Originally published 1.10.23.
It is possible that Dett visited Rochester during his youth in nearby Niagara Falls, NY. Nevertheless, when he chose to call Rochester home after he graduated from Eastman it was likely not a stretch. You can read a bit about his neighborhood via Emily Morry, PhD, a fantastic historian at the Monroe Public Library who has written an excellent blog post about Dett’s life in Rochester on the website of the Library’s Local History & Genealogy Division, Local History ROCs!
Dett spent one year in the MM program at Eastman, living alone at the Edison Hotel in downtown Rochester. During this time, the composer Zenobia Powell Perry (in interviews compiled by Dr Jeannie Gayle Pool) had expected to study with him at Hampton. After arriving there, she learned that Dett had abruptly departed for Rochester (this is a separate topic necessitating more research). Undeterred, Powell Perry boarded a bus to Rochester without telling her parents. She found Dett somehow (this part of the story is not told!), and he arranged for her to lodge with Rochester’s postmaster and take piano lessons privately with him. Don’t worry–she eventually told her parents where she had gone.
Dett made friends quickly, and when his wife (Helen Elise Smith) and two daughters joined him in Rochester the following year, the family put down roots. Active in local churches, speaking at civic organizations, composing music for Rochester’s Inter-High Chorus, and bringing acclaimed violinist Gertrude Martin and former student Dorothy Maynor to Rochester, Dett and his family made their mark.
Dett’s music found the most frequent performance in churches due to its sacred nature. Well before his arrival in Rochester, civic and school choirs performed his iconic anthem “Listen to the Lambs” (1914) with regularity. The Rochester Civic Orchestra also gave several concerts featuring Dett’s music, having made his acquaintance directly, as shown by this photo.
Throughout his residency in Rochester, Dett traveled widely as a performer, lecturer, and educator. Somehow, he found the time to provide incidental music for the pageant-play within Rochester’s 1934 Centennial celebration at Edgerton Park. This music does not seem to have survived, which is music history’s great loss, as Dett flexed his newly-honed orchestral skills to create it.
In addition to finishing his oratorio, Dett also finished his seminal anthology of spirituals, The Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals (1936). This work had started during his time at Hampton, for which he had also re-issued an anthology of spirituals. However, Dett’s own Collection also included his own, Classically styled arrangements of these pieces.
Dett also taught and mentored local students. We do not know who all of them were, but among them was the famed baritone William Warfield, who likely first met Dett through his church work. As a teenager, Warfield sang in one of Dett’s community-based choirs and undoubtedly was inspired by Dett to take up the baton of Rochester’s Inter-High Choir. He was reported as the first high schooler ever to conduct the group.
When the Frederick Douglass monument moved in 1941 within Rochester to its present home at the Highland Bowl, Dett brought Warfield in as a soloist. Warfield’s voice rang out with Rochester’s first ever multiracial choir for an audience of international dignitaries.
The Detts resided just outside an historic area of Rochester known today both as Corn Hill and as Clarisssa Street (as documented by Clarissa Uprooted), but back in the day it was known as the Third Ward. Much of that neighborhood was razed, with many homes replaced by recently-built structures. The area should be considered Rochester’s corresponding locus of Alain Locke’s “Harlem Renaissance,” as other artists lived and visited there.