Center for Black Music Research
Score and composer collections Edmund Thornton Jenkins scores Finding Aid, or Guide to the CollectionTitle: Edmund Thornton Jenkins scores, 1916-1940
Predominant Dates:1916-1925
ID: 2000/JENK_2002
Primary Creator: Jenkins, Edmund Thornton (1894-1926)
Extent: 5.5 Linear Feet. More info below.
Date Acquired: 00/00/1990
Subjects: African Americans--Music, Composers, Black
Forms of Material: Scores
The Jenkins manuscripts include a number of compositions from his student days, and later popular and serious compositions. For some orchestral works only piano scores or incomplete orchestral parts have survived. There are also several unfinished compositions, some only sketches. Both Jenkins’s student compositions and his later works show evidence of his interest in and use of African-American folk and popular themes. Two such works for full orchestra were performed during his lifetime: Folk Rhapsody (on American Folk Tunes) which was written and premiered in 1919, and American Folk Rhapsody: Charlestonia, written in 1917 and premiered in 1925. His operetta, Afram ou la belle Swita, set partly in Africa, includes a chorus in an African language, along with American songs. Another late work, his Negro Symphonie Dramatique, subtitled “Scenes de la Vie d’un Esclave,” exists only as a piano score.
One folder of printed biographical material is included, but the family correspondence on which Green based his book is not part of this collection.
Edmund Thornton Jenkins was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and studied at the Avery Institute and Morehouse College. He got his early musical training at the Jenkins Orphanage founded by his father, a Baptist minister, and toured with the orphanage band during the summers. Jenkins was able to play every band instrument as well as the violin by the age of 14. After travelling to England with the Jenkins Orphanage Band in 1914, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, studying composition and taking lessons on orchestral instruments. He earned a diploma in 1921. Upon leaving the Academy Jenkins supported himself by playing in jazz bands and dance orchestras in England and later in Paris where he also began his own publishing company, the Anglo-Continental-American Music Press, which published some of his own compositions. Around 1920, Will Marion Cook, a noted American composer and performer of both art music and musical comedy works, invited Jenkins to direct his Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which performed a mixed repertoire of early jazz and classical music and toured Europe (and the States) in 1918–1919. After Jenkins grew disappointed at unsuccessful attempts to establish an audience for black orchestral music in America in 1923–1924, he returned to Europe. His operetta, Afram (1924), and the Negro Symphonie Dramatique, (1925) indicate a renewed focus on concert music late in his short life. He died in Paris in 1926 after an illness.
For more information, see: Jeffrey P. Green, Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894–1926. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
Repository: Center for Black Music Research
Alternate Extent Statement: 5.5 linear feet (6 boxes)
Access Restrictions: None
Use Restrictions: None
Physical Access Note: Includes scores, manuscripts
Finding Aid Revision History: Finding aid edited by Adam Melville, March 6, 2018.
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