"A King Celebration" features outstanding works by African-American composers and performers. Below is a list of artists featured in this year's program. Refer to the concerts page for details on the on air and live performances. The composers on this page include the following, listed in order of appearance in the program:

Robert Nathaniel Dett
Howard Swanson
William Grant Still
Hale Smith
William C. Banfield
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
Uzee Brown, Jr.
Joseph Schwantner

You can also check out the King Celebration Composers Symposium, an insightful discussion with some of America's preeminent composers and educators.

Robert Nathaniel Dett:

An eminent composer, conductor and pianist in the first part of this century, Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in Drummondsville, Ontario in 1882, just across the Niagara Falls from the U.S. He studied at a private music conservatory in Lockport, NY, and in 1908 he became the first African American to receive the Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory. Later he studied music at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, the American Conservatory and Harvard University, as well as with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He received his masters from the Eastman School of Music in 1932.

Beginning in 1913, Dett served for 18 years as director of music at Hampton Institute in Virginia, and led its superb choir on tours of the U.S. and Europe. His exuberant Juba Dance is taken from a suite he wrote in 1913 called In The Bottoms, evoking scenes from slave camps pitched along the river's edge. Dett's spent his childhood in Ontario, Canada, in a community established by former fugitive slaves who had escaped the U.S. via the Underground Railroad. Dett’s Chariot Jubilee is a free fantasia for chorus and orchestra with tenor soloist, commissioned in 1919 by Howard Lyman, conductor of the Syracuse University chorus. Dett remained a strong proponent of the importance of black folk music in contemporary composition until his death in 1943.

Howard Swanson:

Born in Atlanta, Swanson grew up in Cleveland, where he began piano lessons at age eleven. He entered the Cleveland Institute of Music when he was 20, studying the composition with Herbert Elwell. At graduation, he won a Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed him to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the legendary teacher of such composers as Copland, Piston and Thomson. In 1947, Swanson was asked by music director Dmitri Mitropoulos to write a work for the New York Philharmonic, Short Symphony, premiered in 1950. The work won the New York Music Critics’ Circle award as the best new orchestral score of the season. This was Swanson’s first large-scale work, and he said he wanted to give it "the depth, seriousness and intensity" inherent in such a work. To the normal sonata-allegro procedures usually found in a symphony’s first movement, he added elements of fugue.

Swanson’s The Cuckoo is a little scherzo composed in 1948 with echoes of the Baroque era in it as well. It's the first published piano piece by Swanson. The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1942), set to a text by Langston Hughes, became Swanson's breakthrough piece when famed contralto Marian Anderson sang it at a recital in New York in January of 1950. Several performances of Swanson's works ensued that same year, including the New York Philharmonic's premiere of his Short Symphony (presented this year by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra). Soloist, Dr. Uzee Brown, Jr., had the distinction of performing this song for Dr. Swanson during one of the composer's rare visits to his hometown in the 1970's. A Death Song (1943) is another early Swanson song set to a text by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

William Grant Still:

William Grant Still is one of the most accomplished and prolific African-American composers of this century. He was born in Woodville, Mississippi on May 11, 1895 and passed away in Los Angeles in 1978. His father was a town band leader, but died when Still was a child, after which the family moved to little Rock, Arkansas. Still studied violin and matriculated at Wilberforce College. He worked with various music ensembles, including that of W.C. Handy in 1916, then enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory where he began to compose before his studies were interrupted by World War I during which he served in the Navy. While working for Handy's publishing company and playing oboe in theater orchestras in New York, he was offered a scholarship by Varese and later by Chadwick, who urged him to write music in the American style. Still began to write large-scale works in the early 1920s and in 1931 the Rochester PO performed his Afro-American Symphony, which was the first symphony by a black American to be played by a leading orchestra. Still was also the first black American to conduct a major orchestra, as well as the first to have an opera performed by an important company.

