Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Harlem Renaissance
Arts-integrated lesson
plans for students in
grades 8-12.
BOSTON
SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
E D U C AT I O N A N D C O M M U N I T Y P R O G R A M S
Credits
Director of Education and Community Programs
Myran Parker-Brass
Coordinator of Research and Curriculum Development
Shana Golden
2006 Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Cover
Jazz Musician Corbis
The Boston Symphony Orchestras Department of Education and Community Programs has a
variety of curriculum kits that are available for teachers and educators for grades K-12. For more
information on our educational materials and programs, please contact the Education Ofce at:
301 Massachusetts Ave, Boston, MA 02115, (617) 638-9373.
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Poetry and the Blues
Lesson Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Supplementary Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
W.C. Handy, Beale Street Blues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
W.C. Handy, St. Louis Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Sterling A. Brown, Southern Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
What is the Blues? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
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Additional Resources
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Introduction
This kit is a production of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Department of Education and Community Programs. Feedback is
welcomed, please contact the BSO with any comments or questions.
Shana Golden
BSO Education Department
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Music
Students will:
Learn about the characteristics of a blues song
Analyze a poem(s) inspired by blues music
Examine a contemporary social issue
Materials
Introduction
Development
Pass out copies of lyrics for the W.C. Handy blues song Beale
Street Blues.
Identify the basic elements of a Blues Song:
What is the subject of this song?
(Blues songs often comment on the social climate of the
time. Is there symbolism in the text? Allusions to historical
events? Are gures of speech used?)
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Activity
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Activity Extension
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Supplementary Materials
The next few pages include materials that may be used with the Poetry and the Blues lesson plan.
Included are photos and biographical information on the artists, lyrics for the St. Louis Blues
and the Beale Street Blues, Langston Hughes poem The Weary Blues, Sterling Browns poem
Southern Road, and an introduction to Blues music called What is the Blues?
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Then one night in Tutwiler, as I nodded in the railroad station that had been delayed nine hours,
life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start. A lean, loose-jointed Negro
had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept as he played he pressed a knife on the
strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists. The effect was unforgettable.
His son, too, struck me instantly. Goin where the Southern cross the Dog. The singer repeated
the line three time, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.
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Music did bring me to the gutter. It brought me to sleep on the levee on the Mississippi River, on
the cobblestones, broke and hungry. And if youve ever slept on cobblestones or had nowhere to
sleep, you can understand why I began [The St. Louis Blues] with I hate to see the evening sun
go down. W. C. Handy
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At any rate, when I was a kid in Kansas City very often I used to hear the blues. There were blind
guitar players who would sing the blues on street corners. There were people plunking the blues
on beat up old pianos. That was of course before the days of the jukebox and the radio. In those
days, almost everybody who could afford to have a piano had one, and played them in their
homes. And so you heard a lot of music. Well, at any rate, I was very much attracted to the blues.
I remember even now some of the blues verses that I used to hear as a child in Kansas City. And so
I, in my early beginnings at poetry writing, tried to weave the blues into my poetry.
- Langston Hughes (1959)
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Southern Road
Sterling A. Brown
Swing dat hammer--hunh-Steady, bo;
Swing dat hammer--hunh-Steady, bo;
Aint no rush, bebby,
Long ways to go.
Burner tore his--hunh-Black heart away;
Burner tore his--hunh-Black heart away;
Got me life, bebby,
An a day.
Gals on Fifth Street--hunh-Son done gone;
Gals on Fifth Street--hunh-Son done gone;
Wifes in de ward, bebby,
Babes not bon.
My ole man died--hunh-Cussin me;
My ole man died--hunh-Cussin me;
Ole lady rocks, bebby,
Huh misery.
Doubleshackled--hunh-Guard behin;
Doubleshackled--hunh-Guard behin;
Ball an chain, bebby,
On my min.
White man tells me--hunh-Damn yo soul;
White man tells me--hunh-Damn yo soul;
Got no need, bebby,
To be tole.
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Lyrics
The 12-bar blues usually has two successive lines of text forming a pair known
as a single couplet. The second line generally repeats the rst; enabling a blues
singer time to improvise a rhyming third line, while singing the second.
Music
Students will:
Learn about two prominent Harlem Renaissance blues
singers: Bessie Smith and Clara Smith
Analyze the lyrics of two Blues songs
Learn techniques for analyzing vocal and musical style
Materials
Recordings:
Smith, Bessie, Down Hearted Blues
Smith, Clara, Broken Busted Blues
(Note: A CD of these works is included with this kit.)
