Chapter 1

How Beethoven Came to Black America

German Musical Universalism and Black Education after the Civil War

Carl Reinecke’s Piano Sonatina in D Major, op. 47, no. 2 might seem like a strange piece of music to find in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1890. Published in Germany in 1855, the light-hearted sonatina appears out of place in the land of sharecropping, the site of the Great Migration and the violent terrain of Jim Crow. A playful exchange between the right and left hands defines most of the first movement: the right hand begins a phrase that the left hand then directly copies a beat later, almost as if lagging behind by a step. The sonatina’s second movement whizzes by quickly, beginning with a chromatic melody lurching forward in a dizzying, hurdy-gurdy motion, followed by a breezy baritone tune. The third and final movement concludes in a fashion popular in its day: a theme with variations. Set in the style of a German chorale, the theme is a classic German children’s song called “Wer hat die schönsten Schäfchen?” (“Who has the prettiest lambs?”). Composed by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in 1790 and then set to text by German Romantic poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1830, the tune was—and remains—a popular German lullaby.

Reinecke’s piano sonatinas were a beloved staple in many a piano teacher’s pedagogical repertoire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a practical and handy tool in their toolkit. And for good reason. A professor (and later director) at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music starting in 1860, Reinecke earned a reputation for being committed to students’ musical development, steeping them in a musical training that he pragmatically saw as a thorough grounding in both the basics and the classics.¹ His piano sonatinas were no exception, offering this unique mixture of German Romantic musical styles and useful technical instruction.

Figure 1. The third movement of Carl Reinecke’s Piano Sonatina in D Major, op. 47, no. 2, mm. 1–16. It is a theme and variations using the children’s song, “Wer hat die schönsten Schäfchen?” (“Who has the prettiest lambs?”) by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Johann Friedrich Reichart, first composed in 1830.

In Tuskegee, Reinecke’s sonatinas came to life again in the hands of African American students, who most likely spent hours on the piano in the newly built chapel of the Tuskegee Institute practicing tricky passages, connecting musical dots to bring out the sonatinas’ melodies, and developing their piano peddling so the pieces would not sound too muddy.² Reinecke’s popular German Romantic Hausmusik, which emanated from pianos in many homes of the middle-class intellectuals (Bildungsbürgertum) throughout German-speaking Europe, found a new home on Black students’ recital programs in the United States.

How did a piano sonatina by a German Romantic composer end up in the hands of formerly enslaved peoples in rural Alabama? The idea that the music of Reinecke and other German composers floated freely out of the windows of chapels or concert halls on African American campuses of higher education in the 1890s might strike some readers as strange or jarring since it counters our historical narratives of the rise of Black popular music in that same era.³ Yet its pervasiveness in African American musical life was no accident. Its prominence in musical education is a testament to the global power of German music in the nineteenth century and to the fierce determination of African Americans invested in performing it.

In the decades following the US Civil War (1861–65), many African Americans embarked on a project to study, perform, and teach the music of Reinecke and others. Part of the mass movement to educate African Americans in general between the 1870s and 1918, music education promised to cultivate new generations of politically minded, culturally sophisticated, and socially aware Black citizens to advance their rights in a nation that still refused to recognize them. Some believed that the respectability afforded to art music offered African Americans a way to fight denigration by white people. Racially mixed institutions of higher learning such as Oberlin College had made it their mission to educate many African American students, and the boom in Black institutions of higher learning (HBCUs) such as Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, Howard University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College during the era of Reconstruction also played a new and significant role in transforming Black American lives.

What all of these institutions espoused, and what music teachers across the United States also insisted, was that if Black students were to advance in society, they would do so through performing and listening to the “right” kind of music. The right kind of music was classical music—and even more specifically, I argue, German art music. Course offerings at HBCUs did not instruct students on the musical qualities of Black popular music, even if African American students performed it in concerts for outside audiences. Rather, students learned two-part inventions by Johann Sebastian Bach, lieder by Franz Schubert, and choral music by Felix Mendelssohn. If music was going to launch a new generation of African Americans into an era of racial equality, the music best suited to accomplish this difficult feat was that of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

This chapter explores the transatlantic and transformative power that classical music, and German music in particular, brought to African American lives in the Post-Bellum and Pre-Harlem era (1870s–1918). Central European musicians and pedagogues who had emigrated to the United States were instrumental in extolling the virtues and values of classical music across America, including in Black American homes. African Americans, in turn, internalized German Romantic ideals of musical universalism and used them to articulate their politics of racial uplift and social advancement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing, Black musicians recomposed what musical universalism looked like or sounded like, anchoring it in the racial politics of the United States and beyond.

