Music: Composer Dett

Negro composers of jazz music, like W. C. Handy and Duke Ellington, have long taken top honors in their field, have long been street-corner names in the U. S. Practically unknown to the U. S. man in the street is the music of their highbrow Negro brethren. Known or not, however, much of it is equal to the best that is being written by U. S. white composers. Most prominent among such Negro composers are Los Angeles’ sober-minded William Grant Still (Afro-American Symphony), Tuskegee, Ala.’s William Levi Dawson (Negro Folk Symphony), and Greensboro, N.C.’s Robert Nathaniel Dett, long famed as the smart, musically sophisticated leader of the Hampton Institute Choir.

Composer Dett has so far been known principally for his choral works and arrangements of Negro spirituals. But last fortnight he joined the symphonic company of Composers Still and Dawson, when his sombre, ably orchestrated composition American Sampler was broadcast over the Columbia network by Conductor Howard Barlow. Last week, at the annual six-day Music Festival at Worcester, Mass., Composer Dett made musical news again. For the festival’s opening program Conductor Albert Stoessel chose Dett’s massive, spiritual-born oratorio The Ordering of Moses. Previously performed in Cincinnati and Manhattan, this tempestuous choral and orchestral work, based on Exodus, came near being the hit of Worcester’s festival:

Composer Dett was born of educated parents in Drummondville, Ont. in 1882. In 1908 he was the first U. S. Negro to receive a Bachelor of Music degree in composition. Further study at the Eastman School in Rochester netted him a Master’s degree, on top of which he rounded out his training as a pupil of famed Pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (TIME, Feb. 28) in Paris.

Nathaniel Dett lives quietly in Greens boro, N. C., works hard at his job, Director of Music at Bennett College, aims steadfastly “to put Negro music on a truly dignified and artistic basis.”