Cultural and Ethnic Influences on Musical Style in the works of Ernest Bloch, William Grant Still and Samuel Barber

by J. S. Graves

I basically agree with R. S. Perry when she says that a composer’s “artistic identity is far more comprehensible when viewed against his background than when removed from it and considered solely in the context of individual genius,”¹ This week I am mounting a new blog that will present some of the defining influences on the lives and music of three American Neo-Romantic composers, Ernest Bloch, William Grant Still (Little Rock, AR was his home town as a youth) and Samuel Barber.

There were creative consequences for these composers when they confronted or exploited their cultural and ethnic inheritance.² This blog will investigate what some of those consequences were and what role the unique backgrounds of these three composers played in contributing to an American neo-romantic musical style.

I will examine important defining factors of their careers such as their social and economic circumstances, their educational backgrounds, influential persons in their lives, and the socio-political climate of the world in which they lived. I will post weekly on these subjects, starting next post with a discussion of the types of American concert music in the first half of the 20th century, followed by explorations of what Neo-Romanticism is.

Later I will discuss the seminal influence on American Neo-Romanticism of the life and works of Ernest Bloch, a European educated immigrant, considered by Walter Simmons to be the fountainhead of American Neo-Romanticism.³ Later blogs will be devoted to the lives and works of two other American neo-romantics, William Grant Still and Samuel Barber. Stay tuned!