Ohio musician Justin Holland participated in the Underground Railroad and worked in the same circles as activists like Frederick Douglass to improve the lives of his fellow Black Americans in the mid-1800s. Holland spent over 40 years of his life living near Cleveland, and when he died in 1887, the Cleveland Gazette said, “his name is more widely known than any other American guitarist.”
As a Black man in the United States in the 1800s, Holland overcame a wide variety of obstacles to create a career for himself. He was a multi-lingual teacher, arranger, composer, and performer on multiple instruments, but he was best known for his work with guitar.
Guitarist Christopher Mallett describes Holland’s 1874 book Comprehensive Method for the Guitar as one of the most successful method books for the instrument in the United States. In a recent interview, Mallett spoke about his 2023 album of Holland's music, Justin Holland: Guitar Works & Arrangements, released on the Naxos label.
Like Mozart, Sibelius, and John Philip Sousa, Holland was a Freemason. He helped to form Excelsior Lodge No. 11 in Cleveland in 1865, and the prolific Black American author James Trotter said in 1878 that Holland’s fame as a Mason was “nearly worldwide; for we find that as a Mason he is well known in the South and West of this country, and in South America, Italy, Germany, and France.”
He studied flute and composition at Oberlin here in Ohio starting in 1841, but his musical career was far from easy. Oberlin's acceptance of Black students was rare for universities at the time, and historian Barbara Clemson writes that Holland's initial attempt to attend the school was unsuccessful because he lacked the necessary funds to pay for his education.
Holland became part of a popular revival of the guitar and was determined to learn the instrument by studying the method books of Spanish masters like Fernando Sor and Dionisio Aguado in their original language. So, he traveled to Mexico for two years to learn Spanish.
The only surviving original composition by Justin Holland is "An Andante in C Major," preserved in an 1878 book by James Trotter, but we know that Holland wrote more pieces.
Mallett says of the lost music, "Maybe it's in some grandpa or grandma's basement somewhere. You never know. I mean, Florence Pryce's music wasn't found until pretty recently, so I'm sure it is somewhere if it wasn't destroyed when the publishers went under."
It was only in 2009 when a couple stumbled upon many of Florence Pryce's lost manuscripts in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois. Perhaps the day is coming when someone will stumble upon some of Justin Holland's lost music, too. Only this time, it may very well happen in Ohio.
Interview Transcript:
Nicholas Booker: I'm Nick Booker from Classical 101 at WOSU Public Media here in Columbus, Ohio, and I'm on a video call with musician Christopher Mallett.
Chris is a classical guitarist and an educator based in the San Francisco Bay area. He lectures for the University of California Santa Cruz when he's not out performing for organizations like the New York Guitar Society and the Cleveland Guitar Society. He's had many critically acclaimed performances and recordings.
But last year in 2023, he released an album on Naxos featuring the music of Justin Holland, a Black musician, arranger, composer, teacher and civil rights activist who made music for over 40 years right here in Ohio in the 1800s. Chris, I'm really excited to talk to you about this wonderful album of Justin Hollins's music. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Christopher Mallett: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about Justin Holland and excited that you're doing a feature on him.
NB: Yeah, me too, goodness. So, it seems like Justin Holland, unfortunately, was largely forgotten for many years. But you've had this almost magical relationship with his music because like him, guitar is your main instrument, and you ended up studying at Oberlin here in Ohio, just like Justin Holland did. But you first came across his music when you were growing up, is that right?
CM: Yeah, I started classical guitar pretty late, like many classical guitarists. It's kind of the story of the classical guitarists of my generation. There weren't a lot of programs for young kids.
So, I kind of stumbled into it when I was around 18 years old and quickly realized that there wasn't a lot of music by Black composers for the classical guitar and classical music in general, you know, or at least what I was learning about at the time, but especially on classical guitar.
So, immediately, I gravitated towards these arrangements I found of Scott Joplin. And I was playing a lot of Scott Joplin on guitar. And I thought it was great, you know, at least I'm playing some music by a Black composer. And one day, my dad, who's an artist, was browsing the Library of Congress website. At the time, they didn't have the massive catalogue that they do now, but they had a lot of cover pages and some samples of pieces.
And he called me out and he was like, "check out this guitar piece I came across." And then I started reading through it. We looked at the name. We saw the name Justin Holland, and we're like, "Well, let's check out who he is." And we looked him up, and we're like, "He's a Black classical guitarist. This is unbelievable."
Had never heard of him. At that time, I knew about Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, all of those, you know, the kind of staple composers but nothing about Justin Holland. And as I started looking into him more, I realized that he had a lot of music out there. It just wasn't being played.
(clip from Christopher Mallett's performance of "Carnival of Venice, Fantaisie" arr. Justin Holland)
NB: And he has a really incredible story as well, not only an influential musician, and had so many of his arrangements published, but also was fighting for the end of slavery and even at various points in his life shared meeting spaces with abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass, right?
Do you do you think about those connections as you prepare his music? Do they sort of affect how you play or or what you play or your preparation and your research?
CM: Yeah, I think that's part of the reason why I'm so attracted to his story. You know, it's like, it's cool, it's great that he was arranging this music, but I think it's even more amazing that at that time, he was thinking about what he can do for Black Americans.
