Dawson's 'Negro Folk Symphony'

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Synopsis Today’s date in 1899 marks the birthday of famous African-American composer, choir director and teacher, William L. Dawson, in Anniston, Alabama. After musical studies in Kansas City and Chicago, from 1931 to 1956 Dawson taught at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed the Institute’s Choir into an internationally-renowned ensemble. His arrangements of African-American spirituals, which he preferred to call folksongs, are justly famous, but in 1934 he produced his masterwork, a Negro Folk Symphony , modeled on Dvorak’s New World Symphony, but exhibiting his own distinctive mastery and development of his themes. His goal, he said, was for audiences to know that it was…