Symhpony

Symphony No. 1 "Afro-American" (1930) by William Grant Still was the first symphony written by an African American man and performed for an American audience. It is a symphonic piece for full orchestra, including celeste, harp, and tenor banjo. It combines a fairly traditional symphony with blues progressions and rhythms that were characteristic of popular African music at the time. A traditional symphony contains four movements – the first is usually in sonata form, the second is a slower movement, the third is either a minuet and trio or a dance-like scherzo, and the fourth is normally a faster movement in rondo or sonata form – and is traditionally characteristic of orchestral pieces written by white European composers. The blues is a type of music that originates in African American communities in the United States, and typically consisted of twelve-bar patterns of chord progressions. The blues had not been heavily or noticeably incorporated into traditional musical forms such as the symphony before Still. This combination of the symphony and blues music reflects Still’s view that both the black and white cultures in America at the time had strong influences on each other, even though their cultures were very segregated.