Van Vechten, Carl, Negro Blues Singers: An appreciation of
Three Coloured Artists Who Excel in an Unusual and Native
Medium.
Introduction
Tell the students that they are going to learn about two singers
from the Jazz Age: Bessie Smith and Clara Smith. Provide brief
biographical accounts of each singer.
Bessie Smith (1894-1937) b. Tennessee. Blues singer, known as
The Empress of the Blues. Began touring in her teens. At the
age of 29 her Columbia recording Down-Hearted Blues/Gulf
Coast Blues sold 780,000 copies in six months. Played almost
entirely in all-black theaters. Died in 1937 after a car accident.
Clara Smith (1894-1935) Blues singer who was the second bestselling artist after Bessie Smith on the Coumbia label. Moved to
New York in 1923. Died in 1935.
Development
Music
Tell the students that Bessie Smith was known for her voice.
She made no attempts to sound pretty. Her direct, forceful,
growling voice and her songs reected her working class background.
Listen to the recording of Clara Smith, Broken Busted Blues.
Discussion (from worksheet):
What is this song about?
What is the mood of the music?
How does the singer convey the mood and meaning of the
text?
Read excerpts from the article, Negro Blues Singers by Carl
Van Vechten.
Tell the class that Van Vechten was a writer who was born
in 1880 (d. 1964). He moved to New York in 1906 where he
worked as a music and dance critic. He was of Caucasian descent, but he was very interested in promoting the work of black
artists. In 1926 he wrote a controversial novel entitled Nigger
Heaven. Throughout his life he photographed and wrote about
life in New York, and often visited Harlem.
Discussion:
What does Van Vechten say about Bessie Smith and Clara
Smith?
How does he describe their voices? Their performances?
What are the factors that he says contributed to their popularity?
Do you agree with his observations?
Activity
Activity Extension
Music
A brief introduction to the performer, including background, musical style, and importance
A playlist
A written script to introduce each work on the show
Supplementary Materials
The next few pages include materials that may be used with the Great Blues Singers lesson plan.
Included are photos and biographies of the artists, and an essay by Carl Van Vechten: Negro
Blues Singers.
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A trip to Newark is a career, and so I was forced to rise from the dinner table on Thanksgiving
night shortly after eight oclock if I wished to hear Bessie Smith sing at the Orpheum Theatre in
that New Jersey City at a quarter of ten. I rose with eagerness, however, and so did my guests.
Bessie Smith, the Queen of the Blues, whose records sell into gures that compete with the circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, was to sing in Newark arid Bessie Smith, who makes long
tours of the South where her rich voice reaches the ears of the race from which she sprang, bad
not been heard in the vicinity of New York, save through the horn of the phonograph, for over a
year.
The signs and tokens were favorable. When we gave directions to the white taxicab driver
at Park Place, he demanded, Going to hear Bessie Smith? Yes, we replied. No good trying,
he assured us. You cant get in. Theyve been hanging on the chandeliers all the week. Nevertheless, we persevered, spurred on perhaps by a promise on the part of the management that a
box would be reserved for us. We arrived, however, to discover that this promise had not been
kept. It had been impossible to hold the box; the crowd was too great.
Day jes nacherly eased into dat box, one of the ushers explained insouciantly. However,
Leigh Whipper, the enterprising manager of the theatre, eased them out again.
Once seated, we looked out over a vast sea of happy black facestwo comedians were
exchanging jokes on the stage. There was not a mulatto or high yellow visible among these
people who were shouting merriment or approval after every ribald line. Where did they all come
from? ln Harlem the Negroes are many colors, shading to white, but these were all chocolate
browns and blues. Never before had I seen such an audience save at typical Negro camp-meetings in the far South.
The comedians were off. The lights were lowered. A new placard, reading BESSIE SMITH,
appeared in the frames at either side of the proscenium. As the curtain lifted, a jazz band, against
a background of plum-coloured hangings, held the full stage. The saxophone began to moan; the
drummer tossed his sticks. One was transported involuntarily, inevitably, to a Harlem cabaret.
Presently, the band struck up a slower and still more mournful strain. The hangings parted and a
great brown woman emergedshe was the size of Fay Templeton in her Weber and Fields days,
and she was even garbed similarly, in a rose satin dress, spangled with sequins, which swept away
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from her trim ankles. Her face was beautiful, with the rich, ripe beauty of southern darkness, a
deep bronze brown, like her bare arms.
She walked slowly to the footlights.
Then, to the accompaniment of the wailing, muted brasses, the monotonous African beat of the drum, the dromedary glide of the pianists ngers over the responsive keys, she
began her strange rites in a voice full of shoutin and moanin and prayin and sufferin, a wild,
rough Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, released between rouged lips and the whitest of teeth,
the singer swaying slightly to the rhythm.
