Composer William Dawson.
In Wednesday’s (1/8) WUSF (Tampa, Florida), Susan Giles Wantuck reports, “Florida Orchestra audiences will experience a work they’ve probably never heard before on the weekend of Jan. 11. Guest Conductor Nicholas Hersh is excited for people to hear William Dawson’s ‘Negro Folk Symphony.’… ‘Dawson was one of the most important African American composers who lived and worked out of the Harlem Renaissance period in the in the early 20th century. And he was, I think, the third African American, a composer, to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra,’ Hersh said. ‘Essentially, the story of how African Americans came to be in American society today, that starts with being shipped in slave boats from Africa. Dawson himself says that the first theme you hear in the horn represents this idea of a missing link that was taking out of the African experience when the first African American was [abducted] from Africa to the U.S. in those days,’ Hersh said…. He said it becomes a kind of journey of finding our roots, and reconciling them and looking to the future…. ‘I’m sure that [audiences will] be blown away by the emotional content and the musical content,’ he said.”