How African American students were able to pick up and study classical music is remarkable when one considers how many impediments stood in their way. Black Americans lived in a racist, white supremacist society that employed violence and the threat of violence, erected oppressive legal systems, and dedicated resources and people to ensure that Black people had a status unequal to white Americans. Rape and lynching, white vigilantism in the South and racialized policing in the North defined many Black experiences.⁴ Black classical musicians, emboldened by transatlantic discourses of German music’s accessibility, overcame significant barriers to perform it. As this discourse of musical universalism reached new shores, it ultimately convinced Black musicians to set sail for Europe. German musicians, we will see, were integral to this generation of a new Black Atlantic network, in part because they were everywhere.

The German Music Teacher

In 1890s Niagara Falls, New York, Nathaniel Dett, a Black teenager, squirmed at the piano bench. His Austrian teacher was visibly frustrated. Dett eventually became one of the most important early composers of African American art music, but as a gifted young student he couldn’t quite seem to figure out the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F Minor. “I still have a memory of this excitable Teuton tearing his hair when I persistently played wrong notes,” Dett shared decades later in an interview. Believing Beethoven’s quick and fiery Piano Sonata in F Minor to be sentimental, Dett played it far too slowly until his teacher stopped him. The teacher demanded that Dett perform the music “as indicated and taught [him] the significance of the printed musical terms.”⁵

Although Dett may not have appreciated his teacher’s antics very much, the fact that he received instruction from a German-speaking musician is revealing. German musicians were highly sought-after commodities in American music, critical “agents of German Kultur” who disseminated German music to American audiences and quickly came to dominate the musical landscape.⁶ In fact, the German musical establishment in the United States was so powerful that in places such as New York City, Berndt Ostendorf writes, “it led some people in the music business to change their names from English to German for reasons of marketability (Clapp to Dockstader, from Gumm to Von Tilzer).”⁷

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African Americans also promulgated the notion that German musicians were superior. For example, James Monroe Trotter’s seminal 1878 text, Music and Some Highly Musical People—the first book written by and about African American musicians—is full of praise for German music. Espousing the principles of musical universalism, Trotter writes, “I have said that music speaks a language all its own, and one that is universal.”⁸ Yet how quickly Trotter pivots from a broad universalism to extolling the composers of the Austro-German musical canon. “The German race,” he concludes, “is remarkable for the intelligence, steadiness, and industry of its members, and their love for and cultivation of the art of music—these latter characteristics prevailing to a most pleasing degree among all classes of the race. Indeed, it is rare to find a German not, in some sense at least, a musician.”⁹ For decades, texts by Black writers and intellectuals on music espoused the same belief. On the eve of WWI in 1914, a writer for the prominent African American civil rights newspaper the Chicago Defender placed Germany at the center of musical greatness. “Certainly,” the author professes, “no other nation can show greater music than that which was composed by Beethoven, Mozart, and other artists from the Fatherland.”¹⁰ And no other people possessed such a mastery of it.

Indeed, the preference among African American families for Germans to teach their sons and daughters the music of Beethoven was so prevalent that the Negro Music Journal complained about it in 1903. In an editorial for the journal, the first ever Black publication dedicated to Black musicians and Black music, J. Hillary Taylor complained that too many Black families were repeatedly boasting, “ ‘My child is studying under a German teacher.’ ” He demanded that African Americans hire instructors “on their merits as teachers rather than on account of color or nationality.”¹¹

Why did German music reign supreme in the United States? For one thing, Western art music supposedly demonstrated the triumph of reason and rational thought over intellectual backwardness and primitive cultures.¹² The sophisticated harmonies, structures, and forms of instrumental music and symphonic music in particular were somehow proof of German music’s supremacy in particular, showcasing Central Europe’s advanced intellectual development and evolution away from more primitive modes of music-making.¹³ Imbued with bourgeois values, the theory of German music’s universality meant that those who did not appreciate this edifying music were themselves found lacking. It became a moral imperative to reach the culturally backward, educate the less fortunate, and uplift those in need of social and cultural transformation. However, David Gramit warns, “the status of German musical culture rested on a precariously double-edged claim: serious (and most often German) music was held to be universally valid, even though, at the same time, maintaining its prestige demanded limiting access to it along the lines of existing social divisions.”¹⁴ German musical universalism reinforced social hierarchies, in other words, even while its rhetoric of transcendentalism obscured them.¹⁵

Both white and Black Americans in the late nineteenth century saw classical music as a way to uplift American society because they linked it to moral improvement and to social status.¹⁶ Admiration of German art music was, in these terms, proof of one’s good taste. “There can be no doubt,” Douglas Shadle writes, “that the sacralization of art, fueled by the desire for German music (of whatever brand), left a lasting imprint on the culture of classical music that is still with us today.”¹⁷ By the late nineteenth century, German music dominated symphony orchestra repertoires, piano teachers assigned it in middle class American homes, American opera houses performed it, and religious communities sang it throughout the United States. German music—from Mendelssohn’s oratorios and Brahms’s German Requiem to Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s overtures—was pervasive, permeating many aspects of American life.

But there was a racial dimension to this aesthetic appreciation as well, for African Americans came to believe that classical music could be a vehicle that they could use to cross the color line. Black American elites especially sought out classical music as a way to challenge white American racist constructions of Blackness that were often tied to minstrelsy. In the midst of violence and oppression, Kevin Gaines writes, Black elites strove to distinguish themselves as “bourgeois agents of civilization” and championed the phrase “uplifting the race”—“so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance.”¹⁸ Unfortunately, racial uplift often meant reinforcing social divisions among Black people and upholding middle-class Victorian values rather than undoing them.

Classical music was imbricated in these social entrenchments defining Black American cultural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But German art music also allowed Black Americans to envision a musical world beyond the United States. The aesthetic and professional choices of Black classical musicians cannot be reduced to a binary pole of assimilation into white America on the one hand or the cultivation of an “authentically” Black identity on the other.¹⁹ As we will see, German music teachers were instrumental in forming an alternative to this binary because they supported Black students’ quests for transatlantic careers. German musicians were highly sought-after teachers who instructed African American students individually in cities around the United States, from big East Coast metropolises such as Boston and New York to Midwestern hubs like Cleveland and the western locales of Denver and San Francisco.

Working closely together in weekly lessons and sharing small physical spaces either in someone’s home or studio, German musicians and African American students formed intimate bonds. Music lessons demand close proximity, the sharing of instruments, a teacher’s hand on a student’s body to illustrate a particular technique or gesture. In musical lessons, a student and a teacher collaborate together to smooth out musical phrases, hammer out a tricky technical passage, and develop a musical idea. Lessons require both the student and the teacher to make themselves intellectually and even physically vulnerable for the sake of musical education.

Musical instruction also required a cross-racial collaboration and intimacy that both parties had to be willing to develop. In agreeing to take on a Black student (which many white teachers would not), a white teacher made a performative statement that he or she desired to share a space with someone to whom white American society was openly hostile. Black students, eagerly seeking knowledge, sometimes put themselves at risk of psychological or even physical abuse. Perhaps because of the intimacy that music lessons require, they frequently fostered lifelong bonds between Central European teachers and African American students, leading to a teacher’s advocacy and support for the student as a musician and intellectual in his or her own right. (A successful student also vindicates the teacher’s decision to admit him or her and enhances the teacher’s reputation.)

We know that these bonds between German teachers and African American pupils were long-lasting and transformative because many African American musicians spoke of them in such terms. Prominent Black classical musicians at the turn of the century such as Daisy Tapley, William Kemper Harreld, Felix Weir, Justin Holland, and Hazel Harrison touted their private training with German teachers in interviews and in press materials.²⁰ Moreover, many of the early titans of African American popular music had studied at a young age with German teachers, including James Reese Europe and the Hyers Sisters.²¹ Speaking favorably of one’s former German music teacher was a useful strategy, for it signaled to concert-goers a musician’s prestige, rigorous training, and commitment to perfecting the musical art.

Two cases in particular illustrate the transformative power, long-lasting bonds, and professional advantages that Black students gained from working with German music teachers: African American composers Scott Joplin and Harry Lawrence Freeman. Arguably the most famous composer of ragtime music, Joplin studied in the 1880s with Julius Weiss, a Jewish-German immigrant from Saxony who taught his young pupil in Texarkana, Texas, even when Joplin’s family could no longer afford a piano tutor. Years later, a financially successful Joplin sent money to an impoverished Weiss for over a decade, an act demonstrating his dedication to and admiration for his first teacher.²²

Joplin also won the support of a second German music teacher in the twentieth century who became an advocate for Joplin’s music. In 1901 Joplin became a student of the pianist and conductor Alfred Ernst, who had come to St. Louis in 1894 to conduct the St. Louis Choral-Symphony. Under Ernst’s instruction, Joplin learned music theory and discovered Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser.²³ That same year, the St. Louis Dispatch reported, “So deeply is Mr. Ernst impressed with the ability of [Joplin] that he intends to take with him to Germany next summer copies of Joplin’s work, with a view of educating the dignified disciples of … European masters into an appreciation of the real American ragtime melodies.”²⁴ Ernst’s public proclamation of Joplin’s talent and abilities most likely benefited the young composer’s career. By suggesting that Joplin’s music could find a German audience, he indicated that Joplin’s talents had merits that reached beyond white Americans and their refusal to recognize them. German audiences were the real tastemakers, after all, and if they admired Joplin’s music, then it meant his compositions were indeed worthy of listening. But by insisting that Joplin’s work could find an audience outside of the United States, Ernst, like other German teachers, planted a seed in Black students’ minds: their musicianship was appreciated beyond the shores of the United States. If white Americans would not accept them, perhaps Germans might.

