Sunday Feature: A Racist Music

Errollyn Wallen explores and challenges the legacy of John Powell (1882-1963), a once-celebrated composer whose racist politics scarred the lives of generations of Americans. John Powell was one of the most celebrated American composers of the early 20th century; his Rhapsodie Negre for piano and orchestra was the most-performed concerto of the era, after Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Performed from Carnegie Hall to London to Berlin, Powell's music blends the lush harmonies of the late Romantic era with folk tunes and even early jazz, a missing link between the lush early Americana of Edward Macdowall and Amy Beach and the roaring Twenties modernism of Gershwin and Copland. Yet you'll find barely a mention of John Powell in most music textbooks. Because Powell was also one of the most infamous and horribly influential racist ideologues in music history. A composer who didn't just hold repugnant white supremacist views - but who used his own compositions, and work as an ethnomusicologist to articulate them. And who used his position as a major cultural figure to help personally secure the passage of one of the most poisonous racist laws of the 20th century: America's 1924 Racial Integrity Act. In Powell's native Virginia, from the archives of Charlottesville's University of Virginia to the bucolic Blue Ridge Mountains, we discover that more than half a century after his death, Powell's social, musical and ideological legacy continues to scar the lives of musicians today. Musicologists Bonnie Gordon and Philip Ewell explain how Powell's unquestioning championing of white music above all others continues to play out in insidious and powerful ways in the 21st century. Powell may be dead, his virulent racism espoused by fewer people now (we can hope). And yet it's lazy - and dangerous - to cast this as a story from the past: Powell's legacy is a conversation with the present