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In 1917, Still entered Oberlin College, but he interrupted his studies the following year to serve in the Navy during World War I, first as a mess attendant and later as a violinist in officers’ clubs. He went back to Oberlin after his service duty and stayed there until 1921, when he moved to New York to join the orchestra of the Noble Sissle–Eubie Blake revue Shuffle Along as an oboist. While on tour in Boston with the show, Still studied with George Chadwick, then President of the New England Conservatory, who was so impressed with his talent that he provided his lessons free of charge. Back in New York, Still studied with Edgard Varèse and ran the Black Swan Recording Company for a period in the mid-1920s. He tried composing in Varèse’s modernistic idiom, but soon abandoned that dissonant style in favor of a more traditional manner.

Still’s work was recognized as early as 1928, when he received the Harmon Award for the most significant contribution to Black culture in America. His Afro-American Symphony of 1930 was premiered by Howard Hanson and the Rochester Philharmonic (the first such work by a Black composer played by a leading American orchestra) and heard thereafter in performances in Europe and South America. Unable to make a living from his concert compositions, however, Still worked as an arranger and orchestrator of music for radio, for Broadway shows, and for Paul Whiteman, Artie Shaw, and other popular bandleaders. A 1934 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to cut back on his commercial activities and write the first of his nine operas, Blue Steel, which incorporated jazz and spirituals. He continued to compose large-scale orchestral, instrumental, and vocal works in his distinctive idiom during the following years, and after moving to Los Angeles in 1934, he supplemented that activity by arranging music for films (including Frank Capra’s 1937 Lost Horizon) and later for television (Perry Mason, Gunsmoke). Still continued to hold an important place in American music until his death in Los Angeles in 1978.

Still received many awards for his work: seven honorary degrees; commissions from CBS, New York World’s Fair, League of Composers, Cleveland Orchestra, and other important cultural organizations; the Phi Beta Sigma Award; a citation from ASCAP noting his “extraordinary contributions” to music and his “greatness, both as an artist and as a human being”; and the Freedom Foundation Award. Not only was his music performed by most of the major American orchestras, but he was also the first Black musician to conduct one of those ensembles (Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936) and a major symphony in a southern state (New Orleans Philharmonic in 1955). In 1945, Leopold Stokowski called William Grant Still “one of our great American composers. He has made a real contribution to music.”

Still composed and arranged much music for concerts, films and television after settling in Los Angeles in 1934, and worked with many of the musicians playing in the studios, local orchestras, and chamber groups. Among them was Joachim Chassman, a first-call violinist at CBS Radio, 20th Century Fox, and Columbia Pictures, a member and soloist with the Santa Monica Symphony, and one of Los Angeles’ most respected violin teachers. In 1939, Chassman established the Hollywood String Quartet with violist Paul Robyn, violinist/conductor Felix Slatkin, and his wife, cellist Eleanor Aller (parents of eminent conductor Leonard Slatkin), and asked Still to compose a piece for the group.

Before the Hollywood Quartet was disbanded when the male members enlisted for military service after Pearl Harbor, Still composed the Lyric String Quartette for them, subtitling it “Musical Portraits of Three Friends”—The Sentimental One, The Quiet One and The Jovial One. He never identified the subjects of these musical depictions. “However,” wrote Judith Still in her biography of her father, “when the group tried it out, my father said there was something wrong with it and threw it in the wastebasket. My mother [music journalist, librettist of Still’s operas and concert pianist Verna Arvey] took it out, saved it, and I later edited and published it. The Quartette was an immediate hit when played, and audiences gave ovations to the Quiet One movement. Everyone wanted to know who among our friends was ‘The Quiet One,’ but I have no idea.… [It] may have been about my mother, a fine, quiet, but powerful lady who had tremendous talent on her own.”

“I am Western-trained,” Fung says, “but my works are infused with Asian elements…. My journey is not like that of someone who grew up in China. I did listen to Chinese folk songs at home, but my first time in China was 2002, when the American String Quartet toured there to play a piece I wrote for them.” Two years later Fung made an extended visit to Bali under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange Program, sponsored by the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, and she has since increasingly embraced such non-Classical influences in her works as jazz, folksongs from the minority regions of China, and Indonesian gamelan music.

Vivian Fung wrote of the String Quartet No. 2, composed for the 25th anniversary of the Shanghai Quartet and premiered by them on April 23, 2009 at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Often, the source of inspiration for my works lies in Asian folk materials, as is the case in the String Quartet No. 2, which uses a Chinese folksong as the basis of the Introduction, Interlude and Postlude.

“The Quartet No. 2 is in six short movements, with each movement being a study in a certain mood or affect represented in the subtitles. These descriptions are not to be taken literally, but are more evocative in flavor.

“The first movement (Introduction) presents the traditional folksong as a chorale with the instruction ‘to be played like a consort of viols.’ In other words, I wanted an ancient sound quality to this introduction, as though the movement were written many moons ago. [Viols are Renaissance predecessors of modern string instruments.]

“The second movement (Of the Wind) evokes ferocity and aggression, and challenges the musicians with different bow strokes and virtuosic scalar passages.

“Of Birds and Insects is playful and humorous, using many off-the-bow strokes, natural harmonics and ornamentation, including glissandi and trills, to depict the sounds of nature.

