Los Angeles Moving

The program notes claimed that Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony is “one of the most popular American symphonies of all time,” but it sure was a lot more popular in the 1930s and 1940s than today. Premiered in 1931 by the Rochester Symphony and the first symphony to incorporate blues with orchestral music so thoroughly and skillfully, the “Afro-American” was a sensation. The L.A. Phil didn’t get around to it until 1940, and was late in the game, any number of other major orchestras having already programmed it. Leopold Stokowski, a huge Still champion, took the symphony on tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936, including to L.A. Times critic Isabell Morse Jones noted that Still’s blues “are soft, insinuating blues which came from the South, not Gershwin’s Broadway.”