William Grant Still Research Paper

Composer, arranger, and conductor William Grant Still was born on May 11, 1895, in Woodville, Mississippi. After his father, a university professor, passed away before he was born, his mother, a successful teacher, moved the family to live with Still's grandmother in Little Rock, Arkansas. Not only did his family value literature and music, but his childhood home was filled with the sounds of his grandmother singing spirituals, which seems to inspire his honorary career. In 1911, Still enrolled in Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he began to study medicine. He left the college before graduating and turned his attention to music, studying composition at Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He also spent time learning from George Whitefield Chadwick at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston; later, he was taught by Edgar Varèse. Still gained …show more content…
Handy and Artie Shaw. His notable early orchestral compositions include 1924's Darker America and 1926's From the Black Belt. He was honored with the Harmon fellowship in 1928, the Guggenheim fellowships in 1934, 1935, and 1938, and the Rosenwald Foundations fellowships in 1939 and 1940.He was also awarded with commissions from CBS, the New York World’s Fair, the League of Composers, and leading orchestras. Nevertheless, in 1931, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra gave the debut performance of Still's Afro-American Symphony (1930); it was the first time that a symphony composed by an African American had been played by a major orchestra. Furthermore, he was the first African-American to apply sounds of blues and jazz to symphonic music. Still's Afro-American Symphony was, until 1950, the most popular of any