“Interlude restates the folksong of the first movement, but in a disguised form in which each note of the melody is played by a different member of the quartet — hence the term Klangfarbenmelodie, German for ‘tone-color-melody.’

“Of Tribes and Villages features a distinct rhythmic drive as well as a songful melody in the middle section.

“The Postlude (Of Ghosts and Memories) restates the folk song as a slow chorale and is constantly interjected with quotations, or ‘memories,’ of the previous movements.”

Galitzin received his three new scores in fine copies by the middle of 1826, and promised payment “in a day or two.” The Prince, for all his good intentions and evident sympathy for Beethoven’s creative process, however, found himself, as he put it, “awkwardly placed” at the time, and the bill remained unpaid. (During the preceding year, one of Galitzin’s children died, his wife fell gravely ill, and his indirect involvement in a revolutionary movement brought him to the edge of bankruptcy.) Beethoven sued for his money without success, and the account was not finally settled until 1852 (!) between Galitzin’s son and Beethoven’s heirs.

The premiere of the B-flat Quartet was given by the ensemble of violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a champion of Beethoven’s works in earlier years and the first musician in Austria to undertake public quartet concerts. There had, however, been problems with the performance when Schuppanzigh’s quartet gave the premiere of the E-flat Quartet (Op. 127) in March 1825 (exacerbated by Beethoven being unable to deliver the parts for this extraordinarily difficult music until just two weeks before the concert), and Beethoven granted them the honor of introducing the B-flat Quartet with some trepidation. Perhaps that is why he chose to spend the evening of the premiere (March 21, 1826) in a local Viennese café waiting for news. Karl Holz, the second violinist of the ensemble, brought a good report: the performance had gone well and the audience was generally enthusiastic, though everyone seemed puzzled by the Quartet’s slow movements and, especially, by its finale, a gigantic construction in fugal style. Holz tried to humor the composer by telling him that the audience demanded encores of the lighter second and fourth movements, but Beethoven was incensed. “Yes, these delicacies! Why not the Fugue? ... Cattle!! Asses!!!” Despite the composer’s epithets, the first hearers of this Quartet were a highly sophisticated lot, perhaps the most knowledgeable and sympathetic audience in all of Europe at the time, and Beethoven must have ultimately found some merit in their misgivings because nine months later he replaced the Grosse Fuge with an alternate finale of more modest dimensions. It was the last music that he completed. The Fuge, in both its original version and in a piano duet transcription, was published separately as Op. 133 two months after his death.

The B-flat Quartet comprises six movements balancing profundity and humor. Indeed, both of these sentiments are embodied in the very first page of the Quartet, which boldly contrasts a solemn Adagio proclamation with a skittering Allegro strain of Baroque rhythmic vivacity. (Beethoven had much earlier tried a similar experiment in the famous “Pathétique” Sonata, Op. 13, of 1799.) These two thematic cells together comprise the main theme, and are juxtaposed throughout the movement. A lyrical episode, embellished with the fast scales of the Allegro, provides contrast as a second theme. The following Presto movement is actually a tiny, quicksilver scherzo that is graceful, witty and thoughtful all at the same time. Robert Schumann called the Andante con moto an “intermezzo,” a term that is both perceptive and inaccurate. On the one hand, the word implies a sort of informal music-making with little regard for creating a unified structural whole, and is certainly not applicable to this movement, which develops logically and inexorably from the motivic germs sown in its opening measures. On the other hand, the movement’s very process of organic growth makes it difficult to classify as one of the traditional Classical formal types, and is probably the quality in this music which occasioned Schumann’s appellation of implied musical miscellany, “intermezzo.” Placed as emotional and stylistic foil between this movement and the deeply felt Cavatina is a Danza tedesca (“German Dance”), whose strict periodic construction, swaying rhythm and buoyant spirits are much in the popular manner of Beethoven’s day. Karl Holz reported that Beethoven “wrote the Cavatina (‘short aria’) amid sorrow and tears; never did his music breathe so heartfelt an inspiration, and even the memory of this movement brought tears to his eyes.” Beethoven here rendered his grand emotion into music of profound simplicity and purity. In but one extraordinary passage, marked “beklemmt” (“oppressed”), does the first violin break into a kind of anguished free recitative whose obstreperous rhythm challenges the solemn gait of the lower instruments and threatens to rupture the music asunder. The emotion is purged, however, and the violin rejoins its companions to murmur once again the theme of the opening.

Beethoven left the question of the Quartet’s finale unsettled, so that the work may be performed with either the Grosse Fuge of the original version or the substitute movement that he provided for it shortly before his death. The Grosse Fuge, grand in size and Promethean in thought, bursts from the strict model of the Baroque genre by inextricably combining counterpoint, variation and thematic development: it is a virtual compendium of Beethoven’s techniques at their highest level. Philip Radcliffe noted that the Grosse Fuge “is best understood if regarded, not as a highly eccentric fugue, but as a kind of symphonic poem consisting of several contrasted but thematically related sections and containing a certain amount of fugal writing.” The work’s principal thematic material is presented dramatically in a short, introductory “overture.” There follow a long fugue, four sections of motivic development in dense counterpoint (Meno mosso e moderato in 2/4 time; Allegro molto e con brio in 6/8; and altered returns of the 2/4 and 6/8 sections), and a modification of the opening fugue as conclusion.