Still's many honors include Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships; the Harmon Award (1927); honorary doctorates from Howard University (1941), Oberlin (1947), Bates College (1954) and the University of Arkansas (1971); and prizes from CBS, the New York World's Fair (1939), the League of Composers and leading orchestras. His music has a freshness and individuality that have brought enthusiastic response. His Three Visions, composed in 1936, is vivid and picturesque, and reflect Still's French impressionistic influences as well as his Mississippi roots.

Hale Smith:

Composer, arranger, editor, and educator Hale Smith was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1925 and began studying piano at age 7. Following military service, Smith entered the Cleveland Institute of Music as a composition student., receiving a B.A and Masters degrees. In 1953, Smith became the first winner of the Broadcast Music Inc. Student Composer Awards competition. He has received the Cleveland Arts Prize and awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Black Music Caucus, and an honorary doctorate from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

After moving to New York in 1958, Smith worked with prominent jazz artists, including Chico Hamilton, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Randy Weston, Melba Liston, and Ahmad Jamal. He served as an editor and consultant for several major music publishers. His major works include Ritual and Incantations, Innerflexions, By Yearning and By Beautiful, Music for Harp and Orchestra, Meditations in Passage, and several works for chorus and for solo voice and piano.

Smith is Professor Emeritus from the University of Connecticut, and has served on the boards of the American Composers Alliance, Composers Recording, Inc. and the American Music Center, among others. He was appointed to the New York State Council on the Arts, serving from 1993-97, and has been a panelist for the NEA.

On Friday’s program, Atlanta's premiere contemporary-music ensemble Thamyris will be performing Smith's Faces of Jazz.

Dr. William C. Banfield:

Dr. William C. Banfield has composed symphonies, concertos, operas, ballet, choral music, song cycles for voice and keyboard, and chamber works for various combinations of instruments. His works have been commissioned and/or performed by the orchestras of Dallas, Roanoke, Detroit, Akron, Savannah, Richmond, Sacramento and Indianapolis, as well as the Eastern Music Festival, Minneapolis Symphonia and Plymouth Music Series chorus and orchestra. His opera Luyala, which is to be premiered next year at Duke University, was composed under a 1996 commission from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Opera for a New America program. He is the author of Landscapes of Color: Perspectives, Conversations and Visions of Black American Composers. Banfield’s Why Can't We All Get Along? will be introduced from stage by the composer in the January 15th program, and excerpts from his Symphony No. IV, as performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will air on January 18th.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington

1999 marks both the 70th anniversary of Dr. King's birth and the 100th of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, born in Washington, D.C. on April 25th, 1899. Friday's program concludes with two of Ellington's most enduring works, Mood Indigo and Take The A Train, in an arrangement for vocal ensemble by arranger Frederick Tillis. Ellington’s contributions to American music were enormous and he is considered one of the most important artists in the twentieth century. Though an excellent pianist, he always considered his orchestra to be his main instrument. He recorded with his orchestra almost constantly from 1926 until his death in 1974. Ellington composed literally thousands of songs, including innovative orchestral works that continually developed with the evolution of jazz during his lifetime.

Learn more about the life and music of Duke Ellington this spring and other Ellington Centennial specials from NPR’s Cultural Programming, including a ten-part series on Jazz Profiles.

Uzee Brown, Jr.

Uzee Brown, Jr. hails from Cowpens, South Carolina. He is a published composer and arranger, narrator, performer, researcher, lecturer, choral director, President of the National Association of Negro Musicians, and is a co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Onyx Opera Atlanta. He holds degrees from Morehouse College (MA), Bowling Green State University (M.M. in composition)and University of Michigan (M.M and DMA in performance) with further study at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, and received study awards to Graz University in Austria and the University of Siena in Italy. Included among his many performances are: the roles of Parson Alltalk in Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s world premier of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, and King Solomon in Emory Theater Productions’ world premier of King Solomon; an appearance in the Alliance Theater’s showcase performance of Jubilee; recent performances in Mozart and Brahms requiems and a workshop performance of Zabette, a new operatic work to premier in April 1999. He wrote the prologue music for Spike Lee’s film School Daze, and also has to his credit a nomination for the Audelco Award in Black Theater. His compositions and arrangements are published by the Roger Dean Publishing Company (Lorenz Corporation) and the Lawson Gould Publishing Company of New York.

