Reflections on “Afro-American Symphony No. 1” by William Grant Still

This is one of the songs I’ve had my students listen to. I chose it specifically because William Grant Still is less commonly used as an example of classical music, he’s a black composer, and he writes music that mixes genres a little bit.

He mixes ideas in jazz with standard ‘classical music’ ideas. That’s what I wanted my students to hear; the breadth that is the genre of classical music. That alone is something more people should hear and realize, even within other genres as well. There’s a huge breadth of music within different genres to be explored and listened to.

The beginning starts with this solo English Horn and then some tense string chords come in. Almost reminiscent of Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.

Then you hear a melody played by a trumpet with a harmon mute. That specific mute is what Miles Davis often used, though Miles Davis would remove the stem to get a warmer sound. There we already have an example of blending genres.

Another example of this blending is in the rhythm. It has a swing rhythm, which isn’t notated in the score shown in this video so I’m honestly not sure if that’s something that William Grant Still originally intended, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did indeed intend to have the piece swung considering how much influence from jazz there is.

The pentatonic based melody also can be thought of as an influence from jazz. Jazz musicians often use pentatonic scales in their soloing and improvising. There’s use of the “blue note” in the first theme, which is especially using some jazz ideas.

The “blue note” is a minor third within a major pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale is scale degrees 1 2 3 5 6 from a major scale. The “blue note” is the b3, making the scale 1 2 b3 3 5 6. It’s used in lots of music, but especially in blues and jazz music. In C major those notes would be C D Eb E F G, with that Eb being the “blue note.”

Another thing that makes this sound especially jazzy is the pizzicato bass notes. Pizzicato notes were definitely around before jazz and are used in more music than just jazz music, but jazz bass players (especially upright bass players) almost exclusively play with their fingers. The technique is slightly different, but the sound is similar. Walking bass lines are almost always played with the fingers, and in this piece we hear the bass line played with the fingers as well.

I really like a lot of this stuff. I like hearing classical music that’s not dated and old. I studied classical composition when I was at Berklee College of Music and one thing that bugged me about the major and about the genre as a whole was how focused it was on old music. And I don’t mean old as in 50 years old. I mean 300 years old. The composers are great, and their music was fantastic, but there was an odd focus on such an old style of music, while ignoring a lot of the modern musicians who make classical music today or more modern classical music.

And that’s one big thing I like about this piece; it’s classical music, but if you started playing this for someone as “classical music” you might get a few weird looks. It doesn’t fit the standard image of what people think of as classical music, but it has all the characteristics needed to fit that genre.

I also like the use of harmony. A lot of the harmony sounds pretty functional, but voiced with fourths, creating “quartal” voicings. That’s another common thing used in jazz especially in some of John Coltrane’s music. Quartal and quintal (chords built in fifths) are also often used by Claude Debussy in his music. I’m a big fan of the sound that fourths creates. It moves away from the standard tertian harmony (chords built in thirds) that you hear so often in music.

Take a listen to the piece, it’s definitely worth listening to if you’re at all interested in jazz or classical music. Or if you’re interested in hearing how William Grant Still blends the two together.

ISJ