The New Negro: Harry T. Burleigh and Black art music in Jim Crow New York (1890s - 1930s)

Thesis

This thesis examines how the singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) became the first Black American to sustain a successful career within the White art music establishment. As such, he was a central figure in the first freeborn, educated generation of African American culture-makers at the dawn of the twentieth century whose contribution is underestimated and invisible to White historical imagination. This thesis argues Burleigh’s impact on American music in the first decades of the century prepared the ground for the creative flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. My research builds on biographical scholarship of New York figures during this period and prioritizes the Black Press, the best chroniclers of his career.

Burleigh built a stable career by agilely securing many income streams by earning the respect and support of various White gatekeepers and institutions. Though a singer by vocation, eventually a compositional career became his most enduring legacy. Deeply influenced by German and German-trained musicians who dominated musical institutions, their Bildung philosophy shaped his approach to “the divine art” of music-making.

After obtaining financial security as a founding member of ASCAP, Burleigh’s crafted, complex art songs became the repertoire of leading White concert singers. During World War I, when German-language Lieder was shunned, Burleigh’s significant intervention in American art music was the Negro art song spiritual. This fresh repertoire materially assisted the careers of rising leading Black concert singers. Burleigh’s popular and financial success inspired composers and literary figures in the Harlem Renaissance to bring Black voices and narratives into their art. As his career wound down, Burleigh was an elder statesman and mentor in this period to those carrying forward his liberatory effort to center Black culture and history in American musical literature.

Authors: Foote, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nzyqxvqyr
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Black Brooklyn; Marshall Hotel; Samuel Coleridge Taylor; J. P. Morgan; Booker T. Washington; spirituals; Antonín Dvořák; American Society of Composers and Publishers; Alston Waters Burleigh; National Conservatory of the Music of America; Tenderloin District New York; G. Ricordi; lieder; James Reese Europe; Black Bohemia; Jeannette B. Thurber; New York City; St. Phillip's Episcopal Church; William S. Rainsford; Victor Herbert; café culture; kleindeutschland; Temple Emanu-El; George Maxwell; St. George's Episcopal Church; Louise Alston Burleigh; James Weldon Johnson; music copyrights; W.E.B Du Bois; A.S.C.A.P; Frederick Douglass
• Subjects: Music publishing; Harlem Renaissance; Black people--Music; Intellectual history; Music by Black composers; Cultural History; Black Intellectual History; African Americans--Music; New York City History; Blackness