Legend: Dett was enrolled at the Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau, France. Status: Untrue. There are no records establishing his enrollment there. In early January 2023, I corresponded with Joe Kerr, current Program Director of the Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau. Without any prompting from me, or even knowing what I was actually seeking, Joe wrote me the following:
I also checked the student cards for 1929 and could not find Dett among them. If you think about it, however, you might conclude that the Conservatoire’s regular curriculum would have little value for Dett, who already had a conservatory education and two doctoral degrees by the summer of 1929. Kendra Preston Leonard’s The Conservatoire Américain: A History, provides an insightful and readily-accessible source on Fontainebleau that should be indispensable to any musings on Dett’s involvement with Fontainebleau, if any—this has yet to be established, in my frank opinion, which Preston Leonard seems to share because she never mentions Dett’s name. Founded initially as a WWI training center for military musicians, the Conservatoire transformed by 1921 into an avenue for American musicians to acquire the equivalent of certifications traditionally granted by the Paris Conservatoire, particularly for women. However, as Preston Leonard has observed, the school’s mission crept into something different: “A far cry from the detailed screening forms of the Paris Conservatoire, applications for admission to the Conservatoire Américain’s first session requested simply the applicant’s name, the course he or she wished to take, and letters of recommendation. These letters tended to be from clergy, bank managers, and personal or family friends rather than professional musicians or professors…Composer Aaron Copland, who was the first student to enroll, provided a recommendation letter in which his teacher remarks that his student always pays on time, but says nothing about young Aaron’s talent or dedication to a life in music” (p. xxvi). In general, “with a good bank balance and positive character references, almost everyone who applied for the 1921 session was admitted” (p. xxvii) because the institution could barely stay afloat financially during its first years. I am also not sure what Dett might have gained by completing a course of study at the Conservatoire. The perceived disappointment regarding the level of the 1920s student body manifested in the credentials granted. As Preston Leonard notes, “By 1926, however, most students were awarded diplomas or certificates either for “excellence in execution” or “fitness for teaching” (p. 12), far cries from the Prix awarded by the Paris Conservatoire that launched careers in France. Not that Dett needed those, since he was already a touring pianist well before he sailed to France. Further, I do not know how he might have benefitted from the required coursework, even if he had been offered private lessons (and not been made to sit with inexperienced students). The compulsory courses on offer were appropriate to undergraduate music study: harmony, counterpoint, ear-training (solfège), music history, and performance on one or more instruments. Post-Depression, the curriculum added French language courses, “stage deportment” (p. 26), and specialized studies in single musical forms or genres (songs, sonatas). It will take another post (or more) to explain how this legend even arose, but for now, I personally would be glad to leave this legend behind. We can admire Dett’s music without needing to justify his existence as an alumnus of any institution. After all, composers were able to forge influential careers without receiving a drop of institutionalized training.
It is possible that Dett visited Rochester during his youth in nearby Niagara Falls, NY. Nevertheless, when he chose to call Rochester home after he graduated from Eastman it was likely not a stretch. You can read a bit about his neighborhood via Emily Morry, PhD, a fantastic historian at the Monroe Public Library who has written an excellent blog post about Dett's life in Rochester on the website of the Library's Local History & Genealogy Division, Local History ROCs! Dett spent one year in the MM program at Eastman, living alone at the Edison Hotel in downtown Rochester. During this time, the composer Zenobia Powell Perry (in interviews compiled by Dr Jeannie Gayle Pool) had expected to study with him at Hampton. After arriving there, she learned that Dett had abruptly departed for Rochester (this is a separate topic necessitating more research). Undeterred, Powell Perry boarded a bus to Rochester without telling her parents. She found Dett somehow (this part of the story is not told!), and he arranged for her to lodge with Rochester's postmaster and take piano lessons privately with him. Don't worry--she eventually told her parents where she had gone. Dett made friends quickly, and when his wife (Helen Elise Smith) and two daughters joined him in Rochester the following year, the family put down roots. Active in local churches, speaking at civic organizations, composing music for Rochester's Inter-High Chorus, and bringing acclaimed violinist Gertrude Martin and former student Dorothy Maynor to Rochester, Dett and his family made their mark. Dett's music found the most frequent performance in churches due to its sacred nature. Well before his arrival in Rochester, civic and school choirs performed his iconic anthem "Listen to the Lambs" (1914) with regularity. The Rochester Civic Orchestra also gave several concerts featuring Dett's music, having made his acquaintance directly, as shown by this photo. Throughout his residency in Rochester, Dett traveled widely as a performer, lecturer, and educator. Somehow, he found the time to provide incidental music for the pageant-play within Rochester's 1934 Centennial celebration at Edgerton