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Originally published 1.07.23. Now that people are performing Dett’s oratorio a lot more often, you will undoubtedly come across different composition dates, namely 1932 and 1937. The full performance version is from 1937, however, and the 1932 version for Dett’s MM Thesis at Eastman contains significantly less music. I am not currently aware if anyone has been doing any work on exactly when Dett began his work on his only surviving orchestral piece. We do get a valuable clue from Vivian Flagg McBrier’s dissertation/book, R. Nathaniel Dett, His Life and Works. McBrier quotes from a “personal notebook” that relates an interaction between Dett and his close friend, PercyRead More →

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Originally published 1.04.23. Less than one year after its world premiere at the Cincinnati May Festival, Dett’s oratorio made its way to New York City’s Juilliard School in April of 1938. Baltimore’s prominent, Black news source, the Afro-American, kept tabs on Dett’s whereabouts and even had a local correspondent in Rochester, NY, who popped up onto its columns just when Dett moved there and then all but vanished once he took his job at Bennett College. The performing organization, the Oratorio Society of New York, had close ties to Dett. Among them was the ethnomusicologically inclined music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel. Krehbiel published a treatise on African spirituals, Afro-AmericanRead More →

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Orignally published 1.04.23. Legend: The NBC radio broadcast of The Ordering of Moses on 7 May 1937 was cut off because of racist complaints at stations in the South. Status: Untrue. However, this does NOT mean that racist complaints were not made. We need to put blame where blame is due, namely, what I have been calling the “long arm of the radio schedule,” which still serves as the primary means to frame on-air advertisements. Newspapers printed the day’s radio listings ahead of time, such as you see here, which is a clip of the schedule from Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle. Mind you, Dett was livingRead More →