CULTURE : In Concert With a Legacy : A 25-year study of American black music has uncovered a mother lode of riches, especially in classical forms. Now, keepers of the flame are bringing the music to life.

In 1971, when Samuel A. Floyd Jr. came across a book titled “Music of Black Americans,” by Eileen Southern, he never expected it to change his life. He had no idea it would send him on a lifelong study or that it would lead him to found a world-renowned music research center as well as the Black Music Repertory Ensemble--the acclaimed chamber group that makes its Los Angeles debut today at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A.

He certainly couldn’t have known it would lead him to musicians like Alton Augustus Adams, who “integrated” the U.S. Navy in 1919, some three decades before blacks and whites actually served together in the armed forces.

“Adams was the first black bandmaster in the Navy,” Floyd explains. “During World War I, there had been some submarine activity in the Caribbean, around the Virgin Islands, which at the time were owned by Denmark. The U.S. forced the Danes to sell the islands and sent the Navy in to establish a base on St. Thomas.

“When they got there, the naval captain heard a group called the Adams Juvenile Band. They were no longer juveniles, but they had started as youngsters taught by Alton Adams, a native of St. Thomas who had taken correspondence courses in music and written several marches. The captain was so impressed by the quality of their music that he got permission from President Woodrow Wilson to induct the entire band into the Navy--at a time when the only way blacks could serve was as cooks.”

Adams is just one of the musical heroes that now fill Floyd’s pantheon--heroes who might hold Floyd in even higher esteem. In 1983, at Columbia College Chicago, he founded the Center for Black Music Research, which he still directs, to “document, preserve and disseminate information about the rich cultural legacy of black music.” In addition to sponsoring the Black Music Repertory Ensemble, the center publishes scholarly journals, newsletters and an annual monograph, and hosts national conferences on black music, making it “an activist operation,” says the director, as opposed to a mere library.

While there are other archives concentrating on jazz or blues, the center remains singular, Floyd says, in its focus on the “full context of the black musical experience,” from gospel to jazz, rhythm and blues to musical theater. It recently added to its endeavors Project Kalinda, which looks at black influences on the music of Latin America and the Caribbean through performances and research.

However, the Center for Black Music Research has worked hardest to eradicate the idea that black composers of “serious” music never existed. Both in this country and abroad, black music is seen as primarily improvised, as opposed to notated: Jazz, blues, pop and folk music usually dispense with the elaborate scores that characterize classical work.

But classical forms and the notated tradition have always drawn at least some black composers. Consider Frank Johnson, who was born on Martinique in 1792, and wrote more than 200 compositions, mostly social dance music, or Will Marion Cook, born in 1869 in Washington, D.C. Cook, a mentor of Duke Ellington’s, gave up a classical violin career (he had a recital at Carnegie Hall in 1889) to work in popular musical theater, where he fused European operetta with African American folk music. Works by both men, unearthed by Floyd, will be heard in the Black Music Repertory Ensemble’s Los Angeles concerts.

Composer Hale Smith, who serves as artistic consultant to the ensemble, contributes pieces to its repertory of contemporary work and has orchestrated much of its repertory, says: “One of our jobs is to resurrect as much of this music as can stand resurrection, pieces we feel should at least be part of the record. It’s interesting that a number of the works we’ve introduced had never been heard by a person now living; some had not been played in more than a century.”

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The founding of the center came about almost accidentally. In 1971, after Floyd, a music instructor at Southern Illinois University, read Southern’s book, he wanted to teach a course on the music of black Americans. But he was stymied by the dearth of usable materials, such as sheet music, scores or recordings. “So I started to do my own research and soon realized this field was too big--that we needed a lot more scholars working on it.”

His initial research took him to the Newberry Library in Chicago, famed for its various scholarly collections. “I had read somewhere that they had a large collection of sheet music of all kinds, so I applied for a grant to look for music by black composers. The music wasn’t indexed, so I started going through every box--more than 80,000 pieces of sheet music in all.” He was guided by a list of composers gleaned from his research, but he would occasionally find a piece of music bearing the composer’s likeness and discover a new name for his list.

Most of the pieces Floyd was cataloging existed only on paper--very little of it could be heard on recordings. “All the while I had the idea in the back of my mind to get some kind of group together to play this music,” Floyd says.

In the meantime, he started printing a homemade newsletter that he sent to anyone he thought might be interested in the field. Scholars and musicians responded with information and questions they wanted to have answered, and the mailing list eventually reached 6,000. Floyd quickly concluded that he alone couldn’t act as clearinghouse for the mass of new information coming in and that the project needed an academic institution in which to settle itself and house its files.

