Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about a re-creation of a landmark concert that took place nearly 90 years ago. We’ll also get details on the Manhattan district attorney’s request for a gag order before Donald Trump’s criminal trial begins next month.
The concert was initiated by students. The printed program, handed out to people arriving and taking their seats in the audience, was typewritten.
When Fredara Mareva Hadley came across it in the archives of the Juilliard School in Manhattan, the program was yellowed. But for Hadley, an ethnomusicology professor in Juilliard’s music history department, seeing the program “was one of those moments where you stopped for a second,” she said. “It felt like a real treasure.”
The program was from a 1934 concert that will be re-created at Juilliard tonight at 7:30 p.m. The soprano Denyce Graves will be the host.
In capital letters, the program said that Harry T. Burleigh (above) was “presiding.” There was no indication that he sang. The concert featured Black Juilliard students. One, Anne Brown, would go on to make such an impression on George Gershwin that he changed the title of his opera from “Porgy” to “Porgy and Bess” — and cast her as Bess. Another of the Juilliard students would create the role of Serena.
Burleigh’s influence on that concert was unmistakable: He wrote two of the songs on the bill and arranged three others.
So who was he?
A protégé of Dvorak
Burleigh was a protégé of one of the greatest composers of the late 19th century, Antonin Dvorak, who created “mainstream music with an American accent,” as his biographer Michael Beckerman explained. “Many composers who followed — notably, Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington — owe him both a stylistic and an intellectual debt.”
Dvorak wrote one of his most famous works, the “New World” Symphony, while he was the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. The school was a short-lived creation of a Gilded Age patron who had lured Dvorak with a $15,000-a-year salary, exponentially more than he was making back home in Prague. Burleigh was a scholarship student there.
“From Burleigh, Dvorak absorbed the songs Burleigh knew from his blind grandfather, a former slave,” Joseph Horowitz wrote in his book “Dvorak’s Prophecy” (2021). “From Dvorak, Burleigh absorbed a fuller appreciation of his musical inheritance.” After Dvorak’s death in 1904, “it was Burleigh more than anyone else who transformed spirituals into concert songs,” Horowitz wrote.
Burleigh was a longtime soloist at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square, hired despite “the consternation of the congregation, which objected because Burleigh was African American,” according to a Library of Congress biography. He sang there for more than 50 years, missing only one appearance. He was also the first Black soloist at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side.
In 1934, Burleigh was in his 60s. Hadley said the concert appeared to be the only time Burleigh was at Juilliard.
“For those of us at Juilliard now,” the discovery of Burleigh’s involvement “feels like new information,” Hadley told me. “Everyone was surprised this happened at Juilliard in 1934 — and delighted: ‘1934? Seriously?’ This was before most predominantly white universities in the country were even admitting Black students.” Juilliard’s records did not indicate how many Black students were enrolled in 1934, she said, but Juilliard’s first Black graduate had received her degree 27 years earlier.
How gutsy was it for the Juilliard students to have approached Burleigh about a concert? “I go back and forth about that question,” Hadley said. “No doubt, it was a major get.” But the students who invited Burleigh had probably already crossed paths with him as well, she added.
The typewritten program from that concert is on display in an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia featuring Black artists and activists with Juilliard connections. Besides works from the 1934 concert, the re-creation tonight will feature a new arrangement of Burleigh’s “Sinner, Please Doan Let This Harvest Past” by Damien Sneed along with new songs by two Juilliard students, Danae Venson and Christopher Armstrong.
“It feels like we are not resurrecting a relic,” Hadley said. “We are listening to what those young people did in 1934 and carrying it forward.”
Weather
Prepare for another unseasonably warm day with a high in the mid-50s and a chance of rain. At night, expect rain and a low around 53.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 24 (Purim).
How to remember Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who died on Friday after apparently flying into a building on the Upper West Side? Impromptu memorials sprang up over the weekend. And a petition on the website Change.org called for a statue in Central Park. The petition suggested a design of a life-size Flaco perched on a branch and the placement of the statue “near the tree across from the compost in the northwest quadrant of the park where he roosted most often.”
Brandon Borror-Chappell, who wrote the petition with his friend Mike Hubbard, said that as a regular in the park, he became accustomed to seeing Flaco. “Now that little spark of magic is gone,” he told me, saying he had just finished a run in Central Park. “It hurts.”
The Parks Department said that commemorative sculpture in parks is exceedingly rare — especially so in Central Park. “Since Central Park was designated a New York City scenic landmark in 1974,” a spokesman for the department said, “there is an extremely rigorous public review process required before a statue can be installed.”
A gag order for Trump?
Manhattan prosecutors asked the judge overseeing the hush-money case against Donald Trump for a “narrowly tailored” gag order that would prevent the former president from attacking witnesses or revealing jurors’ identities.
The prosecutors — from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg — asked for restrictions that would mirror a similar order upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington. That case accuses Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The filing in Manhattan referred to Trump’s “longstanding and perhaps singular history of using social media, speeches, rallies, and other public statements to attack individuals that he considers to be adversaries.” The request asked that Trump be barred from commenting on prosecutors in the case — other than Bragg himself. He has long been a target for Trump and his supporters: Bragg’s head of security, in an affidavit made public on Monday, said that some of the worst attacks directed at the district attorney last year included racial slurs and death threats.
In a separate filing, Bragg placed a special emphasis on the protection of jurors in the case. His prosecutors asked that Trump be barred from making their identities public. Bragg also asked that jurors’ addresses be kept secret from the former president.
METROPOLITAN diary
Last fare
Dear Diary:
I was running late to work one morning, so I decided to take a taxi, a rare luxury. I settled in, and the driver and I exchanged pleasantries. He said I was his last fare.
I said he must be looking forward to going home and getting some rest.
“You don’t understand,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead on the road. “You are not my last fare for the day. You are my last fare forever.”
He explained that he was retiring that day after 45 years of driving a cab.
As he took me to East Harlem from the Upper West Side, he reminisced about his career and the many famous passengers he had picked up.
When we got to my destination, I told him I was honored to have been his last fare and wished him luck. He smiled, turned off his meter and drove away.
— Diane LaGamma
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
