NPR Documentaries

If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson sing “Deep River,” you’ve heard an immortal concert spiritual by Harry Burleigh. His name won’t appear on the youtube captions – and yet Burleigh’s “Deep River” isn’t a mere arrangement. I unpack the genesis of “Deep River” – its surprising origins as an obscure “church militant” spiritual, its indebtedness to Antonin Dvorak, its subsidiary theme composed by Burleigh himself. The performances (other than Marian Anderson’s) were recorded in concert by the exceptional African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. It was my pleasure to be the pianist.

The show argues that Burleigh was a major creative force – more than the pivotal transcriber of spirituals as concert songs. “Burleigh consistently refused to participate in movements he considered separatist or chauvinistic,” writes Jean Snyder in her Burleigh biography. He believed that artists, not politicians, would most effect progressive change. “They are the true physicians who heal the ills of mankind,” he wrote. “They are the trailblazers. They find new worlds.” Burleigh’s own life story is a parable of faith. In New York City, opportunities did not merely arise in spite of his skin color; sometimes, they materialized because – dignified and composed — he was self-evidently a young Black man unusual in character, talent, and promise. In the long view, Burleigh commences a high lineage of Black vocalists whose renderings of the songs of Black America are buoyed by a courageous optimism. His first two great successors, both of whom he knew and admired, were Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson. Closing the NPR show, I ask: “Is Burleigh’s ‘deep river’ of common humanity a thing of the past?

Lawrence Tibbett was chosen by George Gershwin to make the first recordings of Porgy’s songs from Porgy and Bess. But Tibbett did not sing them at the Alvin Theatre – Todd Duncan (called by Gershwin “the Black Tibbett”) did. Gershwin wanted a Black Porgy onstage, and Tibbett was white.  He was also the supreme American operatic baritone of his (or any other) time. He would have been a peerless Porgy.

How to unpack all of this? I’m helped by Thomas Hampson, Conrad L. Osborne, and George Shirley -- and also by John McWhorter, who says: Though the notion that “white people should be allowed to sing like Black people” was “once OK,” today a white baritone singing and acting “Black” would “be hunted to a different planet.” This type of thinking, McWhorter argues, should be “reconsidered” – Tibbett singing Porgy embodies “an American artform evaluable in itself that need not be seen as mocking.”

As McWhorter happens to be a professional linguist, I asked him the most obvious question. He answered that, in the context of linguistic practice in 1935, Tibbett “sounds authentic to me.”

Sampling a terrific new 10-CD Tibbett tribute on Marston Records, I also include stunning Tibbett radio performances of songs by Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, and of aria by Verdi. And I marvel that such an artist could once command a vast commercial radio audience.

One of the most remarkable developments in classical music today is the profusion of gifted Black South African opera singers graduating from the University of Cape Town and winding up on major stages in Europe and the United States. Why and how is that happening? As I was recently in South Africa, I enjoyed an opportunity to try and find out. The outcome is the most recent of my “More than Music” documentaries on National Public Radio. 

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South Africa is a “singing country.” In segregated Black townships, under apartheid, singing was inherent to church and school. And it became commonplace for Black high schoolers to sing selections from oratorios. With the end of apartheid in 1991, the cork was out of the bottle. By 2000, more than 90 per cent of the opera students in Cape Town were Black. 

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As remarkable: casting in opera became color-blind virtually overnight. In the US, opera companies and audiences resisted seeing Black tenors sing opposite white sopranos. Today, the acrimony continues over who should sing what, and whether the entire enterprise is “colonialist.”

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Here is the soprano Goitsemang Lehobye, whom you can hear singing Verdi and Gershwin on my “More than Music” show: “I want to sing [Puccini’s] Madame Butterfly one day. But am I not going to do it because I’m not Japanese, I’m not Asian? I come from a place where we don’t think like that. When you get onstage, you pretend to be what you’re supposed to be. And life goes on.”

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And here is the tenor Sakhumzi Martins, whom I (surreptitiously) recorded – in Fish Hook, South Africa — in a rapturous rendition of “Maria,” from West Side Story: “It’s a shame what Black Americans are facing. In South Africa, for you to get cast, you have to be  hard worker. There’s no short way. The opportunities are quite slim, so you have to work and sweat. We have learned not to take things personally. It’s just business, you have to want it more than the next person. So it’s got nothing to do with color [who gets chosen]. We all know one another. In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

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And here is John McWhorter, quoted on my radio show: ”To a Black American, some Africans cam seem almost oddly secure and joyous – they don’t seem to have a basic sense of whiteness as an insult to them.”

