canada and Europe, to great applause. Earlier still, in France of the late 1700s, the Chevalier de Saint George composed operas, sonatas, symphonies and concertos.

Today the names of these composers and the titles of their works are mostly forgotten - but at least they once evoked popular recognition, a recognition that has escaped contemporary black composers and compositions in the formal tradition. Perhaps, one day, Leslie Adams' Six Songs on Texts by African-American Poets, Wendell Logan's Runagate, Runagate, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Variations and Fugue on 'The Ash Grove,' Hale Smith's Dialogues and Commentaries and Olly Wilson's Of Vision and Truth. A Song Cycle will receive the acknowledgment now given to Ellington's "Mood Indigo" and Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid.

If so, these composers will owe thanks to an influential ally in their struggle to be heard: the Black Music Repertory Ensemble. The ensemble's 15 musicians and vocalists are first-rate professionals, most of whom are employed by mainstream orchestras and choral groups around the country. But, at least once a year, they band together to practice, promote and publicly perform a widening repertoire of neglected black compositions dating from 1800 to the present. The ensemble has enjoyed its own overture and crescendo - and a 1996 climax, a West Coast debut and a five-city, first-ever national tour.

The ensemble is the performing instrument of the Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College Chicago. The center's founder, Samuel Floyd Jr., was born in Tallahassee, Fla., in 1937, and has spent his adult life documenting and preserving the black contribution to the canon of formal musical composition. "People don't realize the major influences of black musicians on the European tradition, on the quality and spirit and profundity of this music," he says. "Much of that contribution has simply not been heard. There's a lot of important music out there that has been ignored by most scholars and audiences."

Following an education at Florida A&M and a stint as a member of the faculty there, Floyd moved North, collecting two higher degrees and serving on the faculty of Southern Illinois University before becoming a professor of music and the director of the Institute of Music Research at Fisk University. In quick succession came his editorships of the Black Music Research Newsletter and the Black Music Research Journal.

Then, in 1983, Floyd founded the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, an independent undergraduate college in the central city. Four years later, the Black Music Repertory Ensemble was formed to perform both the neglected music that the center had helped preserve and the modern compositions commissioned by the center as an aid to fostering contemporary black music in the formal tradition.

Small wonder that when Wendell Logan is asked for the first thought that comes to mind when he hears the words "Black Music Repertory Ensemble," he doesn't hesitate to answer: "Sam Floyd. I've known Sam for 30 years; we were colleagues at Florida A&M. I think of his vision in starting the Center for Black Music Research, and then for having created its performing arm, the ensemble."

Spend enough time talking to the men and women who write for, play with or conduct the ensemble, and you discover that their stories eerily echo one another, as if they shared die experience of being an elite combat unit operating far behind die lines of the mass culture, sometimes tasting success but always aware that the odds favor casualties, wounds, oblivion.

Listen to Leslie Adams, Who has labored for decades to "work in a field where I can express myself at my highest level of awareness, appreciation and understanding, a field that has the potential for longevity, for perpetuity," and you hear his sense of music's magic and beauty as well as his joy when his creations leap from the page to the audience. "Last summer I was asked by Hilda Harris, the ensemble's mezzo-soprano, to orchestrate for them my Six Songs on Texts by African-American Poets. Then I attended their October performance of it in Pittsburgh. Hilda was the narrator and soloist, and Kay George Roberts conducted. It was a marvelous performance: Hilda's voice was opulent, radiant; Roberts was absolutely magnificent; and the ensemble performed with feeling, clarity and beauty. It was heartwarming - I was thrilled to be present."