Yo treated me wrong;
I treated yo right;
I wok fo yo full day an night.
Yo brag to women
I was yo fool,
So den I got dose sobbin hahted Blues.
And now, inspired partly by the lines, partly by the stumbling strain of the accompaniment, partly by the power and magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman and
her plangent African voice, quivering with pain and passion, which sounded as if it had been
developed at the sources of the Nile, the crowd burst into hysterical shrieks of sorrow and lamentation. Amens rent the air. Little nervous giggles, like the shivering of venetian glass, shocked the
nerves.
Its true I loves yo, but I wont take mistreatments any mo.
Dats right, a girl cried out from under our box.
All I wants is yo pitcher in a frame;
All 1 wants is yo pitcher in a frame; When yo gone I kin see yo jes duh same.
Oh, Lawdy! Lawdy! The girl beneath us shook with convulsive sobbing.
Use gwine to staht walkin cause
I got a wooden pah o shoes;
Gwine to staht walkin cause I got
a wooden pah o shoes;
Gwine keep on walkin till I lose
dese sobbin hahted Blues.
The singer disappeared, and with her her magic. The spell broken, the audience relaxed
and began to chatter. The band played a gayer tune.
Once again, Bessie Smith came out, now clad in a clinging garment fashioned of beads of
silver steel. More than ever she was like an African empress, more than ever like a conjure woman.
Im gwineter sing dose mean ornery cussed Wokhouse Blues, she shouted.
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II
If Bessie Smith is crude and primitive, she represents the true folk-spirit of the race. She sings Blues
as they are understood and admired by the coloured masses. Of the artists who have communicated the Blues to the more sophisticated Negro and white public, I think Ethel Waters is the best.
In fact, to my mind, as an artist, Miss Waters is superior to any other woman stage singer of her
race.
She renes her comedy, renes her pathos, renes even her obscenities. She is such an expert mistress of her effects that she is obliged to expend very little effort to get over a line, a song,
or even a dance. She is a natural comedienne and not one of the kind that has to work hard. She is
not known as a dancer, but she is able, by a single movement of her body to outline for her public
the suggestion of an entire dance. In her singing she exercises the same subtle skill. Some of her
songs she croons; she never shouts. Her methods are precisely opposed to those of the crude coon
shouter, to those of the authentic Blues singer, and yet, not for once, does she lose the veridical Negro atmosphere. Her voice and her gestures are essentially Negro, but they have been thought out
and restrained, not prettied, but stylized. Ethel Waters can be languorous or emotional or gay,
according to the mood of her song, but she is always the artistic interpreter of the many-talented
race of which she is such a conspicuous member.
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III
When we listen to Clara Smith we are vouchsafed another manifestation of the genius of the Negro for touching the heart through music. Like Bessie Smiththey are not sisters despite the fact
that once, I believe, they appeared in a sister-act in vaudevilleClara is a crude purveyor of the
pseudo-folksongs of her race. She employs, however, more nuances of expression than Bessie. Her
voice utters agonizingly between tones. Music critics would say that she sings off the key. What
she really does, of course, is to sing quarter tones. Thus she is justiably billed as the Worlds
greatest moaner. She appears to be more of an artist than Bessie, but I suspect that this apparent
artistry is spontaneous and uncalculated. As she comes upon the stage through folds of electric
blue hangings at the back, she is wrapped in a black evening cloak bordered with white fur. She
does not advance, but hesitates, turning her face in prole. The pianist is playing the characteristic
strain of the Blues. Clara begins to sing:
All day long Im worried;
All day long Im blue;
Im so awfully lonesome,
I don know what to do;
So I ask yo, doctor,
See if yo kin n
Somethin in yo satchel
To pacify my min.
Doctor! Doctor!
(Her tones become poignantly pathetic; tears roll down her cheeks.)
Write me a prescription fo duh Blues
Duh mean ole Blues.
(Her voice dies away in a mournful wail of pain and she buries her head in the curtains.)
Clara Smiths tones uncannily take on the colour of the saxophone; again of the clarinet.
Her voice is powerful or melancholy, by turn, it tears the blood from ones heart. One learns from
her that the Negros cry to a cruel Cupid is as moving and elemental, as is his cry to God, as expressed in the Spirituals.
- Reprinted from Vanity Fair, Vol. 26, no. 1 (1926): 67, 106, 108.