He first tried to establish the center at Fisk University in Nashville, in 1978, but financial problems torpedoed that plan. In 1983, he hooked up with Columbia College Chicago, which has built a regional reputation in the performing arts and photography. By this time, Floyd had begun publishing the semiannual Black Music Research Journal.

It was not until 1987 that the center could raise enough funds to establish the Black Music Repertory Ensemble. Even though Chicago serves as its home office, the ensemble--a chamber group of 15 instrumentalists and vocalists--draws its members from around the country. It includes musicians such as violinist Sanford Allen, who in the ‘60s was the first African American to become a regular member of the New York Philharmonic, and tuba player Jack Jeffers, who has also worked with the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands. The conductor will be Kirk Edward Smith, music director of the Central Iowa Symphony, and a professor at Iowa State, and the tour features bass Raymond Bazemore, tenor William A. Brown and mezzo soprano Hilda Harris.

Interestingly, the ensemble, which comes together once or twice a year to rehearse and tour, still draws on Floyd’s research from the ‘70s for most of its historical repertory: Only the occasional “new” piece of old music has turned up in the intervening decades. The ensemble augments its programs with modern pieces, a handful of which they have commissioned.

The Los Angeles concert will feature several such compositions, including Hale Smith’s “Dialogues and Commentaries,” which was inspired by a bird call; Wendell Logan’s “Brasstacs,” which pays tribute to Miles Davis; and Olly Wilson’s large-scale song cycle “Of Visions and Truth.”

Another song cycle, “Six Songs on Texts by African-American Poets,” was brought to the ensemble by soloist Harris. “I know the composer, Leslie Adams,” she says, “and I’ve done these songs for voice and piano.” When Harris suggested this piece for the ensemble’s current tour, the composer provided an appropriate arrangement. This process illustrates the place that the ensemble holds in the consciousness of its members, who spend the rest of their careers immersed in the traditional classical repertory. Says Harris, who has performed at the Metropolitan, Chicago Lyric and San Francisco operas, among others: “It’s important for me as a black performer to always keep in mind that there are wonderful black composers and their music needs to be heard as much as anyone else’s. It’s important for my musical life to be able to do something like this.”

The concert will open with the “Recognition March on the Independence of Hayti” by Frank Johnson, who has almost as interesting a history as Alton Adams. “Johnson’s band was well accepted everywhere as one of the best bands in the U.S.,” Floyd says. “I’ve traced their concerts from Philadelphia to Canada to St. Louis, where he and his entire band were arrested for being ‘free Negroes’ without the appropriate papers.

“But they were the first American band, as far as we know, to make a European tour, where they played for the queen of England, and Johnson brought back the latest trends in social dance music when they were still fresh in Europe.

“But newspaper accounts of the time suggest he was also improvising, playing the music differently in black and white settings. So he was borrowing from the African American tradition too.”

In assessing the general invisibility of black composers, Floyd says that racial stereotyping plays only a secondary role. “I think that in academia, and in the concert world, the western European tradition is still it. Even other traditional American composers don’t get played that much because the powers that be are still touting the masters of Europe. Now if a white American composer isn’t treated any better than that, then of course it comes into play worse for black composers,” he says.

Conductor Smith agrees with that view. He also underscores the ephemeral nature of such distinctions when he says that one can’t listen to a piece of music and determine whether it was written by a black, a woman, or say, a Russian.

“It’s easy to say that it was influenced by things we can identify as coming from black or Russian culture,” Smith says, “or by concerns raised by women. But it’s difficult to tell you who actually wrote it.”

Hale Smith (no relation to the conductor) expands upon that idea. “I think there really is a link, a thread, that ties together much of the music by black composers. It’s sometimes very subtle--certain rhythmic and harmonic preferences. In spite of the fact that these composers wrote many different kinds of music, there’s this subtle line of musical patterns that continues all the way through. I don’t know why. I do think that there is such a thing as transmitted values, bits of communal information passed on by culture and society. And the whole idea of African American tradition is separate from both the African and European traditions, though it has its foundations in both.”

It is the full range of that tradition that the ensemble aims to communicate in its concerts. As Floyd explains: “The general public never gets to see the research published in our academic journals. The purpose of the ensemble is to show the results of that research, and to show just how powerful this music is.”

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Black Music Repertory Ensemble performs today at 4 p.m., Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive. $18-$22. (213) 343-6610.