He was among a number one African American composers during a early years of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. His works typically appeared among a software of William Marion Cook's New York syncopated Orchestra. Dett himself performed at Carnegie Hall and at the Boston Symphony Hall as a pianist & choir director.

Biography
Dett was innate inside Drummondsville, Ontario (today Niagara Falls, Ontario) where he exposed piano at an early age showing initial interest at age ternary & formal piano lessons at age 5. He was a boy of Charlotte Inl& northwest Dett and Robert T. Dett; his mother was a indigen of Drummondville when his father was from either the United States. As a baby his mother encouraged him to memorize passages of Shakespeare, Longfellow and Tennyson. Inside 1893, a personal moved to Niagara Lessens, Future York. At astir age 14, he got played piano for his local church. He continued his Lockport, New York studies at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory of Music from either 1901 to 1903.

He so continued his soft studies at a Lockport Conservatory, matriculating to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It was at Oberlaround while he was 1st explored to the idea of utilizing negro spiritual in definitive style music; he was involved to the music of Antonín Dvořák which was immediately reminiscent of the spirituals he had heard from his grandmother. He was a foremost melanize student to complete a 5-month course at Oberlin. He so toured as a concert soft player & in the time of this period he wrote just rudimentary piano compositions. He so come under a influence of E. Azalia Hackley, soprano, who inspired his interest in black American folk music.

Inside 1908, he completed his degree, a Bachelor of Music with a major within composition & piano. Inside that season, he became the prof at Tennessee's Lane College followed by a tenure at at a Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri. When you took this time, he wrote practical choral & soft pieces suitable for his students. A 1913 piece In the Bottoms contains one of his most played movements, Dance Juba. Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler performed a work on the Chicago Music Hall by using awesome profits. Before long fallowing this he became a number 1 melanize director of music at a Hampton Institute in Virginia where he maintained a position from either 1913 to 1932. When you took this nigh twenty-season time period, he founded a Hampton Choral Union, Musical Arts Society, Hampton Institute Choir & School of Music. He encouraged his Hampton student, treble Dorothy Maynor, to pursue a career as a concert creative person; she followed his advice to be one of a leading concert creative person in the united states.

His position as a major pianist-composer was earned inside 1914. His piece Magnolia was performed at the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Club. In June 3rd of that season he performed Magnolia & In the Bottoms. A Chicago Evening Post reported that among a works on the "All Colored" program, his were a works were a virtually all innovative & complimented a high level of his pianistic skill. In December 27, 1916, he married Helen Elise Smith— the number one graduate of the Institute of Musical Art, at present The Juilliard School of performing arts. Inside 1918, Dett wrote of his compositional goals:

"We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people ... But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characterists, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long." (Southern 280)

Throughout his lifespan, Dett continued to survey. Both summertime, he attended major national institutions. From either 1920 to1921, he attended Harvard University where he studied by owning Arthur Foote winning two prizes. ''Don't Exist as Weary Traveler, a choral composition, won the Francis Boott Award spell his essay "The Emancipation of Negro Music" won a Bowdoin Prize. His interest around composition continued to reflect a demands of teaching. Percy Grainger recorded the Juba from either In the Bottoms in the time of this period at Harvard. He composed collections of negro spiritual which he got intended including Religious Folksongs of the Blackamoor (1927) & A Dett Collections of Negro Spirituals'' (1936). Dett received the Holstein prize for his contributions as a composer.

Around 1929, he traveled to France to survey at a Fountainbleau school of music by having Nadia Boulanger and then he earned a Master's of Music Degree at a Eastman School of Music within 1932. Around 1933 when resigning from either a Hampton Institute, he served when a choral conductor for Stromberg-Carlson's NBC radio broadcasts. One of his virtually all praised chorale works was so written inside 1937, a cantata A Ordering of Moses. It was conducted by Eugene Goosens in 1939 with at a Cincinnati Festival. Dett was Camping Director of Music at Bennett College within Greensboro, North Carolina began in 1937 and continued to 1942. Using this chorus, he toured through Canada & a United States also when broadcasting in CBS.

Dett joined a United Service Organization as a choral advisor to contribute to the war efforts. Traveling by owning this chorus, he died of the heart attack in October ii, 1943 survived by his married woman besides when his two girl. He was buried in the town of his birth at Niagara Lessens, Ontario.

Music
Legacy
Dett is remembered virtually all for his act around combining a music of a European Romantics by having the Western negro spiritual. A music of Robert Nathaniel Dett is however performed now. Canada's Nathaniel Dett Chorale bears his namesake & performs his music likewise when more composers of African properly. A choral is one of numerous that has recording his music.

Late within his career, his style wwhen flushed from either his sooner neo-romantic works as he adopted other contemporary idioms. In that late cycle, he wrote soft suites like U.s. Ordering of Moses (1937), Tropic Winter (1938), & Eight Bible Vignettes (1941&ndash1943)—his final soft suite.

Major Works
Magnolia (1912) In the Bottoms (1913), a "characteristic suite" of foursome movements Music in the Mine (1916), a choral work A Chariot Jubilee (1921), for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. Enchantment (1922) A Cinnamon Grove (1928)