208 Notes

7. Josephine Wright (1979), in referencing the information gleaned from a 1782 edition of
Sancho’s letters published posthumously by Miss F. Crews in London, notes that Sancho
was born on a slave ship that was moving from Guinea (in West Africa) to Cartagena
(which is now part of Colombia). He was orphaned as an infant and taken to England by
his master at the age of two.
8. There seems to have been some discrepancies regarding Bridgetower’s place and date of
birth, which have been outlined by Josephine Wright (1980).
9. A plaque commemorating Emidy’s arrival in Falmouth in 1799 was installed there in 2005;
a picture of the plaque has been made available online by the BBC at http://www.bbc.com/
news/uk-england-cornwall-33211440, accessed Sep. 9, 2015.
10. Emidy is currently making a “comeback,” as his life and musical accomplishments have
been the subject of two recent BBC projects, both of which were made public in 2015. In
his June 21, 2015, article “Joseph Emidy: From Slave Fiddler to Classical Violinist,” BBC
News Online writer Miles Davis chronicles the remarkable achievements of the “genius”
violinist. Davis emphasizes that Emidy, after having been freed from slavery, became
“Britain’s first composer of the African diaspora,” an attribute that has been engraved
on the Falmouth plaque. In addition, Emidy’s life and music are featured on a BBC Radio
4 program In Search of the Black Mozart, which has been created by Chi-chi Nwanoku, the
principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and produced by Sarah
Taylor. Other musicians of African descent who are featured on their show are George
Bridgetower, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Ignatius Sancho.
11. Gossec left the orchestra to conduct the Concert Spirituel (Banat 1990, 186).
12. The other two composers were Giovanni-Giuseppe Cambini and Jean-Baptiste Davaux.
13. The Concert des Amateurs ceased to exist after enduring financial difficulties in 1781,
at which point Saint-Georges began conducting L’Orchestre de la loge Olympique. Banat
(1999, 986) refers to the latter as a “reincarnation” of the former.
14. Considering the fact that Lully was Toussaint’s favorite composer, did he know also of
Saint-Georges, a former Guadeloupean neighbor?
15. When the outline of this chapter was originally conceived, I  had been intrigued by the
work of Gerard Béhague for some time. In 1979 (79), he claimed that the oldest music
manuscript that had been located in the Minas Gerais area was dated exactly two hun-
dred years prior, in 1779. Since the publication of Béhague’s statement, scholars and stu-
dents alike have benefited greatly from an online publication that provides a chronological
listing of Brazilian composers of concert music, opera, religious music, dance, and vocal
music. Readers are encouraged to consult this spreadsheet, “Brazilian Composers from
Colonial Age (1500) until Independency Time (1822),” which was created by Edson Tadeu
Ortolan and is available at www.classical.net/music/composer/brazilian.pdf. Two addi-
tional sources of information are provided within the same spreadsheet:  “19th Century
Brazilian Composers” and “20th Century Brazilian Composers.”
16. See Tinhorão (1972).
17. This search for riches began in the 1670s.
18. Nkiru Nzegwu has identified an Afro-Brazilian architect named Aleijadinho (António
Francisco Lisboa), who “transformed the Catholic architectural landscape in the Brazilian
state of Minas Gerais,” and Mestre Manoel Friandes, who “designed and built the Church
of Lapinha, the Ordem Terceira de São Francisco, and numerous commercial buildings in
Salvador-Bahia” (Nzegwu 2008, 108, 109).
19. Ouro Prêto (Black Gold) was the capital of Minas Gerais from 1720 to 1897. It was sub-
sequently placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in recognition of its architectural
prowess.
20. The term “baroque” may have been applied to music with obviously much later style char-
acteristics because the churches of Minas, with which this music was affiliated, were com-
monly described as “baroque.” Indeed, Minas was known for its abundance of gold, which
in turn, enabled the construction of lavish, ornate churches in Ouro Prêto, São João del
Rei, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.
 Notes 209

