Category Archives: New Posts

New Posts

William Grant Still

Leave a comment

I have just published this small 44 page book about William Grant Still on amazon.com. He composed nearly 200 works throughout his career, including 5 symphonies, 9 operas, 4 ballets, art songs, choral and chamber music.  He is known for blending American genres like blues, jazz, and spirituals with classical elements.  His prolific output reflects his deep commitment to portraying the African American experience and advocating for racial equality in the arts.

To quote Claire Detels, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, “William Grant Still may be characterized as a far-seeing, progressive individual: a breaker of barriers against blacks as composers of serious concert music, a “trailblazer” in the development of a nationalistic American idiom for serious concert music, and a man of unusually broad vision of the purpose and potentialities of music for bridging the gaps between blacks and whites in this country, and indeed between people of all ethnic backgrounds all over the world.”

“This is the inspiring side of William Grant Still—the youth of 17 from the Deep South who dreamed, in spite of all signs of societal repression, that he would compose operas and symphonies…however, there is another side which is equally as important to an understanding of the composer and his works: William Grant Still the traditionalist.”

“As a human being, William Grant Still stood for, spoke for, and wrote about traditional values throughout his adult life—values such as patriotism, freedom, democracy, religious faith, family, and education.”

Bluffton, New Posts, Palmetto Bluff, SC, South Carolina History

River Tides and the Creative Life

Leave a comment

River tides are famous for their effect on human life. I have included here some of the information in my recent book, Lowcountry Tides, Selected Poems of Florence Rubert Graves, where I commented on the impact of those tides. My book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Florence Rubert Graves, greatest of mothers, loving wife, best of daughters, and a loyal friend to many. She guided, mentored and encouraged all who had the good fortune to know and love her. She wrote many poems over a long lifetime. However, I selected the poems for this collection from those she either wrote during the years she spent in the tidal river lowcountry of Bluffton, South Carolina, or later poems written while remembering those times. Living near those tides has a daily impact on creativity. A tidal river can be seen and experienced as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of daily life; the highs and lows of human emotion—and everything in between. Click here for those thoughts, River tides and Creativity

New Posts

Charles Ives and the American Mind

Leave a comment

My wife, R. S. Perry, published a book in 1974 entitled Charles Ives and the American Mind. Her book is a very broad and knowledgeable study on American Transcendentalism and its impact on creative artists such as the composer Charles Ives. I have started re-editing that book for a second edition that will be published soon. Stay tuned for more as I make progress on that project. I will occasionally post some quotes from her book here on a new page that I will mount shortly called R.S. Perry’s Charles Ives.

 

Bluffton, New Posts, Palmetto Bluff, SC, South Carolina History

Tales of Old Town Bluffton

Leave a comment

My new book, Tales of Old Town Bluffton, The Complete Writings of Andrew Peeples, is now available in paperback from Amazon Books. Andrew Peeples’ stories are full of early twentieth century small town local color.  He was born in 1905 in Bluffton, SC, and raised on Calhoun Street (the main street) in the house shown below. He was the seventh son in a family of fourteen children. He graduated from Bluffton High School and later from the University of South Carolina. For many years he worked as the Health Education Director for the South Carolina State Board of Health.

New Posts

Ethnic Influences on Musical Style

Leave a comment

As some of you know I have long been interested in American Neo-Romantic orchestral music. So much so that I started a study over ten years ago and have been working on the book, off and on, ever since that time. (There was a lot of down time!) I finally decided to finish the project! If you ever wondered what Neo-Romantic music is, or just want to know more about it, my new book, Ethnic Influences on Musical Style, Three American Neo-Romantics, is now available on Amazon Books. The cover art is by my wife, R. S. Perry.

The three American Neo-Romantic composers that I discuss are Ernest Bloch, William Grant Still, and Samuel Barber. It is a small and affordable book. (122 pages, $7.95) I plan on making it available as an e-book soon. Stay tuned, or just check back on Amazon from time to time.

When I compose music, I sign it as J. S. Graves. When I write a book or an article I sign it as John Samuel Graves III. It’s kind of complicated. Perhaps I will explain it some day in this blog.

New Posts, SC, South Carolina History

Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story

2 Comments

On April 4, 1951 at 3:30 P. M., my brothers and I experienced a trauma that marked us for life: our father took us by force on our way home from school in Philadelphia and brought us back 700 miles to his and our home: Bluffton, SC. My twin brother and I were nine and one-half years old, and my younger brother was only six. None of us, including our father and mother, ever fully recovered from that event and the subsequent custody battles that followed.