Joseph Schwantner

Joseph Schwantner earned music degrees at the Chicago Conservatory College and Northwestern University. He is Professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and was Composer in Residence for three years with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. He has also been the subject of a documentary, Soundings, broadcast on PBS. Schwantner’s New Morning for the World follows the path blazed by Aaron Copland in his Lincon Portrait: quotations and sayings of a great man in American history, spoken by a narrator and set against an orchestral backdrop. The words are by Martin Luther King, Jr., drawn from speeches and articles written between 1958 and 1965. It was commissioned by the Eastman School, where he has taught since 1970, and premiered on Dr. King’s birthday in 1983 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Schwantner’s series of compositions is an exploration, with each new work serving as a further outpost in "an exciting journey filled with eager expectations of confronting the unknown." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Afternoons of Infinity, an orchestral composition that calls for the sounds of musical water glasses and of instrumentalists vocalizing "like a distant ethereal choir." Other awards include first prize in the Kennedy Center Friedhelm Awards (for Music of Amber), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, several commissioning grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A King Celebration Composers Symposium:

On Wednesday, January 13th Spelman College hosted the "King Celebration Composers Symposium" at the Cosby Center Auditorium. Moderated by Dr. Dwight Andrews, the panelists included Dr. Hale Smith, Dr. William Banfield, Dr. Roger Dickerson, Mr. Roland Carter and Performance Today host Martin Goldsmith. Biographies of Dr. Roger Dickerson and Mr. Roland Carter are provided below.

The "color line" has been one of the greatest challenges to our society and it's cultural development during the 20th Century. Our distinguished panelists discussed race as an issue in culture as we approach the 21st Century. They also covered issues such as commercial and technological influences on artists today, the universality of Dr. King's message and how he has inspired composers and other artists. Listen to this insightful and incisive symposium in its entirety. (Requires the free RealPlayer 2.0 or higher. Length: approx 82 minutes)

Roland Marvin Carter:

Roland Marvin Carter, a distinguished composer-arranger and conductor, is UC Foundation Professor of Music at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. A life member of the American Choral Directors Association as well as the National Association of Negro Musicians, where Carter has served on the Board of Directors and as Chair of the Committee of Choral Standards. He is founder and COE of Mar-Vel, a publisher specializing in music by African- American music and tradition.

Roger Dickerson:

Roger Dickerson, a professor of music and choir director at Southern University at New Orleans, has received Pulitzer nominations for both his A Musical Service for Louis, a requiem for Louis Armstrong (1972) and New Orleans Concerto for piano and orchestra (1976). Both of these works were premiered by the New Orleans Philharmonic, for whom Dickerson has composed commissioned works since 1965. Dickerson’s Sonatina for piano, recently recorded by concert pianist Karen Walwyn, is soon to be released on CD. This three-movement work was listed among required piano competition repertory for the International American Music Competitions, sponsored by Carnegie Hall and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has also been featured at the Kennedy Center Composers Forum.

The composer was the subject of an hour documentary film, New Orleans Concerto, that aired nationally on PBS in 1977.

Dickerson, a native of New Orleans, earned a BA in Music from Dillard University, an MA in Music Composition from Indiana University, and studied composition on a Fulbright Fellowship at the Akademie fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. The composer is presently at work writing a musical set in New Orleans with actor/playwright John O’Neal.

"Composer Roger Dickerson’s works have reached the world, but his heart belongs to New Orleans" (Times-Picayune, 3/3/81). "I believe that my work is an expression of inner devotion and freedom; an expression that combines love of art with human relationships and the sense of Godly duty. I see my creativity as a release of my spiritual self and all that that self reflects from the conscious and unconscious worlds we live in and move through." -Roger Dickerson