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Music
Students will:
Listen to the music of the Duke Ellington Orchestra
Learn to identify the general characteristics of jazz music
Learn about trade clubs from the 1920s, such as the
Cotton Club
Materials
Recordings:
Duke Ellington Orchestra, Black and Tan Fantasy
(Note: A CD of this work is included with this kit.)
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Burns, Ken, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club from Jazz: A History of Americas Music
Quote from R.D. Darrell, a NY music critic
Hughes, Langston, Ten Basic Elements of Jazz
Background
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Introduction
Development
Activity
Music
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Supplementary Materials
The next few pages include materials that may be used with the Duke Ellington at the Cotton
Club lesson plan. Included is biographical information on Duke Ellington and his band, an excerpt from the book Jazz: A History of Americas Music, a quotation by New York music critic
R.D. Darrell, and the Ten Basic Elements of Jazz by Langston Hughes.
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-excerpt from Jazz: A History of Americas Music, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns.
Duke Ellington and his orchestra opened at the Cotton Club on December 4, 1927, and stayed for
almost four years. When I began my work, Ellington recalled, jazz was a stunt, something different. Not everybody cared for jazz and those who did felt that it wasnt the real thing unless they
were given a shock sensation of loudness or unpredictability, along with the music. American
popular music had always exploited the exotic- Oriental-sounding dances, songs with Hawaiian
or American-Indian or African-American themes- anything that seemed to add novelty and spice.
Cotton Club audiences now thought they heard in Ellingtons new music, with its array of growls
and moans and cries, its novel voicings and pervasive sensuality, echoes of Africa- which was just
what they had trooped up from Harlem to hear.
Ellington fully understood the absurdity of much that went on at the Cotton Club. That part was
degrading and humiliating to both Negroes and whites, he said. But there was another part of
it that was wonderful. The Cotton Club was a classy spot, he remembered: unruly guests were
politely asked to be quiet and if they failed to take the hint were gently and rmly removed. (At
the Kentucky Club theyd been given Mickey Finns.) He loved all the elegance, enjoyed meeting
celebrities and getting to know the women in the chorus, even came to like playing cards with the
mobsters who ran the place. The club provided him with a priceless training ground, taught him
how to produce on deadline, how to showcase talented people, even how to disguise the limitations of those less talented. A lot of people worked as hard as hell to put those shows togehter,
he remembered. That was the Cotton Club spirit. Work, work, work. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Get it down ne... We knew we had a standard of performance to match every night. We
knew we couldnt miss a lick. And we rarely did. In any case, nothing could demean Duke Ellington because he refused ever to be demeaned.
Even in the jittery old lm of him enjoying his success at the Cotton Club, surrounded by dancers wearing some white choreographer ludicrous notion of African costume, he remains somehow
set apart at the piano in his white tails, invincibly dignied, in on the joke that is being played on
everybody else. In 1929, when he appeared in a short called Black and Tan, in which two black
comedians performed stereotyped roles-stumbling, shiftless, illiterate, overly fond of alcohol- he
was portrayed precisely as what he already was, a handsome, elegant, hardworking composer.
And, while the jungle music tag would remain with him for a time, neither distant Africa nor
the perverse version of it that helped lure hites to Harlem was ever his source of inspiration. For
that, he would always draw upon what he called the everyday life and customs of the Negro,
as the titles of the tunes that seemed to pour effortlessly from his pen during his Cotton Club
years attest: Black Beauty, Jubilee Stomp, New Orleans Low Down, Swampy River,
Stevedore Stomp, Dicty Glide, Parlor Social Stomp, Harlem River Quiver, Harlem
Flat Blues, Memphis Wail, Mississippi Moan, The Breakfast Dance, Rent Party Blues,
Saturday Night Function. Like his mother and father, like his teachers at William Lloyd Garrison High School in segregated Washington, Duke Ellington continued to manifest what he called
pride... the greatest race pride no matter what else was going on around him. His goal was to
write Negro music, he said, to express Negro feelings put to rhythm and tune. I am not
playing jazz, he told one of his rst interviewers. I am trying to play the natural feelings of a
people. He was, in the admiring parlance of the time, A Race man.
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Music
RHYTHM In jazz this is not limited to percussion beats alone. The variations of volume, tone, and pitch may also be used in
such a way as to give to a jazz performance
additional accents of sound-rhythm, played
against a variety of counter-rhythms supplied by the percussion.
HARMONY In jazz, harmony makes frequent use of the blue note, the blue scale,
the seventh and ninth chords, and the close
harmony of the old barbershop style or
chromatic singing, which is carried over into
instrumentation.
