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Ethnic Irony in Melvin B. Tolson's “Dark Symphony”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
Abstract
This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson's poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson's Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet's attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem's relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem's sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.'s study of “mastery and deformation,” theorizes the poet's tone. While prior critics have read the poem's lofty conclusion as sincerely aspirational toward assimilation, this article emphasizes the ambiguity, or irony, that Tolson develops: he embraces the symphony's capacity as a symbol to encompass multiple meanings, using the genre metaphorically as a mark of achievement, even as he implicates such usage as a practice rooted in conservative thought. The “symphony,” celebrated as a symbol of pluralistic democracy and liberal progress, meanwhile functions to reinforce racialized difference and inequality—a duality that becomes apparent when this poem is read alongside Tolson's concurrent poems, notes, and criticism. Such analysis demonstrates that “Dark Symphony” functions as a site for heightened consciousness of racialized musical language, giving shape to Tolson's ideas as a critic, educator, and advocate for public health.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music
Footnotes
Thank you to members of Anne Stone's Spring 2015 seminar for their comments on this material, and to the Early Research Initiative and IRADAC at CUNY for their research support.
References
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Schenbeck, Lawrence. Racial Uplift and American Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.Google Scholar
Schultz, Kathy Lou. The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolson, M. Beaunorus. “Roland Hayes.” In Negro Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Verse, edited by Murphy, Beatrice M., 151–52. New York: Henry Harrison, 1938.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns by Melvin B. Tolson from the Washington Tribune, 1937–1944, edited with an introduction by Farnsworth, Robert M.. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, edited by Farnsworth, Robert M.. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, edited by Mullen, Edward J.. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Walcott, Ronald. “Ellison, Gordone and Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style and Space.” In Black World 22, no. 2 (December 1972): 4–29.Google Scholar
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933. Reprint, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Melvin Beaunorus Tolson Papers (MBTP). Manuscript Division. Library of Congress. Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bérubé, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Brown, Gwynne Kuhner. “Whatever Happened to William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony?” Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 4 (November 2012): 433–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Harvey G. “Duke Ellington and Black, Brown and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall.” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 1003–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cuney-Hare, Maud. Negro Musicians and Their Music. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1936.Google Scholar
Cruz, Diana V. “Refuting Exile: Rita Dove Reading Melvin B. Tolson.” Callaloo 31, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 789–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dejong, Timothy. “Affect and Diaspora: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.” Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 110–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dove, Rita. “Introduction.” In “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Nelson, Raymond, xiv–xv. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Dove, Rita, editor. The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York: Penguin, 2011.Google Scholar
Edwards, Brent Hayes. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ege, Samantha. “The Aesthetics of Florence Price: Negotiating the Dissonances of a New World Nationalism.” PhD thesis, University of York, 2020.Google Scholar
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1966.Google Scholar
Frank, Waldo. Re-Discovery of America. Chart for Rough Waters. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940.Google Scholar
Farnsworth, Robert M. Melvin B. Tolson, 1898–1966: Plain Talk and Poetic Prophecy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Garcia, David. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Harwood, John. The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hines, Andy. “Vehicles of Periodization: Melvin B. Tolson, Allen Tate, and the New Critical Police.” Criticism 59, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 417–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howland, John. Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Boston: Sherman, French & Company, 1912. Reprinted in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922. Reprint, New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1931.Google Scholar
Lenhart, Gary. “Caviar and Cabbage: The Voracious Appetite of Melvin Tolson.” In The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, Alain. The Negro and His Music. Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. Reprint, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925. Reprint, Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Mullen, Edward J., ed. “Introduction.” In Harlem Group of Negro Writers. By Tolson, Melvin B.. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Neal, Larry. “The Ethos of the Blues.” The Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (Summer 1972): 42–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Raymond, ed. “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Aldon L. “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism.” African American Review 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 241–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oja, Carol J. “‘New Music’ and the ‘New Negro’: The Background of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony.” Black Music Research Journal 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 145–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ottley, Roi. “New World A-Coming”: Inside Black America. New York: Literary Classics, 1943.Google Scholar
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Schenbeck, Lawrence. Racial Uplift and American Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.Google Scholar
Schultz, Kathy Lou. The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolson, M. Beaunorus. “Roland Hayes.” In Negro Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Verse, edited by Murphy, Beatrice M., 151–52. New York: Henry Harrison, 1938.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns by Melvin B. Tolson from the Washington Tribune, 1937–1944, edited with an introduction by Farnsworth, Robert M.. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, edited by Farnsworth, Robert M.. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Tolson, Melvin B. The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, edited by Mullen, Edward J.. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Walcott, Ronald. “Ellison, Gordone and Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style and Space.” In Black World 22, no. 2 (December 1972): 4–29.Google Scholar
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933. Reprint, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.Google Scholar