Harry Lawrence Freeman, a composer of dozens of operas during the Harlem Renaissance, used his relationship with the German American composer and conductor Johann Heinrich Beck to advance his career. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1869, Freeman resolved to become a composer at the age of eighteen when he heard a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Following this musical epiphany he began writing operas and debuted two of them—Epthalia and The Martyr—at Denver’s Deutsches Theater while he was living in the city in the early 1890s. It was his time studying with Beck, however, that transformed Freeman’s career. Returning to Cleveland in 1893, Freeman trained with Beck (the first conductor of what would eventually become the Cleveland Orchestra) and became immersed in the musical language of many opera composers, including Wagner.

Beck, in turn, championed Freeman’s career and praised Freeman for his work as an opera composer. Beck helped sponsor the premiere of Freeman’s opera, The Martyr, at Cleveland’s Germania Hall on May 2, 1900, and attended a casual listening session of the opera at Freeman’s home.²⁵ Beck also conducted one of Freeman’s works, Nada, with the Cleveland Orchestra in March 1900, and he kept a copy of the score with him throughout his life.²⁶ Beck praised Freeman as having “some of the important qualities of character that made Wagner great. His compositions are wonderfully big in conception, the music faithfully portraying the sentiment of the words.”²⁷ Freeman used Beck’s ringing endorsement in his own press materials. Perhaps because of Beck’s association with Wagner in print, Freeman was dubbed the “Colored Wagner,” a title he proudly maintained throughout his career.²⁸

African American students and performers managed to keep in touch with former Central European teachers for years—sometimes even throughout their whole careers. Their memoirs, letters, and interviews with local press testify to the intimacy and adoration of these relationships. Their close bonds tell us that although white Americans were often reluctant or unwilling to teach or foster Black students, many Central European musicians were not, perhaps because they did not feel the same social pressures of American racism or because people’s perceptions of them as cosmopolitan Europeans permitted them to break social rules and work with Black students (or both).

It would be naive or foolish to believe that Central European musicians were somehow free from the politics of American racism. Nor should we see them as rescuers of Black musical talent, plucking young African Americans from a path of obscurity to reveal their true musical promise. African Americans, of course, were hungry for training, compelled by a desire to sing, play, and listen to music that consumed their thoughts. They sought out teachers, requested auditions, and set up music lessons for their own musical and intellectual growth, often at great financial and social expense.

But what remains striking is the transnational nature of these collaborations. If a Black musician were to succeed in the world of classical music, the likelihood that a musician from Central Europe—or at least from outside the United States—was behind his or her career was fairly high. They endorsed and promoted students and encouraged them to travel not only around the United States but around Europe.²⁹ The transnational nature of their relationship might have permitted German teachers to imagine how their students could build careers for themselves that were not limited to the United States. These teachers’ backgrounds, in other words, freed them from seeing Black lives and potential careers solely through the lens of American race relations. Operating outside of established institutions, together both student and teacher explored the range and fulfilled the promise of Black musical potential.

Black Students at White Institutions

The reason why African American students worked with teachers outside of conservatories of music is that many established music institutions were hostile to Black students. The number of Black students admitted at the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), the Curtis Institute of Music, and other schools was never high. Moreover, some institutions such as the Peabody Institute and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music refused to accept Black students well into the mid-twentieth century—Peabody did not admit Black students until 1949.³⁰ As Loren Kajikawa argues, music conservatories were historically “built on a culture of exclusion” that privileged white bodies and musical traditions over all others.³¹

Silence shrouds many histories of Western art music institutions and their participation in maintaining racial segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The profound consequences of the myth of Western art music’s color blindness and proclaimed meritocracy coupled with the historical realities and legacies of racism in the United States have created a fraught body of literature on the history of racial minorities at music conservatories. The few institutional histories of American music schools that mention race routinely find ways to laud their conservatories for their race relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such praise often espouses the kind of color-blind mythology that frees classical music from any social responsibility for racism.³²

For example, when approached by the Kennedy administration in 1963 to create directives against discrimination in light of the civil rights movement, NEC’s board boastfully replied, “There has never been a color bar in either the admissions or the placement policies of the Conservatory.”³³ But Black students nonetheless experienced racism at NEC. Take, for example, the experience of the NEC student Maud Cuney Hare in Boston in the 1890s. Hare was a forceful figure of the Harlem Renaissance and a musicologist whose 1936 book, Negro Music and Musicians, was a landmark piece of scholarship on Black music history. Attending the conservatory to study with Emil Ludwig and Edwin Klahre, Hare faced protest from her white roommates upon entering her college dormitory. School authorities took her roommates’ side.³⁴ Hare’s experience counters the NEC board’s boast of racial harmony.

