JAVS Fall 2020

In the second decade of the 20 th century, Johnson played chamber music and freelanced as a violist in New York City. His work during this time period including performances in the pit orchestra for the Broadway musical Shuffle Along alongside Eubie Blake and William Grant Still, as well as a tour with an orchestra led by James Reese Europe. Notably, he was the original violist of what became known as the Negro String Quartet. Founded by violinist Felix Weir, this group was an expansion of Weir’s duo with cellist Leonard Jeter, which became a piano trio with the addition of Jeter’s sister Olyve. In 1914, Weir and Leonard Jeter dropped their pianist and added violinist

Joseph Lymos and violist Hall Johnson, to perform as the American String Quartet. In 1920, Weir replaced Jeter and Lymos with cellist Marion Cumbo and violinist Arthur Boyd, and renamed the group the Negro String Quartet. In this formation, with Felix Weir and Arthur Boyd on violin, Hall Johnson on viola, and Marion Cumbo on cello, the group remained active until 1933. As a member of the Negro String Quartet, Johnson performed not only European concert music, but also works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Clarence Cameron White. The group’s most notable concert appearance occurred on November 27, 1925 at Carnegie Hall, where they accompanied tenor Roland Hayes on spirituals arranged by Hall Johnson for tenor, piano, and string quartet. In his review published the next day, New York Times reviewer Olin Downes wrote: The performance had the profound and mystical feeling that the slave songs may possess—if the interpreter understands them—a spirituality and pathos given them in face as well as name. Thus the final group was not merely an expected item of entertainment. It was rather the contribution of a musician and artist whose sincerity and fineness of feeling brought two races together in the presence of a common ideal of beauty. 4 “Negro Job Boss Hired by Municipal Symphony” was the headline in the New York Age , an influential Black newspaper, on July 4, 1959, commemorating the first-ever appointment of an African-American as a contractor by a classical music organization. The contractor, hired by the Municipal Concerts Orchestra, was Selwart R. Clarke, then a 25-year old violist and violinist from Harlem, and the appointment was made through a partnership with the Urban League, which was then working to secure positions for African-American classical musicians. Julius Grossman, director of the orchestra, downplayed Clarke’s appointment, saying “I simply hired the man I thought most capable of handling the job. Now I find I have started some kind of a rumpus.” In fact, Clarke’s appointment was a major step forward. A report presented by the Urban League to Congress in 1960 detailing classical performances by African-Americans within the New York City area painted a discouraging “Negro Job Boss” Selwart Clarke (1933–1992)

Figure 3. Detail image from the program of Roland Hayes, November 27, 1925, Carnegie Hall. Courtesy of Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 2, Fall 2020

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