George Bridgetower, Beethoven’s friend and the original dedicatee of the “Kreutzer” Sonata (Beethoven dropped him because they quarreled over a woman.
As portrayed in the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason:
Robert C. Fisher:
The young prodigy Ifetayo Ali-Landing:
And the late Draylen Mason (2001-2018):
The pieces Roy Williams plays in his mother’s house when he returns from Europe:
The most famous of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms (called “The Gypsy Dances” by Hughes):
Roland Hayes singing “The Crucifixion” (for more on Hayes, including the poem Langston Hughes wrote on the assault on the great tenor in Georgia, see here):
The “Meditation” from the opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet:
It’s worth noting in the context of the Hughes story that, in the 2018 film Green Book, composer and pianist Don Shirley does not play classical music for white audiences, but rather his own jazz-classical hybrid form, a choice that makes white listeners more comfortable with the separation between him and themselves; in a sense, Hughes tells us, it’s the blurring of race and musical genre that leads to Roy’s death. For Don Shirley in the film, it’s only in a black bar that he’s finally allowed to play the music that he loves the most.
For more about the real Don Shirley, the subject of the film, read this.
What do Kira Thurman’s essay and Langston Hughes’s story tell us about the experiences of black classical musicians?
One year ago, the city of Austin, Texas was terrorized by a bomber who, over the course of two weeks in March, murdered two people, and injured several more, with homemade bombs sent through the mail to residents of communities of color.
One of the dead was a 17-year-old classical musician, Draylen Mason, the only black member of the Austin Youth Symphony.
Dr. Kira Thurman, who has written extensively about black musicians working in the standard repertoires of western art music, uses this tragedy as the starting-off point for an exploration of what it means to be a black classical musician in the article “Singing Against the Grain: Playing Beethoven in the #BlackLivesMatter Era”:
Classical music cannot save anyone. But I still find our discussions of its role in black lives too one-note, tone-deaf and flat. What is absent from conversations on black experiences in classical music and what is grossly underestimated in our debates is classical music’s shocking power . . . Black popular music is not the only thing capable of moving the body irrespective of what the mind wants.
. . . I do not believe that the answer to critics’ questioning of blackness and classical music is for black people to stop playing it. Such an argument allows only white people the freedom to enjoy a musical work for its own sake, and it dictates to black people not only what their social responsibilities are as artists, but the terms by which they are to fight against their own oppression.
. . . Held up as symbols of racial advancement, used to denigrate others who cannot or will not make the same aesthetic choices, or denounced as Uncle Toms, black classical musicians inhabit a liminal space. But it is a space that encourages us to consider the full range of experiences that should be available to people of color, including the pleasure of abstract, even Western, art music. It is a space in which Draylen Mason chose to thrive. And because of him and others, it is a space in which I choose to remain.
Dr. Thurman imagines Draylen Mason performing this concerto for his Oberlin audition:
Here is the music Dr. Thurman played at her own conservatory audition.
A Bach prelude: she doesn’t specify which one, so here are a few.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 2, no. 1:
Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor:
Other pieces that Thurman says have moved her in particular:
You will notice that I was unable to find any videos of performances of the above pieces by black musicians. Why do you think this is? Is it important? How can this absence be addressed?
The composer Anthony R. Nelson speaks to some of the issues facing black composers of art music:
As a frequent attendee of new [classical] music events around the world, I often feel as though the presence of people who look like me is not wanted or is merely tolerated . . .this feeling arises mainly from observations of concert programming [whose absence of works by black composers sends] the message “black composers have not composed music good enough for us to play or for this stage” . . . Classical music did not escape the greater social construct of racism and patriarchy, which is why composers such as Ignatius Sancho, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Blind Tom, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, William Grant Still, and plenty more are usually only studied in non-required specialized classes. . . There is also a trend that places the music of black composers mostly in themed concerts, more often than not related to social justice or for Black History Month. While this is not necessarily negative, the injustice arises when absolute music or music with non-social themes by black composers is overlooked. In sum, we are not one-trick ponies.
Some examples of new classical music by black composers referenced by Kira Thurman:
Cycles of My Being, a song cycle composed by Tyshawn Sorey, with texts by Terrance Hayes, performed by Lawrence Brownlee.
Read the program for one of Brownlee’s performances of this piece, with the texts, here.
The Spark Catchers, by black British composer Hannah Kendall:
Anthony R. Nelson is himself one of the founders of a classical music ensemble with the beautiful name Castles of Our Skins, which is dedicated to fostering and performing works by composers of color. Here is video from some of their concerts:
Why do you think black composers are so rare in the worlds of classical music? Do you think the western art music traditions offer meaningful opportunities for self-expression for black musicians and audiences?
As we’ve discussed in class, W.E.B. Du Bois, above, who spent several years studying in Germany in the 1890s, greatly admired German classical music, and considered it a repertoire full of freedom and possibility for black performers. He especially loved the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and in 1936 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the opera house in Bavaria where a festival of Wagner’s operas is put on every year. By this time, it was widely known that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer: here is Hitler at the 1934 Bayreuth festival.
As Alex Ross describes the trip:
Inspired by Du Bois, and by the remarks made by historian Kira Thurman (above) in the “Studying the Lied” colloquy in the Summer 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, here is a playlist of most of the singers mentioned by Thurman, singing German repertoire. Read the colloquy here.
A live recording of the African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey from 1941 (starts at around 15:00; I couldn’t figure out how to cue the audio, so you may need to listen to a violin sonata by Paul Hindemith first).
Tenor Roland Hayes, a native of Georgia and the son of former slaves, was brutally beaten by a white shoe store clerk while on tour, when his wife and daughter sat in the “whites only” area of the store. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the incident:
Roland Hayes Beaten (Georgia, 1942)
Negroes,
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their minds!
Ellabelle Davis:
Kenneth Spencer:
Leontyne Price:
Simon Estes:
William Warfield:
Grace Bumbry:
Reri Grist:
Kathleen Battle:
South African soprano Pretty Yende improvises some Zulu in a spoken monologue in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at the Metropolitan Opera:
Pretty Yende singing an aria from the same opera:
Tenor Russell More recalls being told “Too bad you’re black,” at an audition.
Thomas talks about his debut as Otello:
Thomas sings:
