If carving out a place as a modernist composer was hard for a woman in 1920s America, it was all but impossible for an African American, man or woman. Nevertheless, William Grant Still set his sights early in life on becoming a composer of concert music and opera. By 1919 he had found his way to New York City; in the 1920s he studied with Edgard Varèse and had works performed by the International Composers’ Guild.

In New York’s Harlem district, a new and vital movement in African American arts and letters formed at this time. It has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, and its luminaries included poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and jazz musician Duke Ellington (see page 392). Still also took part in this cultural movement, both with his modernist compositions and as an arranger of jazz musicals and early radio music.

From his earliest works, Still strove to capture a distinctive African American identity and sound in his music, and this took him down a different path from many other musical modernists. (His approach was very different from Ruth Crawford’s abstract, Europe-derived modernism, for example.) Still’s music incorporates styles derived from blues and jazz, and his songs, operas, ballets, and symphonic works return again and again to African American subjects and stories.

We can think of Still’s music as a strain of musical nationalism in modernist guise, akin to Bartók’s incorporation of his native Hungarian folk music — with the important difference that Still spoke from a minority position in an America dominated by whites.