Howard Swanson

Howard Swanson was born on the eighteenth of August 1907 at Atlanta, Georgia, the son of John Swanson and Eliza Swanson — labourers in the Atlanta domestic-service economy. The family migrated north in 1916 to Cleveland, Ohio in the first wave of the Great Migration, settling in the Hough neighbourhood.

He completed the public schools of Cleveland and worked through his teens at the New York Central Railroad as a porter and at the Cleveland post office as a mail clerk. He saved at the post office for nine years and enrolled in 1927 at the Cleveland Institute of Music in evening study under the institute’s founder Herbert Elwell, completing the bachelor’s in composition in 1937.

He took the Rosenwald Fellowship in 1938 — among the principal Black arts fellowships of the inter-war period — and used it to study with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris between 1938 and 1940. He returned to New York at the outbreak of the European war in the summer of 1940 and took employment at the Internal Revenue Service as a tax examiner — the position from which he composed for the following decade.

He completed in 1948 the Short Symphony in three movements, premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos on the twenty-third of November 1950 at Carnegie Hall. The Short Symphony was named the 1952 New York Music Critics’ Circle Award best new orchestral work of the previous season — the first such award to an African American composer.

He composed in 1949 the art-song The Negro Speaks of Rivers on the Langston Hughes (placed in this archive) text — premiered by Marian Anderson (placed in this archive) at Carnegie Hall on the twenty-second of October 1949 — and a further forty art-songs across the following twenty-five years.

He lived from 1952 to 1966 at Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, returning to New York in 1966.

He died at New York on the twelfth of November 1978 of a stroke, at seventy-one.

He is honored here as the first African American to win the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award.