Samuel A. Floyd: Black Music Scholar and Founder/Editor of The Black Music Research Journal
Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Leshell Hatley in Music, Places of Scholarly Work, Places of Scholarly Work, Research, Scholarly Celebrations
Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. is a man with a mission –to uncover, document and share with everyone a vast body of Black music that has been hidden far too long. It is music that has grown out of the unique experiences of Black Americans, and ranges from simple “hollers” to very complex symphonic works. His Center For Black Music Research is turning up long-neglected works by Black composers.
Education
Accomplished musical educator Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. was born in Tallahassee, Florida, on February 1, 1937. He received his B.S. from Florida A&M University in 1957 before attending Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he received his M.M.E. (Masters in Music Education) in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1969.
Career
From 1957 to 1962, Floyd worked as band director for Smith-Brown High School in Arcadia, Florida. He then moved on to his alma mater, Florida A&M University, where he worked as a music instructor and the assistant director of bands until 1964 under the legendary William Foster.
Between 1964 and 1978, Floyd taught as an associate professor in the Music Department at SIU, after which he became director of the Institute for Research in Black American Music for Fisk University, where he worked until 1983. This Institute documents the establishment, activities and accomplishments of the project. Resources include, but are not limited to, correspondence, financial records, brochures, programs, invitations, booklets, sheet music, dissertations, photographs and miscellaneous materials.
National Conference by the Center for Black Music Research
Since then, he has worked at Chicago’s Columbia College, where he directed the Center for Black Music Research from 1983 to 1990 and from 1993 to 2002. He also served as academic dean from 1990 to 1993 and as interim vice president of academic affairs and provost from 1999 to 2001. In 2002, Floyd became director emeritus and consultant for the Center for Black Music Research.
Floyd has lectured at numerous colleges and universities throughout the United States; served on various committees for Southern Illinois University, Fisk University and Columbia College; received a multitude of research grants and awards; and participated in many professional and civic organizations. He has written a variety of articles published in professional journals and has authored and edited books on musical theory and research.
The Center for Black Music History
Working out of a small office in an annex of Columbia College in Chicago, Dr. Floyd has gathered countless music manuscripts, recordings, concert programs, memorabilia and other items that make his Center For Black Music Research perhaps the most important such facility in the world. The Center publishes several scholarly periodicals, including Black Music Research Journal, Black Music Research Digest and the International Dictionary of Black Composers.
A Proud Moment
One of Dr. Floyd’s proudest achievements is the Black Music Repertory Ensemble, a small orchestra he organized to perform some of the works he discovers as well as music by living Black composers such as Olly Wilson, a professor of music at Tufts University, and Hale Smith, the distinguished composer who orchestrates all of the early music the 14-member Ensemble performs. A recent concert was praised by Chicago music critics. It included such little-known compositions as “St. Louis Grey’s Quick Step,” written in 1852 by J. W. Postlewaite; “Rescue Polka Mazurka,” written in 1869 by Sidney Lambert; “On Emancipation Day,” written in 1903 by Will Marion Cook, and “Three African Dances,” written in 1913 by Montague Ring, the pseudonym of Amanda Aldridge, daughter of the famous actor Ira Aldridge. Also heard at the concert were Olly Wilson’s “Sometimes,” an arrangement for tenor soloist and electronic instruments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” and the final movement “Duet” from Hale Smith’s Meditations In Passage.
Influence
He was fascinated by a book, The Music Of Black Americans, by Eileen Southern (the 1st Black Professor at Harvard University-also featured here on BSI), and began looking for some of the music he had read about.
“I wanted to perform it in my classes and have the students become familiar with it,” he says, “but all I could find were pieces here and there; there was no body of work available anywhere, so I began my research.”
He was encouraged by valuable material he found at Chicago’s private Newberry Library. More was found at the Library of Congress, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture. A Newberry Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment For the Humanities allowed him to devote full-time to research.
Floyd is married and has three adult children.
===
Information obtained from The History Makers and Ebony Magazine online (via BNET’s findarticle feature).
More Related posts:
