JAVS Fall 2020

spirit. It was a pleasure to be with him, and he was a very special person,” Fader commented.

was as a studio musician and contractor that Clarke was most prolific. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, Clarke performed and recorded on violin and viola on hundreds of recordings with a diverse array of artists ranging from James Brown and Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, and Willie Colón. Of particular note is his appearance on a recording from Ornette Coleman’s Town Hall appearance in 1962, on a string quartet arrangement Dedication to Poets andWriters , in what is considered Coleman’s first chamber music utilizing his improvisational theory of harmolodics. Clarke was also one of the founders of the Symphony of the New World, one of the first integrated orchestras in the U.S. Little information is available about Brown, but he deserves mention as the sole other African-American violist, in addition to Selwart Clarke, listed as a Broadway performer in the 1960s. 9 He was one of the first African-Americans admitted to the Eastman School of Music, which he attended in 1947 before transferring to Curtis in 1948, where he studied with William Primrose and Karen Tuttle. As the marginalization of David Johnson suggests, many talented African-American musicians during this period either did not perceive, or did not encounter, robust opportunities to enter major orchestras. Many such players instead sought out careers as performers and contractors for the more copious opportunities available in locations such as New York City for the recording of popular music and music for film, as well as opportunities for live performance with pop superstars. Brown did have occasion to perform in the NBC Radio Orchestra under Toscanini, but, much like Clarke, performed and recorded with a wide variety of famous performers such as Alfred Brown (1931–2013)

In 1964, with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson conducting the Orchestra of America, Clarke gave the premiere of Perkinson’s viola concerto, a three-movement work without pauses dedicated to him by the composer. Perkinson had written this work as his master’s thesis at MSM in 1953 or 1954, and the two had known one another for some time, given that their attendance had overlapped at both the High School of Performing Arts and MSM. The dedication and subsequent performance may be taken as evidence that the two were close at the time. Unfortunately, the New York Times reviewer in attendance was not favorable towards the work. Keiser Music, which publishes much of Perkinson’s work, has no record of a manuscript. Nor is the work available via recording. It seems that Clarke’s performance was one of very few occasions or the only occasion at which this work was presented to the public. Another work of by Perkinson for viola, his Lament for viola and piano, has been published and is available through Keiser Music (see ex. 1). For more information about this work, see the author’s article “Signifyin(g) within African American Classical Music: Linking Gates, Hip‐Hop, and Perkinson” in the Fall 2019 issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 7 The New York Times also reviewed Clarke’s Town Hall debut recital on December 6, 1965, in which Clarke presented works by Marais, Telemann, Vaughan Williams, Fisher, and Piston. 8 He was joined by cellist Kermit Moore for the Piston, and a short encore by Kermit’s wife, Dorothy Rudd Moore. The review unfavorably characterized his musical approach, labeling it overly “athletic” and “vigorous” for the program’s lighter works. Reflecting Julius Grossman’s good judgement in hiring Clarke as a manager back in 1959, it

Example 1. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Lament for viola and piano, mm. 1–6.

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

25