Park. This music does not seem to have survived, which is music history's great loss, as Dett flexed his newly-honed orchestral skills to create it. In addition to finishing his oratorio, Dett also finished his seminal anthology of spirituals, The Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals (1936). This work had started during his time at Hampton, for which he had also re-issued an anthology of spirituals. However, Dett's own Collection also included his own, Classically styled arrangements of these pieces. Dett also taught and mentored local students. We do not know who all of them were, but among them was the famed baritone William Warfield, who likely first met Dett through his church work. As a teenager, Warfield sang in one of Dett's community-based choirs and undoubtedly was inspired by Dett to take up the baton of Rochester's Inter-High Choir. He was reported as the first high schooler ever to conduct the group. When the Frederick Douglass monument moved in 1941 within Rochester to its present home at the Highland Bowl, Dett brought Warfield in as a soloist. Warfield's voice rang out with Rochester's first ever multiracial choir for an audience of international dignitaries. The Detts resided just outside an historic area of Rochester known today both as Corn Hill and as Clarisssa Street (as documented by Clarissa Uprooted), but back in the day it was known as the Third Ward. Much of that neighborhood was razed, with many homes replaced by recently-built structures. The area should be considered Rochester's corresponding locus of Alain Locke's "Harlem Renaissance," as other artists lived and visited there. Now that people are performing Dett's oratorio a lot more often, you will undoubtedly come across different composition dates, namely 1932 and 1937. The full performance version is from 1937, however, and the 1932 version for Dett's MM Thesis at Eastman contains significantly less music. I am not currently aware if anyone has been doing any work on exactly when Dett began his work on his only surviving orchestral piece. We do get a valuable clue from Vivian Flagg McBrier's dissertation/book, R. Nathaniel Dett, His Life and Works. McBrier quotes from a "personal notebook" that relates an interaction between Dett and his close friend, Percy Grainger (here's a character). Grainger was visiting the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in 1930. Dett and his elite-level choir were about to embark on their famous European tour. Wanting to impress his friend, Dett had the choir sing excerpts from what would become The Ordering of Moses. Grainger was impressed, and he reportedly asked Dett how long it took him to compose the "Go Down, Moses" fugue. Dett reportedly replied, "Four years," to which Grainger is said to have replied, "I thought so." Now, this is a great story, BUT McBrier does not say where this "personal notebook" is, only that it was in her possession at the time she wrote her dissertation/book. I have not been able to find out what happened to McBrier or her belongings, so I do not know how anyone would be able to confirm this story. All the same, I feel confident enough to assume that Dett had the choral parts already written by the time he stepped through the doors of Eastman in the Fall of 1931. The R. Nathaniel Dett Collection of Eastman's Sibley Library has a beautifully stenciled, cleanest-of-the-clean copy of the choral parts that sits apart from the manuscript of his full score. The choral parts are also stenciled in and pristinely blemish-free throughout the manuscript full score. The rest of the full score, I must say, looks the way a composition project does when a deadline approaches: it starts off pretty cleanly at the beginning, but it becomes very sketch-like and messy by the end. This fits with the anecdote about him writing the choral parts (probably with piano or organ accompaniment) at least four years prior to 1930--let's say ca. 1926. While it is always risky to rely solely on newspaper reports (I am forced to do it too often, however), in this case Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle related on 23 November 1936 that The Ordering, “on which he has been at work for 10 years...was unsatisfactory to the composer [as his MM thesis] and he rewrote the score. The present oratorio represents the third major revision." By the MM Thesis submission in May/June 1932, Dett had mostly composed everything except the "Meditation," the "March of the Israelites through the Red Sea," and "Egyptians Pursue." Percussion parts are only sketched sporadically into the score as an afterthought, since they are penciled in on top of ink. Further, some transitions and passages that would appear in the 1937 manuscript also have not yet been written. By 1937, Dett had finished everything you will perform at Carnegie Hall. The version you are singing and playing is a manuscript (that is, it's in Dett's handwriting) that was given to Luck's Rental Library. I would not assume that it is the very same score that was used for its 1937 premiere by the Cincinnati May Festival. For all we know, Dett might have changed or added a few things before he sent the score off to Luck's! So, long story short, it is my humble opinion that Dett composed his oratorio from ca. 1926 to the middle of the year in 1937. That means he started it while he was still at Hampton (choral parts plus provisional piano or organ accompaniment), orchestrated a big chunk while a student at Eastman, and then added three new movements plus put the finishing touches on it. He most likely did these last things while he lived in Rochester and possibly when he taught at Samuel Huston College in Texas (now Huston-Tillotson University) and Bennett College in North Carolina. There is also a chance that he worked on its initial orchestration while in Paris during the summer of 1929, but I am still searching for evidence of that.
