An Update and a Challenge
This past Thursday (August 29, 2024) marked the 145th anniversary of the birth of a rediscovery-in-the-making for the twenty-first century: the remarkable musical and theatrical polymath Will H. Dixon (1879-1917). Thanks to the tireless stewardship of Lawrence Levens of New York, the occasion, and its advent, have attracted attention, with the result that it is now easier than ever before to learn about Will Dixon and his legacy, and to pass that knowledge on to others. Now comes the real challenge – which is, truth be told, an extraordinary opportunity.
First let me show you the “substantial attention”:
Travelanche’s excellent blog post on the occasion of Dixon’s 145th birthday (here);
The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association’s excellent post titled “Will H. Dixon’s Birthday” (here);
Gershwin 100’s wonderful post centering on Mirabella: Mexican Serenade (here);
The New York Amsterdam News story by Lawrence H. Levens on Will H. Dixon, Frankye Dixon, and the story of the discovery of the Barnes/Dixon/Myers Historical Harlem Papers (here);
An earlier story by Daytonian in Manhattan about the Rochambeau Apartments at 312 Manhattan Avenue, where Dixon’s daughter, Francesca (“Frankye”) and her mother (Dixon’s wife) lived after his death (here); and
A wonderfully rich 2021 post by Erin Rothenbuehler for Archiving Wheeling (here).
That’s a beautiful pool of resources for a composer who is unknown to most people today.
But if this remarkable burst of attention to Will Dixon and his legacy poses an opportunity for today’s world to make his story a part of our own world’s story, that also brings with it a great responsibility. Because if we rely on these exciting contributions to the blogosphere and on today’s listeners listening to the few recordings of Dixon’s music that are currently available, the knowledge of Will Dixon and his legacy that we have just begun to savor will eventually become a matter of memory, and then forgotten, lost in the fray. It all means that the future longevity of Will Dixon’s legacy – the chance of its not slipping back into the obscurity that has all but completely hidden it from view for the past 107 years – depends on our world, on our seizing this historical moment and opportunity:
Teachers need to learn about Dixon and learn his music; and we need to teach about his and teach his music to their own students. Today’s students are tomorrow’s teachers, and tomorrow’s teachers are infinitely more likely to teach their own students a world of music that includes rather than excludes will Dixon if they’ve learned those things from their own teachers.
Scholars – musicologists, music theorists, and cultural historians – need to study Dixon as a manifestation and contributor to the great Black Renaissance of the twentieth century with every bit as much zeal and thoroughness as they (we) unquestioningly devote to canonical composers. (He deserves it!)
Scholars also need to investigate, edit, and publish the dozens of other fascinating and beautiful pieces small and large are held in the Barnes/Dixon/Myers Historical Harlem Papers, Archives and Musical Manuscripts Collection that currently survives under the guardianship of Lawrence H. Levens in New York (https://www.weremember.com/william-dixon/7s3l/memories). Because today's peformers generally do not perform from manuscript, it is only through printed and published editions that Dixon’s musical legacy can be studied and taught, performed and recorded. (This circumstance -- the fact that performers must have printed and published music -- is how the political economy of music publishing has effectively marginalized the legacies of many composers who do not belong to the insider's club of dead white European men to the point of obscurity.)
Music publishers – who are ever eager for music that has no complicated and expensive legalities – need to take advantage of the fact that the Intellectual Property of Dixon’s music is now long since in the Public Domain. As I pointed out in my last post, his 35 most widely held works and published compositions in 47 publications are held in 98 academic libraries. Accessing those 47 publications currently held in libraries is the definition of ease; and reissuing or re-editing them would be the simplest of publishing opportunities. Music publishers can, and should, collaborate with scholars who are investigating the works still in manuscript in order to make these accessible – and affordable – to performers and students.
Finally, professional institutions, societies and organizations (among them the American Musicological Society, the National Association of Negro Musicians, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Society for American Music, the libraries of HBCUs, and more) can work to provide a safe, stable, and publicly accessible home to the documents of Will Dixon’s life. Many of these, as noted above, are under the stewardship of Lawrence Levens in New York, but it will take more than any single individual can offer to follow through on the task of rediscovering Will Dixon and his legacy. The role that the libraries of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, have played in preserving the legacy of Florence Price, or that the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University) and the Booth Family Center for Special Collections (Georgetown University) have played for Margaret Bonds is an example of what’s needed.
Today, 145 years after Will Dixon’s birth, we stand before a real and marvelously consequential historical moment. That much is clear. The only question is, will our world walk away from that moment, or will we seize and make Will Dixon’s story a part of our own world, bequeathing his rediscovered legacy to our students and their students after them?
The fact that you’re reading this suggests that you’ll be eager to seize this moment. As a reward, here’s a new Dixon collage created by the estimable Bill Doggett:
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