Born in Drumondville, Quebec, R. Nathaniel Dett received early musical training at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory in Lockport, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree at Oberlin Conservatory in 1908. A lifelong scholar, Dett would continue to study music throughout his career at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. In 1900 Dett began to experiment with ragtime, publishing his first composition, After the Cakewalk, but soon left ragtime behind for concert spirituals. After touring as a concert pianist, he taught at Lane College from 1908 to 1911 and Lincoln Institute in Missouri from 1911 to 1913. From 1913 until 1931 he worked as director of music at Hampton Institute. Dett led the Hampton Institute Choir to great success, with performances at the Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, and Symphony Hall in Boston. All the while Dett arranged spirituals and folksongs for voice and chorus, and composed original pieces. Dett published two collections of spiritual arrangements, Religious Folksongs of the Negro in 1926, and The Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals, a four volume series published in 1936. His awards include the Harvard Bowdoin Prize for his essay, "The Emancipation of Negro Music" (1920), the Francis Boot prize for composition, the Harmon Foundation Award for composition (1927), honorary Master of Music degree from Eastman School of Music, honorary doctorates from Harvard and Oberlin, the Palm and Ribbon Award from the Royal Belgian Band in Europe, and a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting Company to write a work for radio. Dett's most accomplished works include the piano suites Magnolia (1912), Enchantment (1922), In the Bottoms (1926), The Cinnamon Grove (1928), and Tropic Winter (1938). His oratorios The Chariot Jubilee and The Ordering of Moses have been performed at prestigious festivals including the Cincinnati Festival of 1927 and the Worchester Festival of 1938. His works were also performed by the Oratorio Society in New York (1939), and at the National Negro Opera Company Concert of 1940.³²