Legend: Dett studied with Arthur Foote at Harvard. Status: Misleading. Dett was granted a sabbatical that paid his Harvard tuition and lodging in Somerville, but he studied privately with Arthur Foote off campus. 1. Arthur Foote did not serve on the Harvard faculty, at least not while Dett was there in 1919-1920. Foote was a famous graduate of Harvard and noteworthy composer who taught out of his home in Dedham, a suburb of Boston that is not Cambridge. That is, he did not teach students on the Harvard campus. OK, so how did Dett meet him? The 1919-1920 Harvard University Catalogue lists Foote as Chair of the Francis Boott Prize Committee, a prize Dett would win in 1920. Since the submission deadline was 15 April 1920, Dett would have met him no later than around that time. Notice that I say "no later than around that time." Special note: Foote's family, especially his mother, Mary Wilder, had very deep and wide connections to Boston society. Mary, in particular, had social ties (reinforced through her status among the Unitarian Church) with people such as Charles Eliot (erstwhile President of Harvard) and George Peabody. This George Peabody, (1795-1869) philanthropist and eventual founder of the Peabody Institute at John Hopkins, should NOT be confused with George Foster Peabody (1852-1938), who served as a Trustee for Hampton and personally paid the bill (i.e., dipped into his hedge fund) for Dett's Harvard sabbatical; the two are not familial relations, either. All right, all right, semantics seem to have obfuscated this legend. So we need to ask, what was Dett actually doing at Harvard? 2. Per Lori Rae Shipley's excellent and readily available dissertation, Dett was invited by Archibald Davison to take courses (that he had already taken at Oberlin) to learn how to do the job (he was already doing brilliantly) at Hampton. Davison is primarily remembered today for having founded the Harvard Glee Club ca. 1920. The seminar room in the Harvard Music Library is named for him, but do not go into it lightly because the room has hosted countless acts of torture. Here is the list of courses that Davison taught for the Music Department during the 1919-1920 year. As you can see, they are sophomore-/junior-level courses that Dett would have taken for his BM at Oberlin. Frankly, Davison did not attend conservatory, but in my personal experience as both an Eastman and Harvard alumna, the courses are not different in content. So, the answer to our question only raises another question: what did Dett really do while on sabbatical? This is a better question than, What did Dett do at Harvard besides win the Bowdoin Literary Prize and the Francis Boott Composition Prize and not study with Arthur Foote? He beat out Randall Thompson for the Boott Prize, by the way. You will have to wait for another blog post for the answer to that one. Additionally, there will be another blog post about why it even matters that he studied with Arthur Foote. To be continued... Less than one year after its world premiere at the Cincinnati May Festival, Dett's oratorio made its way to New York City's Juilliard School in April of 1938. Baltimore's prominent, Black news source, the Afro-American, kept tabs on Dett's whereabouts and even had a local correspondent in Rochester, NY, who popped up onto its columns just when Dett moved there and then all but vanished once he took his job at Bennett College. The performing organization, the Oratorio Society of New York, had close ties to Dett. Among them was the ethnomusicologically inclined music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel. Krehbiel published a treatise on African spirituals, Afro-American folksongs: a study in racial and national music (1914), which argued that African slaves brought their musical traditions with them directly from Africa and did not simply appropriate the church hymns of their owners (an unfortunate, widespread view at the time). Dett cited Krehbiel's work personally and advocated its commendation by the National Association of Negro Musicians. Krehbiel's association with the OSNY is manifested most strongly in his Notes on the cultivation of choral music and the Oratorio Society of New York (1884). Two sons of Leopold Damrosch, the founder of the OSNY, assumed its artistic helm: Walter and Frank. These two musicians also had personal ties to Dett. Helen Elise Smith, Dett's wife, was the first Black graduate of the Damrosch Institute of Musical Art (a precursor to the Juilliard School), founded by Frank Damrosch. Dett also made the acquaintance of Walter Damrosch, although I am currently unaware exactly how. Albert Stoessel, listed as conductor in the news clipping above, apprenticed