The perceived lack of a color bar did not historically guarantee positive or progressive action to grant Black students access to classical musical education. In fact, the legacies and consequences of color blindness, meritocracy, and musical universalism shaped classical musical education itself. On the one hand, because of their belief in musical universalism, classical musical institutions admitted some Black students for study at times when they were denied access to education elsewhere. Committed to sharing classical music’s edifying powers and virtues with all of society, some teachers and musicians took on Black students who demonstrated musical talent and interest, thus practicing the gospel of musical universalism they themselves preached. On the other, the premise of “art for art’s sake” and the belief that the politics of race played no role in musical admissions or the aesthetic pleasure of a musical concert glossed over classical music’s complicity in racism and ignored the classist, racist, and gendered structures in the United States that operated against Black students.

Nonetheless, one institution played a prominent role in educating Black music students: Oberlin College.³⁵ It was such an obvious choice for African American musicians that prominent performers such as William Grant Still and Will Marion Cook publicly stated it was the only place for Black students to study.³⁶ Oberlin was in a unique position to musically educate Black students for two reasons. First, Oberlin’s commitment to educating African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was unparalleled. The core mission of Oberlin as an institution was one of radical egalitarianism. Accepting and educating Black students was essential to the institution’s identity from its founding in 1833. From 1833 until 1916, for example, Oberlin used its pre-college preparatory school as a feeder into its bachelor degree programs, thus successfully pipelining Black students into the college.³⁷ By 1899, Oberlin—a white-majority school—educated the most Black students outside of the South.³⁸ Especially prior to the end of the Civil War and the consequent founding of historically Black Southern institutions such as Fisk or Howard Universities, Oberlin shone brightly as a beacon for Black education.

What also distinguished Oberlin was its conservatory of music. In the United States, the German model of the conservatory of music served as the foundation for American conservatories of music, and Germans and German Americans were those institutions’ founders and first teachers. Founded in 1865, Oberlin’s conservatory of music was no different. Of the twenty-three faculty listed in their 1901 course catalog, only five lacked either a personal or a professional connection to Germany or Austria, and those five were lower-tiered instructors who mostly taught in the preparatory music program.³⁹ All of the primary faculty, in other words, were either German themselves (such as the music theorist Friedrich Johann Lehmann) or had studied, performed, or attended concerts there.⁴⁰ For decades, the directors of the conservatory were all German-trained musicians. Well through the 1950s, it remained a requirement for American faculty at Oberlin to have studied extensively in Central Europe.⁴¹

With its commitment to educating Black students and its prestigious German-led conservatory of music, Oberlin offered a rigorous musical education to Black classical musicians that was unmatched by any other predominantly white institution.⁴² Indeed, many of the musicians who traveled to Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries trained at Oberlin or later took lessons from Oberlin graduates. Between 1890 and 1945, Oberlin awarded over eighty degrees in music to African American students, including the composers Nathaniel Dett and William Grant Still and the pianists Roy Tibbs and Sylvia Lee, both of whom studied and made careers in German-speaking Europe.

Black students’ recital programs also show how steeped Oberlin music students were in the German musical canon.⁴³ In their senior recitals, pianists performed works by Carl Maria von Weber, Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, while organists showcased fugues by Bach and Dieterich Buxtehude.⁴⁴ German faculty at Oberlin such as Friedrich August Goerner (a product of Weimar’s Orchestra School and a student of Leopold Grützmacher) and Maurice Koessler (a graduate of the Royal Academy of Musical Performing Arts in Berlin) often played on Black student recitals as well, offering up pieces such as Josef Rheinberger’s Trio no. 3, op. 121. Oberlin faculty also wrote letters of recommendation for Black students, such as that by Arthur Heacox, a string bass player and music theorist trained in Munich, applauding Edith Baker for her discipline, scholarship, and knowledge of harmony, keyboard, counterpoint, musical form, music history, and piano literature.⁴⁵

African American musicians studied at other conservatories of music as well. But only Oberlin produced a substantially large number of musicians with wide-ranging careers. Some became music teachers at elementary schools, private piano instructors, or high school choir teachers, and others became nationally known composers or conductors. Belonging to the first generations of college-educated music students, they were instrumental in establishing music programs for Black students in the United States.

Teaching Music to the Talented Tenth: Classical Music at HBCUs

The music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was also important to Black colleges and universities in the United States, who sought to uphold the values of racial uplift and create a liberally educated Black middle class.⁴⁶ Black university students were, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, the “talented tenth,” an elite group of African Americans who would use their cultivated intellects and cultured selves to lead a new generation of African Americans into a more promising and brighter future. Established in the aftermath of the Civil War, HBCUs such as Fisk, Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse are institutions whose educational goals of intellectual and social advancement have drawn generations of African American students to them.

Figure 2. The Fisk University Choir, singing inside the Memorial Chapel, which was completed in 1892. Fisk Herald, February 1942, 12. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections.

One mission for many HBCUs was to create a conservatory of music, and they explicitly imitated schools such as NEC or Oberlin to accomplish this goal. Spelman’s 1890 course catalog, for example, states that their curriculum is “modern and progressive, employing New England Conservatory plans of teaching.”⁴⁷ By 1894, Spelman music students were learning Chopin nocturnes and singing major choral-orchestral works like Bach’s St. John’s Passion or Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

To launch their brand-new conservatories of music, HBCUs hired Oberlin’s first Black music graduates to become the leaders and founders of their conservatories of music. Oberlin’s dominance in Black schools of music was so prevalent that Oberlin alumna Edith Baker commented on it to her classmates in 1931 from her position at Fisk. “I am now in my third year teaching Harmony, School Music Methods, and Counterpoint,” she writes, “and I am also the conductor of the orchestra in the Music School of Fisk University of Nashville, Tennessee. There is a little Oberlin here for the director of the Music School and five of the teachers of nine on the faculty are Oberlinites.”⁴⁸ The list of Oberlin graduates who taught at various Black institutions was extensive.

Fisk’s department of music offers us a strong example of how classical music functioned on an HBCU campus. One of the most prestigious conservatories of music at an HBCU, the department had 132 pupils studying voice, piano, or organ by 1896. By the 1915–16 academic year, Fisk had “twenty pianos, including three concert grands, and a pedal piano, and three cabinet organs, one of which has pedals and two manuals after the manner of pipe organs, and one pipe organ,” and their music library contained over 4,000 copies of musical scores.⁴⁹ The library collected original letters by composers such as Franz Liszt, Beethoven, Wagner, and Weber.⁵⁰ By 1922, a twenty-five-member student and faculty orchestra had organized to perform symphonies and choral-orchestral works for the local community.⁵¹

For decades, the Mozart Society, a mixed choral ensemble that had formed in 1881, was a source of pride for Fisk. Throughout its history, the choir, ranging from forty to eighty students at its height, sang oratorios, requiems, and other standard choral-orchestral works by composers such as Mendelssohn, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. Although the Fisk Jubilee Singers—the more famous of the university’s two choirs—sang African American spirituals to outsiders around the United States to raise money, the Mozart Society was the choir that serviced the musical needs of the institution. One of society’s primary functions was to officiate at ceremonies, and the music they sang gave college rituals their pomp and circumstance: the Benedictus from Mozart’s Requiem and “Et resurrexit” from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor for commencement week, and George Frideric Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus at holidays.⁵²

While the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled away to perform, the Mozart Society earned adoration from students such as Du Bois at home.⁵³ After hearing the ensemble perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio, Du Bois wrote in the Fisk Herald that the Mozart Society’s concert proved that “our race, but a quarter of a century removed from slavery, can master the greatest musical compositions.”⁵⁴ If we look at a list of the musical works performed by the ensemble, it becomes clear that the “greatest musical compositions” referred to by Du Bois were from the Austro-German canon. Meeting and performing steadily throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, the group expanded their repertoire to include Bach’s B Minor Mass, Brahms’s German Requiem, Mendelssohn’s St. Paulus Oratorio, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Joseph Haydn’s Creation Oratorio.⁵⁵ “No student ever left Fisk without a deep and abiding appreciation of real music,” Du Bois boasted in his autobiography. Real music, of course, meant classical music, and usually the music of German composers.

Fisk students occasionally snuck off campus to attend concerts in Nashville. “In the gay Nineties during my college days at Fisk University,” the pianist Raymond Augustus Lawson recalled, “Walter Damrosch came to Nashville with the Metropolitan Opera Company and gave a performance of Tannhäuser. It was a thrilling experience, being the first time we had heard an opera in the South with a fine conductor, chorus, and orchestra.”⁵⁶ Listening to Wagner in segregated Nashville while attending a university often under threat of attack by white supremacists was a bold act. Yet German art music, held up as the model of progress and universalism, was the object of many music students’ affection.

Figure 3. The Mozart Society choir at Fisk University. Fisk News, November 1937, 13. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections.

In addition to hiring German-trained teachers for their music programs, Black colleges also ensured that all students took music theory and music history classes to cultivate a greater and more intimate knowledge of classical music. Their courses in theory and history also reveal the extent to which the German worldview of musical performance had been inculcated into Americans. The primary textbook assigned to students at Spelman and Fisk in the 1910s, for example, embodied these German ideals of music pedagogy. Written by two Oberlin professors, Friedrich Johann Lehmann and Arthur Heacox, the book, called A Guide Through Lessons in Harmony, emphasized a thorough training in tonal music. Students learned how to compose in the style of Martin Luther or Bach through instruction on writing four-part chorales and were also exposed to formal analysis of the music of German composers. The piano instruction offerings from Fisk University’s 1896 course catalog, as shown in figure 4, illustrate the overwhelming hegemony of the Austro-German musical canon.