John Samuel Graves, Jr., my father, and Florence Rubert, my mother, married on June 25, 1939. After 11 years of marriage my mother decided she wanted to think things over. She and my father agreed to a trial 3 month separation, and on June 3, 1950, Mother took us north to stay with her sister, her mother, and her grandmother. After about 10 months had passed without our father being allowed to see us he became convinced that he had to take matters into his own hands: he would return us to our ancestral South Carolina home. The details of that story are presented in my new book, Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, a non-fictional account of those and previous times in the Lowcounty town of Bluffton, South Carolina. The second edition will soon be available. Stay tuned.

For more information about the people described in my book please visit The Real People in my New Book tab on graveshouse.org.

My book is now available in its Second Edition on Amazon Books. Amazon’s Look Inside feature allows a viewer to read substantial portions of the book’s text. Please take a look! The Second Edition in not primarily different from the first edition. It has been re-edited for spelling, grammatical and formatting issues. The Second Edition also contains photographs that were not in the earliest versions of the book. Some of these additions and corrections have been posted for quite some time on graveshouse.org . See page Testimony Back Story & Photos.

New Posts

The Resilience of Nature

Leave a comment

The Resilience of Nature
October 2020

Nature often seems to ignore
whatever is going on in our lives.

It just keeps “pushing things up.”
Nature is “by nature” hopeful!

These photos are of things that have just “appeared” in our yard in the last month – without invitation or prodding. Somehow – like music – they just seem to “always be there for us, if we will just look and listen.”

If anyone knows what exactly these plants are please let me know. When using my contact form please include “plant names” in your first line. I get a lot of junk mail in my contact form and I may inadvertently delete your email. Thanks.

New Posts

Florence B. Price, American composer

Leave a comment

The Heart of a Woman, The Life and music of Florence B. Price

New book by Rae Linda Brown, recently published by University of Illinois Press, 2020, now at the Central Arkansas Library.

Florence B. Price (April 9, 1887-June 3, 1953) and William Grant Still (May 11, 1895-December 3, 1978) were raised in the same Little Rock neighborhood and were lifelong friends. Both can be viewed as Neo-Romantic composers.

According to Brown:

“Florence Price was the most widely known African American woman composer from the 1930s to her death in 1953. She achieved national recognition when her Symphony in E Minor was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1913…The concert marked the first performance of a large-scale work by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.”

“I have told Florence Price’s story in the fullest context of her life as an African American woman in the vibrant cities in which she lived – in Little Rock, Boston, Atlanta and Chicago. Only through an understanding of the social, political and economic milieu can the reader more fully appreciate Price’s music and the context in which it was written. Particular attention is given to the black classical music tradition in these cities, which is often overshadowed by the proliferation of jazz, blues and gospel music.”

Remarkably, Price completed over 300 works in diverse genres: 4 symphonies, orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, including arrangements of spirituals, a piano sonata, a piano concerto, violin concertos, a piano quintet, multiple works for the organ and more. Brown gives a great deal of attention to the analysis of some of Price’s major works. Much of Price’s music can now be seen and heard on youtube.com.

Price’s story is a cautionary tale about what can happen to one’s artistic output if steps are not taken to preserve it while one is alive! If it hadn’t been for a chance find in 2009 by a new owner of an abandoned vacation cottage once used by Price much of her music would have been lost. They found many previously unknown pieces, including  two violin concertos and her Fourth Symphony. Much of Price’s work is now archived at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Our own Linda Holzer, Professor of Piano and Music at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has often championed American composers, especially women composers. She has featured works by Florence Price on many of her recitals. Her Doctoral Dissertation Treatise was entitled Selected Solo Piano Music of Florence B. Price. Watch for future recitals of Price’s music and please visit Professor Holzer’s website: http://www.lindaholzermusic.com/

New Posts

Tonality, Neo-Romantic Post #9

Leave a comment

In an attempt to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the word tonal, Walter Simmons describes two basic kinds of tonality:1

    1. the strict constructionist position which dates from 18th century Germany and Austria, where “a primary tonal center serves as an overall organizing principle, unifying all other aspects of a composition,” and

    2. the loose constructionist position which refers to “all music in which tension/resolution expectations rooted in tonal harmony play a role in the expressive impact of a composition.” This kind of tonality permits the use of atonality “as an expressive device within a tonal composition, in passages where the subjective experience of a tonal center is largely absent, even though a theoretical tonic may be adduced through elaborate objective analysis.”2

      The loose constructionist position on tonality most accurately describes the music of the American neo-romantic, and highlights, for me, the most ‘neo’ part of their appellation. They are Late Romantics who, rather than being satisfied with producing music like 19th century romantics, continued to develop and evolve their, and our, sense of how tonality, harmony, rhythm, and form could be used most creatively in the 20th and now, the 21st century.