with Walter Damrosch beginning in 1921 and by 1938 had charge of Juilliard's graduate opera and orchestra departments and was Musical Director at the Chautauqua Institution, which is not too far from Rochester, NY. It is not known exactly who performed with the orchestra, and I hesitate to attribute the concert to one of the school's standing ensembles. Nevertheless, having Stoessel at the podium was quite significant and attests to Dett's high regard in the Classical-music world. Legend: The NBC radio broadcast of The Ordering of Moses on 7 May 1937 was cut off because of racist complaints at stations in the South. Status: Untrue. However, this does NOT mean that racist complaints were not made. We need to put blame where blame is due, namely, what I have been calling the "long arm of the radio schedule," which still serves as the primary means to frame on-air advertisements. Newspapers printed the day's radio listings ahead of time, such as you see here, which is a clip of the schedule from Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle. Mind you, Dett was living in Rochester at this time, plus he had once had his own, weekly show and had since been a repeat-return guest on-air. People here knew about him. That being said, you can see at the red checkmark that exactly 45 minutes were being devoted to the Cincinnati May Festival, which gave the oratorio's premiere. It was normal to have the minimal listings like this as well. So what we have is a local show ("Community Chest") preceding the network show (marked with an 'n'), followed by another local show, the all-important and very lucrative reporting of baseball scores. Following that, a regular network show was due (Eddie Vargos' Orchestra, which might have served up dance music?). The radio schedule was devastatingly egalitarian. As reviewer Jack Sher had lamented, even Beethoven's iconic Fifth Symphony proved vulnerable to network interruption. However, in this case the broadcast was so late in the night that there probably was not another show waiting to air, plus it was the day after Christmas, when--back in the old days--lots of things shut down. In fact, network interruptions occurred so frequently that John Hogan turned New York City's WQXR into an ad-free radio station for a three-hour portion of each day. He did this, as the article relates, because people tuned into the previous TV station only for the music and not for the screen picture. Hogan presented the three-hour block in two increments, 4:00-5:00 pm and 7:00-9:00 pm. While entire operas received play, WQXR's audiences preferred instrumental music, especially symphonies and concertos. If there were ads, "since the station is not a philanthropic venture," the announcers uttered only 50-100 words. As Hogan said himself, "You wouldn't admit a loud mouthed salesman to your living room in the flesh, and I won't be party to sneaking him in, costumed as an entertainer." It is also important to note that famous, white men could not escape the schedule, either. You might not recognize Cecil B. DeMille by name alone, but you probably would recognize two movies that he produced, both by the moniker The Ten Commandments. In this clipping here, DeMille does not exactly get cut off because of time constraints. Rather, the reviewer calls DeMille out for using the network cut-off as a device for not crediting a play to its rightful author, and then the reviewer rants about other things. On a side note: if you get the chance, watch the silent version of Ten Commandments (1923), especially the parting of the Red Sea. It's on YouTube. Did Dett know it???? Herbert Hoover, POTUS #31, received exactly two minutes of air time (he wasn't POTUS any more) before the network cut off the punchline to his address. Essentially, he compared the New Deal's agricultural subsidies to Russian Communism (sound familiar?). I told you the arm of the radio schedule was long. When the US Congress voted to propose the eventual 21st Amendment to repeal the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), radio audiences listened to the gripping drama unfolding on their wireless sets...until it got cut off. Most interestingly, the action was relayed through the words (and thus interpretations) of the radio announcers, and the article even compared the broadcast to "a football game broadcast..that ended in the closing minutes of play, with the ball on the one-yard line and a down to go." That is, the proposed Amendment was imminent but anything still might have happened. The proposed Amendment represented the first, significant challenge to Prohibition since its ratification on 16 January 1919. All right, you get it, the long arm of the radio