Kay, Ulysses Simpson

(b. 7 January 1917 in Tucson, Arizona; d. 20 May 1995 in Englewood, New Jersey), classically trained composer and professor who was among the first black American musicians to write music independent of folk traditions.

From an early age, Kay determined to be an accomplished musician, with encouragement from musically inclined relatives including his father, Ulysses S. Kay, a barber who sang in the family home, and his mother, Elizabeth Davis Kay, who sang at church and played piano. Especially influential was his uncle, the legendary cornetist and leader of the Creole Jazz Band, Joseph “King” Oliver, who urged his nephew to study piano. Kay took piano lessons from the age of six through his college years. In his youth he also studied the violin, saxophone, and flute, performing in school ensembles and in a navy band during World War II. But well into adulthood he did not consider himself “a player.”

At age seventeen he entered the University of Arizona, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1938. As an undergraduate he met the eminent composer William Grant Still, probably best known for his Afro-American Symphony. The Mississippi-born Still encouraged Kay’s composition efforts, and the younger musician considered Still a major influence on his career. Kay received a master’s degree in 1940 from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he studied composition with Bernard Rogers, another career influence, and with Howard Hanson. Kay continued study with Paul Hindemith at the Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood in Massachusetts and at Yale University (1941–1943). After his military service, Kay studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University (1946–1949). On 20 August 1949 Kay married Barbara Harrison, a teacher; they had three daughters.

Kay’s work and residence overseas included three years in Italy (1949–1952), made possible by two Prix de Rome awards and a Fulbright scholarship. In 1958 he took part in a cultural exchange with the Soviet Union through the U.S. State Department. A music professor for more than twenty years, Kay taught at Boston University in 1965 and at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1966–1967. In 1968 he joined the faculty of the City University of New York’s Herbert H. Lehman College, where he remained until retiring in 1988. For years Kay was also an editorial consultant for Broadcast Music, Inc.

Kay wrote more than 140 compositions scored primarily for orchestra, chorus, chamber groups, voice, and keyboard instruments. While some black American composers routinely incorporated spirituals, work songs, or other elements of black folk traditions into classical structures, Kay preferred not to follow suit. Comparatively few of his pieces draw attention to black traditions, among them Lift Every Voice and Sing (1952), scored for a big band—style orchestra and named for a hymn often called the black national anthem; Fugitive Songs (1950), an unpublished song group; and the opera Frederick Douglass (1985), created with librettist Donald Dorr. In both scholarly interviews and the public press, Kay has been quoted as saying he saw “nothing especially black” about his music, “other than its expressive content.”

Nor could Kay’s compositional career be considered terribly nationalistic, because he did not often incorporate American folk tunes or patriotic themes into his works, although he did write some music for the Bicentennial celebration of 1976. Still, some observers have detected a subtle American flavor in his Serenade for Orchestra (1954) and Umbrian Scene (1963), due to their “optimistic character” and “unconstrained color and melody.” Kay also wrote pieces inspired by monumental American historical figures, among them presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy and the explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

Kay’s choral and orchestral music was often inspired by literary or historical figures. One piece he mentioned as being personally significant to him was the 1966 symphonic essay Markings, inspired by writings of the United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold. Premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and performed by the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra, Markings stood out to Kay because it is “big in scope as well as in expression” and “quite personal in terms of how it’s worked out.” The International Dictionary of Black Composers calls Markings prototypical of Kay’s chromaticism, lyrical melodies, and potential for great tension.

In middle age Kay increasingly read poetry for inspiration for vocal and choral music. Text-based compositions include Three Pieces After Blake (1952) for soprano and orchestra, Inscriptions from Whitman (1963) for chorus and orchestra, Emily Dickinson Set (1964) for women’s chorus, and Stephen Crane Set (1967) for chorus and orchestra. Other major orchestral works include Of New Horizons: Overture (1944), which was an early success premiered by the New York Philharmonic; Concerto for Orchestra (1948); Theater Set (1968), which was commissioned for the Atlanta Symphony; and Southern Harmony: Four Aspects for Orchestra (1975), inspired by nineteenth-century hymns.

Slightly built with glasses, close-cropped hair, and a receding hairline in later years, Kay and his wife lived for more than three decades in suburban Teaneck, New Jersey. He died in Englewood Hospital after a lengthy illness. The family attributed the cause to Parkinson’s disease.

Historians who classify Kay’s music sometimes head in decidedly different directions. Observations often depend on various periods in Kay’s music. Hildred Roach, who wrote two volumes of profiles of black composers, sees “neo-baroque” structure and counterpoint in some of Kay’s early works. Pieces from the 1940s and 1950s seem “neoclassical” to Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. Atonality in Kay’s late works has been described both by Roach and by Kyle Gann of the Village Voice. Perhaps the former Harvard University professor Eileen Southern’s description of Kay’s “contemporary traditionalism,” “neoromantic roots,” and “crisp, dissonant” technique comes closest to the composer’s intentions.

The music historian Nicolas Slonimsky’s extensive detailing of Kay’s life and work in his 1997 edition of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians builds on material Slonimsky published forty years earlier in American Composers Alliance (ACA) Bulletin. Hildred Roach chronicled Kay’s work and analyzed his music in her first volume of Black American Music: Past and Present (1973), then credited the composer for research for the second volume (1985). The Black Composer Speaks (1978), edited by the jazz composer David N. Baker and others for Indiana University’s Afro-American Arts Institute, contains extensive commentary and analysis from Kay himself. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Bergen (New Jersey) Record (both 23 May 1995) and the Washington Post (28 May 1995).

Whitney Smith