German music also permeated life on HBCU campuses, and schools such as Tuskegee, Howard, and Fisk were instrumental in teaching generations of African American students about German music. In the 1880s and 1890s, many colleges and universities strove to cultivate a rich and robust musical life on their campuses. Students at Clark College and Atlanta University attended “Mozart evenings” or “Wagner evenings” to improve their musical education. On such an occasion, a student usually gave a public presentation on the life of a composer and one of the college’s music ensembles provided a live performance of the composer’s music.⁵⁷ Musical activities on Black campuses, in other words, encouraged students to perform and listen to Western art music.

Most of the repertoire that students learned at Black conservatories of music was aesthetically conservative. Students did not rehearse the music of Arnold Schoenberg, for example, and composers such as Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Francis Poulenc did not appear with much frequency on student recital programs or in their classroom instruction. Moreover, many institutions discouraged the study of opera, especially for Black women, on the grounds that it was not respectable enough for an aspiring student of a middle-class background. Rather, they focused on presenting music deemed universally great for students and the public attending their concerts.

An undertone of stoic conservatism also resonated in music pedagogy for Black students more generally. For example, the pianist Raymond Augustus Lawson, an 1896 Fisk graduate and a pupil of Ossip Gabrilowitsch in Germany, preached the values of self-discipline that were necessary to the pursuit of high art in his article for the student newspaper, the Fisk Herald, in 1915.⁵⁸ In an essay full of platitudes and beatitudes extolling in Weberian tones the virtues of hard work, he ties art music to racial advancement and portrays music as morally purposeful with proclamations. Arguing that through musical practice African Americans could “advance slowly but surely,” he preaches that classical music has the power to create moral and upstanding citizens.⁵⁹

The musical styles of Central Europe were especially desirable models for aspiring young Black musicians because of the music’s perceived seriousness and sense of purpose. Like the majority of white American classical musicians in these decades, African American classical musicians believed that works such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony far surpassed the frivolities of Italian operas or French chansons. Ergo, African American art music would be made more beautiful and listened to more seriously if its composers used German compositional techniques to express Black musical ideas and truths. In 1899, for example, a student writing for Atlanta University’s newspaper, the Scroll, asked, “Where is the great Negro composer who shall take those sweet old plantation melodies—the only distinctively native music ever produced on American soil—and use them as a basis for fugues, lullabies, nocturnes, and sonatas?”⁶⁰ For many, the future of African American art music could only be built upon a German musical foundation.

Figure 4. Fisk University Course Catalog, 1896–97. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections.

Black popular music such as ragtime, on the other hand, was the enemy. A genre of popular music that thrived between the 1890s and 1910s, it carried with it the connotations of Black minstrelsy and Black popular culture. Its most predominant musical trait was its rhythmic syncopation, a sonic signifier to many of Black American popular music. It is also precisely because of ragtime’s perceived African American musicality that white Americans mocked it. In response, Black elites argued that the music was undignified and called for African Americans to move away from it.⁶¹ For these reasons, HBCUs offered no instruction on Black popular or improvisational music, nor did they encourage students to perform it on campus.

Black institutions’ hostilities towards Black popular music cohered with established Black music criticism on the moral purposes of music education. The writers and editors of the Negro Music Journal, for example, also held the position that only art music, rather than ragtime and popular music, offered Black Americans a morally and musically sound education. Its editor J. Hillary Taylor denounced ragtime and lauded classical music on moral grounds in 1903, declaring that the “day of low, trivial, popular music should be cast aside forever.”⁶² African Americans deserved a “better art,” and the supposedly pure and noble music of Mozart and Beethoven was best suited to advance their cause of musical progress, if not enlightenment.

On the surface, musical education at HBCUs looked quite similar to the education that students at Oberlin or the NEC received. And, certainly, modeling their course catalogs and concert programming on other conservatories of music was intentional. The faculty’s degrees from those institutions also guaranteed that students at HBCUs would learn similar repertoire, musical styles, and techniques for mastering the music of “the great masters.” Yet the motivations behind learning classical music differed greatly, dictated as they were by the sharp and violent politics of racism and racial segregation in the United States.

Heading to Europe

In 1890s Niagara Falls, Nathaniel Dett’s training with his Austrian music teacher frustrated them both. But an encounter with a German visitor and acquaintance of the composer Antonín Dvorˇák changed Dett’s life. Called “Dr. Hoppe” in Dett’s memory of him, he asked if Dett could arrange African American spirituals on the piano. After performing for him, Dett found himself on the receiving end of a strange request: “He urged me to come to Germany for study, leaving me his card which for years I treasured chiefly as a souvenir.”⁶³ Dett was apparently stunned by the offer, but also dismissive of it. “Much of what Dr. Hoppe had said really did not greatly interest me,” he remembered. “At that time there was little respect for Negro music or its possibilities.”⁶⁴ Only later, after hearing the Kneisel Quartet perform Dvorˇák’s music as a young student at Oberlin, did Dett begin to believe in the possibility of creating African American art music and that he could be the one to compose it.

This mysterious Dr. Hoppe might have planted two separate seeds into Dett’s mind: first, to compose African American art music, and second, to travel to Central Europe to study. Going to Germany became a lifelong dream of Dett’s, one he realized in 1932 when he took the Hampton Institute Choir to Central Europe on tour to perform his own choral music, much of it inspired by the music of Dvorˇák and Brahms.

The same decade Dett received an invitation to visit Germany, a teenaged Hazel Harrison began taking piano lessons with the German pianist Victor Heinze in La Porte, Indiana.⁶⁵ A former pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Heinze lived in Chicago but came frequently to La Porte to give lessons. Harrison recalled that the first time he heard her perform, “he was very pleased; he had visions of me playing in Germany with an orchestra and he, Heinze, conducting.”⁶⁶ From a young age, at Heinze’s encouragement, Harrison entertained the thought of performing abroad.

Eventually, Harrison’s dreams of concertizing in Europe became a reality. Following a recital in Chicago, Heinze introduced Harrison to her future piano teacher, the legendary concert pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni. After listening to her play for him backstage after one of his concerts, Busoni said, “Now, little girl, you are very, very talented. Now, what I want you to do is this: I want you to work on technique. I want you to work on technique endlessly. In the meantime, I want you to finish your school and as soon as you finish your high school, let me know, because I want you to come to Europe.”⁶⁷ And she did. With the help of Heinze, Busoni, and others, Harrison traveled to Germany, where she performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1904. Between 1904 until the outbreak of WWI in 1914, she lived in Berlin intermittently and studied with Busoni and other teachers.

Stories such as Dett’s and Harrison’s teach us about the immense transnational power of musical exchange. Central Europeans’ cultivation of African American musical talent and their encouragement of these students to look beyond their locales for audiences and musical inspiration yielded rich new musical produce. It was surprising what turning outward to German-speaking Europe could quickly accomplish for African American musicians enduring white supremacy in the United States. Buoyed by their international exchanges with Central Europeans in the United States, African Americans, like the Germans they encountered, imagined other possibilities for Black musical expression.

Let us consider one last story, that of the young pianist Raymond Augustus Lawson witnessing the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler give one of his last concerts before his death. In residence in New York, Mahler visited Hartford, Connecticut, on a cold and snowy night on February 16, 1911, to perform orchestral works by Beethoven, Weber, and Liszt, and his own transcription of a Bach suite at Parsons Theatre. Lawson sat transfixed by the composer’s conducting and was especially struck by “his playing of a Bach composition on the harpsichord while conducting the orchestra.”⁶⁸ It is unclear, however, where Lawson sat in the concert hall. Would the racial politics of the day have forced Lawson to sit at the back? His writings indicate that he rarely missed an orchestral performance in Hartford in his sixty years of residence, which indicates either a sustained commitment in Hartford to admitting Black patrons to classical music concerts or a sustained transgression of racial order by Lawson and perhaps a few others. Nonetheless, on that snowy evening, Lawson attended a performance by a preeminent Central European composer and deemed it one of the most thrilling musical experiences of his career. Shortly after the concert, Lawson left the United States for Central Europe to further his musical studies.

Figure 5. A concert program advertising the soloists for Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio at Boston Symphony Hall, 1915. The program states: “The Elijah Chorus, Dr. W.O. Taylor, conductor, will render Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah,’ Thursday evening, April 15th, 1915 at 8.15 o’clock at Jordan Hall.” Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library.

African American engagement with the Austro-German canon made it possible for them to imagine themselves in another country altogether, far away from the racist strictures trying to define and restrict their actions and beliefs. Their future lay in the German musical past. The siren song of the Austro-German canon beckoned them to Europe, singing to them that they, too, could join a transatlantic chorus. To shed the skin of white supremacy and become the pinnacle of Black musical achievement would require going to Europe, a place of liberation in the minds of many Black Americans. Booking tickets on boats sailing to Hamburg, some African Americans finally began to make the dream of visiting the land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms a reality.

These artists arrived in Central Europe with a deep and intimate knowledge of German musical culture; once there, they sought out new and liberating spaces to grow and perform. Encouraged by their own teachers, who were either from Central Europe or who had studied there, they became part of what Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic in their travels to and from Europe. Black classical musicians pursued a different musical solution to the problem of race’s entrenched barriers. If the United States could not provide for their musical and intellectual growth, if the United States failed to protect them from the violence and oppression of racism, German-speaking Europe, the heart of musical universalism, might finally be the place where the powers of music could transcend racial discourse and defeat racial determinism.