21. Scores for three of these works, José Joaquim Emérico Lobo de Mesquita’s Antiphona de
Nossa Senhora (1787), Coelho Neto’s Himno (Maria Mater gratiae, 1787), and Gomes da
Rocha’s Novena de Nossa Senhora do Pilar (1789), have been published by the Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo, Escuela Superior de Música, Departamento de Musicologia in Mendoza,
Argentina.
22. According to Béhague (1979, 79–80, 84), the Confraria de Nossa Senhora das Mercês dos
Homens Crioulos, of which Mesquita was a member, was one of a number of such orders
that also included the “ ‘Black’ brotherhood of São José dos Homens Pardos.”
23. For more information about Mesquita and a list of his works (including recordings made
from unpublished manuscripts prior to 1999), see John E. Druesedow (1999), 817–20.
The principal archive of Mesquita’s works is in the Museum of Mariana, which is located in
Minas Gerais, Brazil. During Mesquita’s time, it was very expensive for composers to get
their works printed, as printing was available primarily in Portugal. But thanks to both the
interest in Mesquita’s music and the advancements made in musical notation software,
twenty-four of his works are now available (2015) on IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library in
clear, typeset editions.
24. For more on Garcia and for the availability of his works, see de Lerma (1986).
25. Here, we should take note of the continuation of the confrarias, counterparts or predeces-
sors of which had been established in Spain, by the Moors, by the early fifteenth century
as confradías, and also perhaps in Portugal, and in Mexico, where they sprang up as cabil-
dos, probably as a way for blacks to continue with the ideal of African secret societies.
26. Avril Coleridge-Taylor can be heard discussing her father’s work Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast
on a 1974 BBC Radio 4 show, which is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=8dt_knOC3ko, accessed Sep. 1, 2015.
27. In his preface to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, Tuskegee Institute
founder Booker T. Washington deemed the composer to be “the foremost musician of his
race,” noting also that “Mr. Coleridge-Taylor is himself an inspiration to the Negro, since
he himself, the child of an African father, is an embodiment of what are the possibilities of
the Negro under favorable conditions.”
28. The recording also includes a concerto by the Chevalier J. J. O. de Meude-Monpas, who had
been mistakenly considered of African descent in previous accounts. A brief discussion of
this album and of the corrected information regarding Meude-Monpas’s identity is avail-
able on William Zick’s important and informative website, AfriClassical, at http://africlas-
sical.blogspot.com/2007/09/violin-concertos-by-black-composers-of.html (accessed Nov.
6, 2016).
29. For a comparative assessment of George Bridgetower, José White, and Claudio José
Domingo Brindis de Salas, see Fikes (1982). A number of resources convey information
about Afro-Cuban musicians who created and/or performed art music of a European style.
See, for example, Orovio (1992), Carpentier (2001), and Moore (1997).
30. Deberque’s name and dates are given as Jacques Constantin Deburque (1800–1861) in
Southern (1997, 134).
31. Lester Sullivan acknowledges several spellings of the composer’s name:  McCarty,
McCarthy, and Macarthy. Sources also vary on Macarty’s date of birth. Eileen Southern’s
Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians pinpoints the year 1821;
Sullivan provides a range of years, from 1817 to 1823.
32. For more information about these composers, see their entries in Floyd (1999b).
33. Lucius Wyatt (1990) lists approximately seventy-five works that have been identified,
but we know that Dédé composed more than 250 dances and songs besides his works for
orchestra, ballet, opera, operetta, and other performing media. For more information on
Dédé, see Sullivan and Sears (1999).
34. Sullivan and Sears (1999) inform us that Dédé became a full member of the French Society
of Dramatic Authors, Composers, and Editors of Music; moreover, his compositional out-
put was well received, as evidenced by written critiques published in L’Artiste de Bordeaux.
210 Note s

35. An entry in the Black Perspective in Music 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1982) lists her date of birth
as Mar. 30, 1887, but the entry in another 1982 publication, the Biographical Dictionary of
Afro-American and African Musicians (BDAAM), presents a different year: Mar. 30, 1888.
36. See Southern (BDAAM 1982, 288) and Walker-Hill (1995). George Shirley, with his accom-
panist William Bolcom, recorded Nickerson’s “Chere, Mo lemmé toi” and “Michieu Banjo”
alongside songs by other black composers, including works by A.  J. R.  Connor, James
Bland, and Will Marion Cook. Shirley attracted attention from the New York Times (Apr. 7,
1961) at age twenty-six when he became the first African American to win the auditions
sponsored by the National Council of the Metropolitan Opera. The reader is encouraged
to listen to Shirley and Bolcom on the sound recording Battle Pieces Albany, NY: Albany
Records, 2003.
37. Readers are referred to Trotter’s groundbreaking book Music and Some Highly Musical
People. Trotter’s book (1878), along with Slave Songs of the United States (1867), which is
referenced several times throughout Transformation, are two of the earliest written works
of substance and length that provide information on a variety of contributions by African
Americans. The writing of Gustavus Pike (1873) is equally valuable in its recounting of the
trailblazing efforts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the United States and Europe, beginning
in 1871. Yet by default, Pike chronicles only one performing ensemble; conversely, the
joint efforts of Lucy McKim Garrison, William Francis Allen, and Charles Pickard Ware
document musical practices of African Americans in a variety of locales within the United
States, as does the book by Trotter.
38. Two years later, another vocal ensemble was established in Cincinnati, the Mozart Circle.
This group comprised twenty-five members, and its inaugural (1875) performance of the
cantata Daniel was met with “deserved praise” and recommended to others as “refined
musical entertainment” (Trotter 1878, 318–19).
39. We will return to the American influences on Adams and his juvenile band in Chapter 7.
40. During my own visits to locations such as Trinidad, Aruba, St. Kitts, and Nevis, and other
islands over the course of thirty-plus years, I have heard similar but gentler comments.
Unfortunately, however, when I have read important music books about the Caribbean,
I have not found much information about the Virgin Islands.
41. In 2014, for example, the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) published
an article on the Black Swan (Elizabeth Greenfield) by Julia J. Chybowski. Black Patti, for-
mally known as Matilda Sissieretta Jones (1868–1933), was the subject of a JAMS article
in 2000; she had previously been featured in the Black Perspective in Music (1976) and in
the Music of Black Americans (1971, 1983, 1997). See Graziano (2000).
42. Although the focus here is on vocalists, the reader’s attention is directed to Chapters 7,
8, and 9 and the Epilogue for insight about the astonishingly diverse ways in which black
instrumentalists, composers, and academics helped to shape our soundscape during the
twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.
43. Robeson’s life has been chronicled extensively, and readers may be interested to learn that
he was multitalented outside the world of music. Educated as an attorney, he also exceled
at football, for which he had earned a college scholarship. He and his musical career suf-
fered irreparable damage as he was accused of being a communist during the years follow-
ing World War II, making it very difficult for him to earn a living abroad and at home as
racial tensions were nearing their peak. A file of FBI documents pertaining to Robeson can
be found at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago. In the early months of 2016,
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City featured Steve McQueen’s exhibit
on Paul Robeson, End Credits, which makes use of these documents.

Chapter 4

1. The term isles of rhythm is borrowed from the title of Earl Leaf’s 1948 book, Isles of Rhythm.
2. Callaloo (calalou, calalu) a West Indian soup, or stew, made from any of “several tropi-
cal plants” that were “introduced from the Guinea Coast (q.v.) in colonial times” (Nuñez
1980, 104).