The vanishing presence of the arts in the American experience has implications for America’s reputation abroad, and for its pursuit of foreign policy goals. If the US is in fact embarking on a new Cold War, the cultural Cold War with the USSR is urgently pertinent. This “More than Music” program is based on my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. In a nutshell: the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom was initially a seminal Cold War propaganda instrument. In my book, I argue that, by claiming that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art, it failed to produce credible propaganda. Far more successful was cultural diplomacy with the Soviet Union, beginning in 1959 with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic (a visit about which I have new things to say). But as the Cold War waned, so did cultural diplomacy. So much so that when in 1986 Vladimir Horowitz triumphantly returned to Russia, Ambassador Arthur Hartman had to raise funds on his own. Today, cultural diplomacy could be a formidable tool in, say, Central Africa, where the US is vying with China to exert influence. My “More than Music” show features remarkable testimony from Alexander Laskaris, the US Ambassador to Chad – who recently hosted the African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. You can hear Sidney Outlaw sing “I am a Pilgrim of Sorrow” for fishermen on an island in Chad – and hear them sing a fishing song of their own in response. John Beyrle, former US Ambassador to Russia, contextualizes this vignette. Beyrle persuasively extols cultural diplomacy. He also worries that the arts today wind up “on the chopping block.”

In my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, I call “an antipathy to jazz” one of the defining attributes of American classical music during the interwar decades. I’ve also written a lot about “the jazz threat.” In the US, jazz bore a Black taint; it was linked to brothels and nightclubs; it was declasse. Henry Ford’s notorious Dearborn Independent denounced jazz as a “morally filthy” alliance of crude African-Americans and clever Jewish “merchandizers.” European-born composers more greatly esteemed jazz than their American colleagues.

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All of this feeds the topic here. Eventually, I ask Michael Dease if the jazz threat persists. His short answer is: yes – jazz remains more prestigious abroad. A nation’s music anchors its identity. That America’s music is formidably Black creates tensions that continue to stress the national fabric.

 I document the impact of a remarkable contextualized performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony by Delta David Gier and his singular South Dakota Symphony last February – and ponder its significance for the future of embattled American orchestras striving to retain pertinence today. Shostakovich’s symphony was composed during the Nazis’ strangling 872-day siege of Leningrad . . . 

What if George Gershwin, a contemporary of Aaron Copland, had lived as long as Copland did – and died in 1988 at the age of 90 rather than in 1937 at the age of 38? I then turn to the music historian Mark Clague, who heads the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan. Mark memorably responds: 

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“One of the most powerful experiences I had researching Gershwin’s music was at the Library of Congress looking through his letters – and I found one in which he was speculating about the projects he would undertake after Porgy and Bess. One of them was a symphony. It was like a punch to the heart to read about what George Gershwin might have done had he not died at the age of 38. It would have completely changed what we think of as American music. . . 

Harry Burleigh, who turned spirituals into concert songs sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, wrote in 1917 that “the voice is not nearly so important as the spirit” in performing his historic arrangements. George Shirley, still singing at the age of eighty-nine, is an artist who today gloriously affirms Burleigh’s claim. In 1961, Shirley became the first Black tenor to sing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera. He subsequently pursued a notable international career. Today, he continues to sing in concert. It is my privilege to sometimes accompany him . . .

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The Shirley tenor remains strong and true. If its firmness and luster are compromised, in their place is a different kind of steadiness: to stand still and peer deep. Shirley says of Marian Anderson: “She was attuned in such a manner that the spirit sang through her.” And so it does when George Shirley sings Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River” (go to 43:00).

While the present-day conflation of the arts with instruments for social justice is dangerously overdrawn, some musical experiences are unquestionably therapeutic, and some composers are more wholesome than others. Of Lou Harrison’s music, I observe: 

“In today’s terms, it was ‘global’ and ‘inclusive.’ It celebrates ‘diversity.’ He was an early apostle for gay rights. He campaigned for world peace. He enfolded both East and West – without ever dabbling. ’Globalization,’ we are told, can mean diffusion – a thinning of the cultural fabric, an unmooring from tradition. Lou Harrison – the man, the musician — was both global and anchored. He was a composer far ahead of his time. We should aspire to catch up with him.”

