Continuing my research into Black-American composers such as Florence Price and William Grant Still (more on him in another article soon), I was delighted to hear a piece on the radio by another Black composer, Robert Nathaniel Dett. I was struck by the beauty of his Ave Maria and decided to look into his life and music a bit more. 

Robert Nathaniel Dett (11th October 1882 – 2nd October 1943), often known as R. Nathaniel Dett and Nathaniel Dett, was a Canadian-American Black composer, organist, pianist, choral director, and music professor. Born and raised in Canada until the age of 11, he moved to the United States with his family and had most of his professional education and career there. During his lifetime he was a leading Black composer, known for his use of African-American folk songs and spirituals as the basis for choral and piano compositions in the 19th century Romantic style of Classical music.

He was among the first Black composers during the early years after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was organised. His works often appeared among the programs of Will Marion Cook’s New York Syncopated Orchestra. Dett performed at Carnegie Hall and at the Boston Symphony Hall as a pianist and choir director.

Dett was born in 1882 in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls, Ontario), to Charlotte (Washington) Dett and Robert T. Dett; his mother was a native of Drummondville and his father was from the United States. The young Dett studied piano at an early age, showing initial interest when he was three years old and starting piano lessons at the age of five. When he was a child, his mother encouraged him to memorise passages of Shakespeare, Longfellow and Tennyson.

In 1893, the family moved over the border to Niagara Falls, New York. At about age 14, Dett played piano for his local church. He studied at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory of Music from 1901 to 1903.

He continued his piano studies at the Lockport Conservatory, matriculating to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. It was at Oberlin when he was first introduced to the idea of using spirituals in classical music. He heard the music of Antonín Dvořák, who had toured the United States and incorporated elements of American music in his own work, including the New World Symphony. Some of the music reminded Dett of the spirituals he had learned from his grandmother. He was the first black student to complete the five-year course at Oberlin. Dett toured as a concert pianist and during this period wrote only rudimentary piano compositions. He came under the influence of Emma Azalia Hackley, a soprano singer, who inspired his interest in black American folk music.

In 1907, Dett completed his first degree, a Bachelor of Music with a major in composition and piano.

After graduation, Dett started teaching at Tennessee’s Lane College, followed by a tenure at the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri. During this period, he wrote practical choral and piano pieces suitable for his students. The 1913 piece In the Bottoms contains one of his most played movements, “Dance Juba”. Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler performed the work at the Chicago Music Hall. Soon after this Dett became the first black director of music at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he maintained the position from 1913 to 1932. During this near twenty-year period, he founded the Hampton Choral Union, Musical Arts Society, Hampton Institute Choir and its School of Music. He encouraged his Hampton student, soprano Dorothy Maynor, to pursue a career as a concert artist; she followed his advice to become one of the leading concert artists in the nation.

His position as a major pianist-composer was earned in 1914. His piece Magnolia was performed at the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Club. On 3rd June that year he performed Magnolia and In the Bottoms. The Chicago Evening Post reported that among the works on the “All Colored” program, his works were the most innovative, and it praised his high level of piano skills.

On December 27, 1916, Dett married Helen Elise Smith. She was the first black graduate of the Institute of Musical Art in New York City, which became known as the Juilliard School of performing arts.

In 1918, Dett wrote of his compositional goals:

“We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people … But this store will be of no value unless we utilise it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long.”

Throughout his lifetime, Dett continued to study music. Each summer, he attended major national institutions. From 1920 to 1921, he attended Harvard University, where he studied with Arthur Foote, winning two prizes. Don’t Be Weary Traveller, a choral composition, won the Francis Boott Award, while his essay “The Emancipation of Negro Music” won the Bowdoin prize. His interest in composition had to accommodate his demands of teaching and administration. Percy Grainger recorded the “Juba” from In the Bottoms during Dett’s year at Harvard.

Dett also composed collections of spirituals, which he had arranged, including Religious Folksongs of the Negro (1927) and The Dett Collections of Negro Spirituals (1936). Dett received a Holstein prize for his contributions as a composer.

From 1924 to 1926, Dett served as president of The National Association of Negro Musicians. Founded in Chicago in 1919, the association is the United States’ oldest organisation dedicated to the preservation, encouragement, and advocacy of all genres of African-American music.

In 1929, Dett travelled to France to study at the Fontainebleau school of music with composer Nadia Boulanger. He earned a Masters of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester in 1932.

In 1933, after resigning from the Hampton Institute, Dett served as the choral conductor for Stromberg-Carlson’s NBC radio broadcasts. He wrote the oratorio The Ordering of Moses (1937). It was conducted by Eugene Goosens in its premiere on 7th May 1937, with a chorus of 350 and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Cincinnati May Festival in Ohio.

From 1937 until 1942, Dett served as Visiting Director of Music at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. With its chorus he toured across Canada and the United States. They also performed on CBS radio broadcasts.

Late in his career, Dett shifted his style from that of his earlier neo-romantic works and adopted more contemporary idioms. In this later period he wrote piano suites such as American Ordering of Moses (1937), Tropic Winter (1938), and Eight Bible Vignettes (1941–1943)—his final piano suite.

Dett joined the United Service Organisation (USO) as a choral advisor to contribute to the war efforts in supporting US troops during World War II. Travelling with the USO chorus, he died of a heart attack on 2nd October 1943. He was buried beside his wife as well as his two daughters, in the town of his birth at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

The pieces that got me interested in his music are his aforementioned oratorio “The Ordering Of Moses” and his working of “Ave Maria”. They are both exquisite pieces of music and I share them with you here. I hope you enjoy them. 

Keith.

The Ordering of Moses

Ave Maria