Composer Robert Nathaniel Dett was a native of Drummondville, Ontario, a town founded by slaves who had escaped to Canada. The young Dett started piano at three years and lessons at five. His grandmother introduced him to spirituals, and his mother to Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Tennyson.
He was the first black American to graduate from the Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied composition and piano, and was introduced to the idea of incorporating spirituals into classical music, such as Antonín Dvorak’s use of American elements in the “New World” Symphony. And he discovered the music of a fellow admirer of Longfellow poems, the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who also was fascinated by African- and Native-American music.
Dett toured as a concert pianist before embarking on a teaching career. His nearly two decades of work at the Hampton Institute in Virginia included becoming its first black director of music; founding its School of Music; and creating the Internationally-touring Hampton Institute Choir, which specialized in African American sacred music, including Dett's own compositions and arrangements.
Said Dett,“We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people ... But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it… unless our musical architects… fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics.”
Though already successful, Dett continued to grow: studying at Columbia, Northwestern, Harvard, and with master composition teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
While advising a U.S.O. tour during World War II Dett suffered a fatal heart attack… championing black American music to the end.
Robert Nathaniel Dett… Classically Black.
