Jazz Symphony

Nobody expects jazz musicians to play symphonies. But some high-brow concert audiences still think that symphonic musicians can play jazz. Symphonies are made to be played in concert halls for people who buy tickets to listen to them; the best jazz is made up on the spur of the moment, belongs in the jam session or the dance hall. Last week in Philadelphia's mid-Victorian Academy of Music, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, under platinum-blond Maestro Leopold Stokowski, jiggled and swayed, did their best to lose their educated musician's sense of discipline, tried embarrassingly to get hot. The result was pretty tepid, but not their fault. William Grant Still, Negro composer of the Afro-American Symphony, had asked for it by writing a new Symphony in G Minor based on jazz, blues and other American musical idioms.

Subtitled Song of a New Race, Composer Still's newest work purports to "point musically to changes wrought in a people through the progressive and transmuting spirit of America." Its four movements are labeled "Yearning," "Sorrow," "Humor" and "Aspiration." Pleasantly sentimental in the moments when it was not jazzy, the score was more impressive in its clear professional instrumentation (Composer Still once orchestrated for Paul Whiteman) than through its intrinsic musical qualities. Minus its jazz content it might possibly have been a better symphony; minus its symphonic pretensions, its jazz moments would certainly have been better jazz.

U. S. "nationalist" composers have long sought to combine these two musical styles, to create a type of symphony that is peculiarly a U. S. product. Jazz, or "Afro-American" symphonists prominent in recent seasons have included: Negro Composer William L. Dawson, who conducts the Tuskegee Choir, and whose Negro Folk Symphony No. 1 was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Conductor Stokowski three years ago; Otto Cesana, onetime staff composer at Manhattan's Radio City, whose two jazz-inspired symphonies have been broadcast by Radio Maestro Erno Rapee; 23-year-old Radio Arranger Morton Gould, whose Swing Symphonette is scheduled for performance later this season.

George Gershwin, Louis Gruenberg, John Alden Carpenter, most famous of U. S. nationalist composers, have avoided jazz symphonies, contenting themselves with writing rhapsodies, operas, ballets, tone-poems. Loudest pooh-poohing of their efforts has come, not from high-brow critics and musicians, but from swing and hot jazz fans who find this symphonic jazz stiff and imitative.

Composer Still, who is rated today as one of the more gifted of younger U. S. composers, has held two Guggenheim Fellowships and lives in Los Angeles. He was born of educated parents in Woodville, Miss., in 1895. He got his early musical training in Little Rock, Ark., where his mother taught high-school courses in Literature. Subsequently he attended Wilberforce University, Oberlin Conservatory and Boston's New England Conservatory, studied later with Modernist Edgar Varese in New York. Shy and retiring by temperament, he avoids publicity, says: "My most characteristic trait seems to be my utter inability to retain names in my memory." His compositions are almost all orchestral, include, besides the two symphonies, three ballets (Sahdji, La Gidablesse, The Sorcerer) ; Lenox Avenue for chorus and orchestra, written especially for broadcasting, and numerous tone-poems. His Afro-American Symphony has been played in Berlin, Leipzig, and Stuttgart, as well as in Philadelphia by Stokowski and in Manhattan by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra under Hans Lange.

Serious Composer Still has few diversions. His favorite: "The study of life with a view to learning that which will enable me to make my life more serviceable to mankind."

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