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CDs of Still's Compositions by
Various Artists
Works by William Grant Still /
The American Scene /
Music of William Grant Still /
Still/Dawson/Ellington: Symphony No. 2/Negro Folk
Symphony/Harlem /
Still: Symphony No. 1; Ellington: Suite from "The River"
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A Search for
William Grant Still
Africlassical.com:
Song of a New Race
By Amin Sharif
The
ability to see beauty in another people's culture is a raw
quality-especially in race conscious America. Bill Zick is one
of those rare persons who has found a unique way to celebrate
the achievements of African people throughout the world. Bill
has established a website devoted totally to the composers of
black classical music. Samuel Coleridge, Le Chevalier Sainte
George, Micheal Mosoeu Moerane have respectively composed
classical music for audiences in America, Europe, and South
America.
Yet,
until now, there has been no central resource that anyone,
African, African-American or otherwise, could access that would
tell them the story of how composers of African decent have
contributed to the classical period. Bill's website www.Africlassical.com
has changed all of that.
It was my great fortune to find Bill's site when I was trying to
locate a poem that William Grant Still set to music. Still is
considered, by some, to be the greatest Afro-American composer
of classical music. Still's
Afro-American Symphonies No.1 and
No. 2
are considered to be as important to American music as the woks
of Copeland or Ellington-who was also a composer of classical
music. Bill was kind enough not only to direct me to where I
could find the poem. But, he also gave me some insight on how
his love of classical music began.
Bill states that for thirty years he heard only the works of
"white classical' composers. But, in 1993, Bill found the
CDs of the "Detroit Symphony Orchestra featuring the works
of Duke Ellington, William Levi Dawson and William Grant
Still." It seem s that these woks made a great impression
on him. He says, "I enjoyed them greatly, and realized it
was not the quality of the works that that explained their
relative neglect by the classical music establishment."
When
Bill retired due to a medical problem, he decided to "use
the Internet to communicate his findings." What Bill has
constructed is a fine-if not the finest site on the subject of
African, Afro-American, Afro-European, and Afro-Latin composers.
His site is bilingual, in English and in French. He says that
the page on the Afro-French composer Le Chevalier de Saint
George receives as many visitors as the English counterpart.
Obviously,
Bill is quite serious about his work. The site is both
attractive, informative and fun. Bill has a quiz that one can
take after reading about little and more well known black
composers. But since the site has been around since 2000, Bill
had had plenty of time to refine the site.
In my humble opinion, Bill has done a fantastic job bringing to
light a subject matter that is as cultural pertinent as the
works of Coltrane or Miles Davis. Indeed, any real fan of Miles,
Trane, and Monk would know that they all either studied or
listened to classical music. It is well know that Bird loved
listening to the Firebird Suite. No doubt each one of these
giants of jazz would have loved this site.
Africlassical is an extraordinary experience in
black music. That, it was constructed by a cool white cat (Bill
Zick) makes it all amazing. Well done, Bill!
posted 5 March 2005
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AfriClassical
(Blog)
A companion to
AfriClassical.com,
a website on African Heritage in Classical Music. Meet 52
Black composers and musicians, take a Black History Quiz and
hear over 100 audio samples at the site.
William J. Zick |
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Dear Friends,
In March 2005, Amin Sharif wrote a glowing review of my website,
www.AfriClassical.com, for
which I remain grateful and which is quoted on the Reviews page of my
site. The website has a new companion blog,
http://africlassical.blogspot.com/
For my first post on July 20, 2007 I chose to discuss the cover art of
Calliope 9373 (2007), released in June. Earlier, I had expressed the
same concerns in an E-mail to the U.S. distributor, Harmonia Mundi USA.
I have since learned that a famous French cartoonist named Cabu was
commissioned to produce the cover image of Saint-Georges.
In the cover picture, everyone else wears normal 18th century attire.
Saint-Georges, the only person of color in the scene, wears a red outfit
with white polka dots! It is absurdly inappropriate! In my mind it
resembles nothing more than the demeaning attire of a minstrel
performer!
A lengthy reply has been made by E-mail on behalf of Calliope, saying
the cover art was created by "two great artists." It is reproduced in
full in a post in which I answer the pertinent points in the reply:
http://africlassical.blogspot.com/2007/07/calliope-cover-is-work-of-two-great.html
Are we rescuing classical composers and musicians of African descent
from obscurity only to see them ridiculed on CD covers?
Please consider blogging or writing about this issue. Thanks in
advance.
Best wishes,
Bill Zick
wzick@ameritech.net
Ann Arbor, MI
posted 29 July
2007
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 29 December
2011
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