For twenty years, from 1950 to 1970, the University of Alabama hosted an annual Composers Forum every spring on the UA campus. The founders of the Forum were two UA faculty members, Gurney Kennedy and Paul Newell. For the first two years, the Forum was sponsored by the Alabama Composers’ League. Beginning in 1952, the Forum was renamed the Regional Composers Forum and was co-sponsored by newly-formed Southeastern Composers’ League, also founded by Gurney Kennedy.
The goal of the Composers Forum was to provide opportunities for composers in the Southeast to hear performances of their works and those of their colleagues. The objective, as set forth in a statement by Kennedy, was “to make a direct contribution to the development and maturation of contemporary composers by providing what might be called a laboratory or workshop in which new works might be put to the test of performance.“
Kennedy and Newell wanted the Forum to be a kind of informal colloquium, and the program of the very first Forum in 1950 illustrates this well. There is a combination of orchestral and chamber works, and there are full rehearsals, sectional rehearsals, a panel discussion, and public performances.
Over the years, approximately 175 composers participated in the Forum, and some composers attended multiple times. In addition there were a large number of guest conductors and several guest critics. In almost every year, a well-known composer was an invited guest at the Forum, and the list of guest composers reads like a Who’s Who of American music in the mid-20th century, including Roy Harris, Vincent Persichetti, Lukas Foss, and Carlos Chavez, among many others.
The Forum and its achievements have long interested Dr. Linda Cummins, a musicologist and faculty member of the UA School of Music. Dr. Cummins was an undergraduate at UA during the last year or two of the Forum, and she has vivid memories of the excitement she felt at hearing so many new works. In the spring of 2016 Dr. Cummins assigned the students in her graduate seminar MUS 626 the task of collecting and organizing information on the Forum and the participating composers and conductors. The W.S. Hoole Special Collection holds a rich trove of primary source materials related to the Forum, including photographs, programs, newspaper articles and reviews, and letters. The students made use of these materials, as well as other library and online resources, to compile the data.
Dr. Cummins and Cynthia Miller, Music and Performing Arts Librarian, realized that an online exhibit would be a good way to make this information accessible to a wider audience. They proposed such a project to the staff of the Alabama Digital Humanities Center – Dr. Emma Wilson and Tyler Grace- who became enthusiastic collaborators. The project is now in the first stage of development.
When the project is complete, it will be possible for the viewer to navigate through the site in multiple ways: by year, program, composer, conductor, and critic. The site will also show the relationships among some of composers. Many of the composers who attended the Forum were teachers or students of other Forum attendees. The site will enable the user to explore these connections.
We hope that this project will illuminate a rich period in the musical life of the University of Alabama, and that it will trace the many interconnections among southeastern musicians and with their counterparts throughout the country.