Gwynne Kuhner Brown
Gwynne Kuhner Brown,
University of Puget Sound, Washington
Gwynne Kuhner Brown is an Associate Professor of Music History and Theory at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Her article, ‘Whatever Happened to William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony?’ recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and her essay ‘Performers on Catfish Row: Porgy and Bess as Collaboration’ is included in the collection Blackness in Opera published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. She has presented papers at national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music. She is currently writing a book on the life and work of William Dawson, under contract for the University of Illinois Press’s American Composers Series.
Talk Title: The Deep Satisfaction of having Discovered a New World: William Dawson in Spain
Among the many cultural ambassadors sent abroad by the U.S. State Department during the Cold War was African-American choral conductor and composer William Dawson (1899-1990). For six weeks in 1956 he toured Spain, conducting local choirs in performances of African-American spirituals and sacred works by Tomás Luis de Victoria. Spanish musicians, clergy and audiences alike were astonished by Dawson’s authoritative conducting of Spanish sacred music. They were surprised at the existence of a hitherto unknown sacred African-American musical tradition and were won over by the man himself. For his part, newly self-employed after a quarter century on the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute, Dawson’s letters home paint a vivid picture of this seasoned musician experiencing artistic fulfillment, quite possibly for the first time in his professional life.