He wasn't just trying to make music for everyone. And he succeeded at that, but he also wanted to make the world a better place. He wanted to make the United States a place where maybe people in future generations that were Black could perform in public and not have to worry that they can travel freely to the South, you know.
And yeah, he was part of several national and local conventions, the "Negro Conventions" they were called at the time. He was invited to several conventions, including—he was one of the delegates who was selected go to Rochester and a few other of the national conventions, which, at the national convention is where he was said to have possibly worked alongside Frederick Douglass.
(Clip from "Variations on L. Mason's 'Nearer My God to Thee,'" arr. Justin Holland from Christopher Mallett's album Justin Holland: Guitar Works and Arrangements)
NB: So, I've been listening to your album of his music over and over. It's just a really stunning performance of some artful arrangements and one of his original compositions as well. Would you tell us a little bit about how you got started with the album?
CM: Yeah. So, the album was a long time coming, and at that time when when we discovered his music on the Library of Congress website, it wasn't so easy to get music from the Library of Congress. So, I was browsing the internet at the time. I think it was 2003. So, you know, the internet was a different place, and I came across this blog of a guitarist, amateur guitarist, Donald Sauter, who was also an amateur historian and was completely obsessed with Justin Holland and was writing a lot about his life and his pieces.
So, I thought, "I'll just reach out to him and maybe start a conversation." He lives close to the Library of Congress. So, I thought maybe he'll actually go there and collect everything that they have Justin Holland's music, and I asked him. He wrote me back immediately. He went there, and about a month later, this package arrives at my door, you know, about this thick of sheet music. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have everything that the Library of Congress has of Justin Holland's music."
And then a few years ago, I think in around 2016 or 2017, I went to Cal State Northridge where they had another collection of his sheet music. And I went there and went through the catalog, copied it all and then was just kind of playing it here and there, you know, played it at St. Louis Guitar Society and a few other guitar societies.
But there just wasn't much interest in having me play it. Still, you know, it's like, I knew that I loved the music. I thought it was great. I thought they were great arrangements. But you know, a lot of people just want to hear the hits. And in 2020, when there was a lot of civil unrest, and, you know, all of a sudden, I was getting flooded with emails, like, you know, "Can you play Justin Holland?" "I know that you know a lot about Justin Holland. Can you lecture about Justin Holland?"
So, at that time, I realized maybe people were ready to open their ears and hearts to his music. And I reached out to Naxos and proposed the idea of getting Holland on their catalogue. I thought Naxos would be the best home for his music because in addition to of course being a label, they are a great catalog of some of the most important composers and arrangers out there, and they said yes, and yeah.
(clip from Christopher Mallett's performance of "Rochester Schottische," arr. Justin Holland)
NB: And with his music, as I understand it, he sort of managed to avoid some racism associated with his music because many people buying his music and even some of his publishers didn't know he was Black, right?
CM: That's correct, yeah. They had no idea that he was Black. And I think probably a majority of the people that were playing his arrangements had no idea either. There's a story, I think it was in James Trotter's book, that he went to a music store outside of Cleveland, which was also a music publisher, too.
But, you know, he went there to go get an instrument or something. But he went to the store, and they were just ignoring him. And you know, he couldn't get any help at all. They were just completely not paying attention. So, he just decided to leave and took his business elsewhere.
But years later, that store actually published a few of his pieces, and he made quite a bit of money off of them. So, they had no idea that the person that they were ignoring was someone that they would employ later and have some successful arrangements from. So, I just think that's such a strange, sad, but also, I think, redeeming story.
His name was just out there. And he at the time became a household name among guitarists and guitar lovers, which, at the time guitar was actually quite popular because I think piano was falling out of favor a little bit because guitars were cheaper, they were easier to carry around, and you can just pick up a guitar in your house after dinner and play it for your family.
So, whenever a new piece came out, a new opera came out, a new, you know, hit single, I guess at the time, Justin Holland was the one who would arrange it for the guitar. So, he has over 300 arrangements on the guitar. And in terms of compositions he is said to have around 30 to 35 composition.
The one that I played on my album, "An Andante," is the one that survives because it was in the back of a book called Music and Some Highly Musical People by James Trotter, which cataloged the lives of several Black composers and Justin Holland's profile was one that was covered in that book and with his story in there was also that piece.
(Clip from "An Andante in C Major" by Justin Holland from Christopher Mallett's album Justin Holland: Guitar Works and Arrangements)
NB: Yeah, one can only hope that some of those compositions,that he made survive somewhere and that, you know, it'll be uncovered...
CM: Yeah, I mean, you never know. Florence Prices's music wasn't found until pretty recently. So, I'm sure it is somewhere if it wasn't destroyed when the publishers kind of went under but, yeah.
NB: Well, for those of you at home, you can find Christopher Mallett's album Justin Holland: Guitar Works & Arrangements on streaming sources. And you can look at his website at christophermallett.com for news and upcoming performances. Chris, this is just a beautiful project, and I'm so looking forward to seeing the effects of this work for Justin Holland's wonderful music going forward. Thanks for talking with me today.
CM: Thanks for having me, and thanks for featuring Holland's music.
