Howard Swanson

Howard Swanson was born on the eighteenth of August 1907 in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Mamie Thomas and Howard Swanson. His mother had taught school and was active in Atlanta's cultural life before her marriage; his father found work with the railroad. As a boy Swanson sang in a clear soprano, often in duet with his mother in the churches of their community — the first music of a life that would carry Black American song into the great concert halls.

In 1916 the family, seeking wider opportunity, left Atlanta for Cleveland, Ohio. There Swanson labored by day and studied by night, entering the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he trained in piano and composition and earned his degree. His gifts drew him onward to Paris, where he studied under the exacting Nadia Boulanger, before the shadow of war compelled his return to the United States in 1941.

Lean years followed — a clerkship at the Internal Revenue Service, and the quiet resolve of a man determined to write lasting music. Recognition came in 1950, when Marian Anderson sang his setting of Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" at Carnegie Hall, and when the New York Philharmonic premiered his Short Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos that November. The work earned the New York Music Critics' Circle Award — Swanson the first African American composer so honored — and Guggenheim and academy recognition soon followed.

Across art songs, orchestral works, and chamber pieces, he wove the traditions of African American song into the classical forms, speaking, as Virgil Thomson wrote, "clearly, warmly, modestly and at the same time with authority." Howard Swanson died in New York City on the twelfth of November 1978. We honor him: the boy who sang beside his mother, who made of dignity a music that endures.