schedule was brutal. The question, however, remains: did the radio overseers ever cut anyone off intentionally? If your guess involves a politician, the answer is yes. Radio broadcasts had stricter obscenity policies than newspapers, as this clipping shows. Ohio Governor Martin L. Davey (1935-1939) received a network "time out" for bad on-air behavior. WAIU is a Columbus-based station that, in all likelihood, possessed strong ties to Ohio State University, the ostensible target of Davey's invective. The final example reports an on-air incident at a soccer match in Ireland (and the suspense ends here). The match featured Cavan vs. Galway at the All-Ireland Football Championship being played in Dublin. The background to the incident involves the Irish Republican Army, which had been organized for roughly a dozen years by 1933. President of the (1921) Irish Republic Éamon de Valera attended the match, and he was likely the protestors' intended audience regarding the alleged mistreatment of political prisoners by his administration. The article reports that guards were stationed around the radio station (in Cork) for the entire night. If you read about R. Nathaniel Dett, you are bound to encounter conflicting information. This is not anyone's fault, really, but it still results in a lot of unnecessary confusion. So, here we go: 1. The Name. The first thing we need to do is get his name right. "R. Nathaniel Dett" was how he signed his name. The "R." stands for Robert, which was his father's name: Robert Tue Dett. However, Dett did not have a great relationship with his father, who divorced his mother and essentially estranged himself from Dett and his brother Samuel as well. Further, Robert Tue Dett was a bit of a big name in Niagara Falls, NY, building his own hotel (a rather fancy one that no longer survives) and owning several properties. People close to Dett called him "Nate," and I have not found any evidence that he answered to the name "Robert." 2. The Birthplace. Dett was born in the province of Ontario, Canada, in a village named Drummondville. This one-time village should not be confused with the city of the same name in the province of Québec, nor is it spelled as "Drummondsville." Rather, it was later incorporated into the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Just to ensure everyone's confusion, the Dett family moved across the Rainbow Bridge into Niagara Falls, NY. 3. Where he earned degrees. You all know that Dett was an early Black alumnus of the Oberlin College Conservatory, but he was not the very first. That honor belongs to Harriet Gibbs Marshall, who went on to found the Washington Conservatory and School of Expression. Technically, she received a BA from Oberlin College, completing its course in Piano. Her degree was converted retroactively to a BM once the Conservatory began issuing them. Since Dett graduated in 1908, he would have been among the first to receive a full-fledged BM. Furthermore, he never claimed to be the first Black alumnus of Oberlin. Rather, he did make it known that he was the first to major in both Composition and Piano. Dett earned honorary doctoral degrees from Oberlin (1926) and Howard University (1924) before he completed an MM at Eastman in 1932, making him Eastman's first Black alumnus. These are the only degrees he received, which is more than Howard Hanson had as the Director of Eastman! By the way, Hanson was referred to as "Doctor Hanson" even though he did not have any doctoral degrees, honorary or otherwise, and nobody has seemed interested in correcting the record... Dett completed coursework or audited courses at other places, but it is very difficult to establish exactly where. I have seen hard evidence of studies at Columbia, Northwestern, and Harvard. In a recent research development (i.e., January 2023), I have learned that he was never enrolled at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in France; whether he studied privately, one-on-one with Nadia Boulanger still remains to be seen (in my humble opinion, however, I doubt it). You might read on the internet that he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, but I have yet to find concrete evidence of that. Similarly, he took summer courses at conservatories in Chicago and New York, but the school names were in flux and it is difficult to pin down exactly where he was. |
Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, PhDMusic Theorist, Musicologist, Score Editor, Arranger, Performer Website content Copyright Ⓒ 2023 Jeannie Ma. Guerrero
Information subject to change Niagara Falls at Sunrise Timelapse by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash
Archives
February 2023
Categories |