BREAK This is a very brief syncopated interlude, usually of two to four bars, between
musical phrases often improvised in
unwritten jazz. Armstrong is famous for his
breaks.
RIFF This is a single rhythmic phrase repeated over and over. usuaily as a background to
the Lead rrelody. A riff may be used also as a
melodic theme in itself.
Music
Students will:
Learn about the life and work of Harlem Renaissance
artist William Grant Still
Analyze the use of the blues idiom in a piece of
modern American classical music
Write a critical review of the Afro-American
Symphony
Materials
Recording:
Still, William Grant, Afro-American Symphony
(Note: A CD of this work is included in this kit)
Quotes from William Grant Still, on the Afro-American
Symphony
Introduction
Accomplishments:
Music
The early 20th century saw the birth of three new kinds of
music that all had African-American roots: Ragtime, Blues,
and Jazz. These genres featured mainly black performers, but
were becoming more popular with white listeners; because of
black (nightclubs)speakeasies, availability of recordings, and
increased recognition in arts for African-Americans.
Classical music was an imported European tradition which was
just starting to nd an American voice. It had a history of being
patronized by the aristocracy, and associations with the upperclass were still prevalent in the 1920s.
How did Grant Still t into the American musical scene in the
20s?
Development
Music
Activity
Activity Extension
Have students attend a classical music concert and write a review of one of the pieces.
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Supplementary Materials
The next few pages include materials that may be used with the William Grant Still and the AfroAmerican Symphony lesson plan. Included is a photo of William Grant Still, and quotations from
his written works.
William Grant Still was an American composer and conductor, and the rst black to conduct a
professional symphony orchestra in the United States. Though a prolic composer of operas, ballets, symphonies, and other works, he was best known for his Afro-American Symphony (1931).
Still was brought up by his mother and grandmother in Little Rock, Ark., and studied medicine
at Wilberforce University, Ohio, before turning to music. He rst studied composition at Oberlin
Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, then under the conservative George W. Chadwick at the
New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, and later under Edgard Varse during the latters
most radical avant-garde period. The diversity of Stills musical education was extended when, in
the 1920s, he worked as an arranger for the dance-band leader Paul Whiteman and for the blues
composer W.C. Handy. In 1939 he married and settled in Los Angeles. Early orchestral works
include Darker America (1924) and From the Black Belt (1926) for chamber orchestra.
Stills concern with the position of the blacks in U.S. society is reected in many of his works,
notably the Afro-American Symphony; the ballets Sahdji (1930), set in Africa and composed
after extensive study of African music, and Lenox Avenue (1937); and the operas The Troubled
Island (1938; produced 1949), with a libretto by Langston Hughes, and Highway No. 1, U.S.A.
(produced 1963 and 1977).
Stills compositions from the mid-1930s show the jazz band as a major inuence on his
eclectic musical style. He made considerable use of material in the Negro stylethough rarely
borrowing actual melodiesand preferred simple, commercial harmonies and orchestration,
the use of which, however, was characterized by the highest professionalism and seriousness of
purpose.
- adapted from William Grant Still, The Encyclopedia Brittanica Online 2006,
http://www.brittanica.com.
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_______________________________________
Long before writing this symphony I had recognized the musical value of the Blues and had
decided to use a theme in the Blues idiom as the basis for a major symphonic composition. When
I was ready to launch this project I did not want to use a theme some folk singer had already created, but decided to create my own theme in the Blues idiom.2
_______________________________________
I had chosen a denite goal, namely, to elevate Negro musical idioms to a position of dignity and
effectiveness in the elds of symphonic and operatic music American music is a composite of all
the idioms of all the people comprising this nation, just as most Afro-Americans who are ofcially classed as Negroes are products of the mingling of several bloods. This makes us individuals,
and that is how we should function, musically and otherwise.3
W.G. Still, from liner notes for a recording of the Afro-American Symphony, made by Karl Krueger and
the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, 1965.
1
W.G. Still, from a speech to a Composers Workshop, annual convention of National Association of Negro Musicians, Los Angeles, CA, August 17, 1967.
2
W.G. Still, from A Composers Viewpoint, Black Music in Our Culture. Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1970.
3
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Additional Resources
*Not included in this kit
The Blues
Duke Ellington
at the Cotton Club
Music
Afro-American
Symphony
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CORE CONCEPT:
Learning in, through and about the arts develops understanding of the
creative process and appreciation of the importance of creative work.
It was our goal to provide examples that will help you begin exploring the Harlem Renaissance
through an interdisciplinary approach. We hope that you will build upon each of the suggested
ideas and activities as you introduce the Harlem Renaissance to your students.
Music