Kurt Weill, a refugee from Nazi Germany, turned himself into one of Broadway’s leading composers – an amazing feat of assimilation. After the war, he only returned to Europe once, in 1947  – and reported: “Strangely enough, wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.” How does that sentiment play today? I here treat Weill’s odyssey as a lesson in immigration.  The commentators include the social critic John McWhorter and the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke, both of whom reference Weill’s anti-apartheid musical Lost in the Stars (1949) – an implicit condemnation of Jim Crow.

The Star-Spangled Banner is controversial today for three reasons. The first is that Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words, owned slaves. The second is that the little-known third verse references “hireling and slave” – and we’re not sure what that means. The third is that American identity is being scrutinized as never before in living memory – what does it mean, right now, when we sing “land of the free”?

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The music historian Mark Clague tells us that Key both owned slaves and, as an attorney, freed nearly 200 enslaved Black Americans. He explains that “slave,” in Key’s third verse, doesn’t refer to African-Americans (which, he adds, doesn’t let Key off the hook). And Mark eloquently makes a case for retaining The Star-Spangled Banner – with two revisions. As part of our national inheritance, it stands witness to our history; it changes significance over time; it instigates a virtual “conversation” about the shifting meaning of American patriotism. Additional commentary: bass-baritone Davone Tines, historian Allen Guelzo.

Fill in the blanks:

“This was performed and broadcast to millions of people. And something that should resonate with all of us today is the confluence of fine art and popular art and a mass medium – something we’ve lost in this era, when we’re being sliced into ever narrower shards of demographics. The brilliance of what xxx and xxx did was to embrace all of us, in the best [Walt] Whitman spirit. To make all of us one nation, one community. How I wish we had something like that today.”

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The blanks read “Bernard Herrmann” and “Norman Corwin.” The speaker is Murray Horwitz, former head of cultural programing for National Public Radio. My topic: the radio plays of the 1930s and 1940s generally, and the Corwin/Herrmann “Whitman” (June 20, 1944) specifically.

Art promoting social justice is everywhere upon us. It’s what our composers and visual artists and playwrights want to produce, it’s what presenters want to present, it’s what our foundations want to fund. We all feel that we’re responding to a state of emergency, especially with regard to issues of race and social justice – and that includes composer of classical music. Mexico, in the 1920s and ‘30s, was a place where political art flourished. The political murals of Diego Rivera, the political music of Silvestre Revueltas rose above ideology and propaganda to inspirationally define a nation. How and why that happened – and what we can learn from it today – is the topic I pursue.

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I’m joined by the social critic John McWhorter, author of the best-selling Woke Racism, who warns that woke activism can diminish the arts (go to 34:50). 

At the conclusion of this show, Jenn White asks me:

“In the Foreword to your new book Dvorak’s Prophecy, George Shirley – the first Black tenor to sing leading roles at the Met — writes: ‘Because of our current conversation about race, we now observe a seemingly desperate effort to make up for lost time, to present Black faces in the concert hall. But if it’s going to become a permanent new way of thinking, there has to be new understanding.’ What does he mean by that?”

I answer:

“You know, I went to a prestigious liberal arts college [it was Swarthmore]. I graduated a long time ago, in 1970. I majored in History. And in my four years there I never once heard the name  W. E. B. Du Bois. And I certainly did not read Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which today I regard as pretty much obligatory reading for educated Americans. Du Bois, his book – they’re part of a usable American past, something we can all utilize as an anchor. George Shirley references ‘a seemingly desperate effort.’ What is this about? It says that we have to rethink the concert experience in our concert halls, on our campuses. We need to rethink the learning the experience. It’s not enough just to perform Black classical music. We should use the story of Du Bois, the story of Dvorak, the story of Harry Burleigh. We need to tell stories about the American past in order to anchor a constructive American future.”

The show narrates in considerable detail Copland’s adventures on the political left – and the price he paid: a 1953 interrogation by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, which we re-enact.

If the New World Symphony remains the most beloved symphony composed on American soil, I think that’s because in the sadness and poignance of this work we recognize, however subliminally, an act of empathy –- Dvorak’s empathy for the African-American, born in slavery, and for the Native American, facing extinction. But there’s an elephant in the room – “cultural appropriation.”