WHY IS AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC SO WHITE?<\/p>\n
Tom Huizenga<\/strong><\/p>\n Antonin Dvorak predicted that American classical music would draw from African American traditions. A new article wonders why American classical music has remained so white.<\/p>\n When the first enslaved Africans landed on American shores in 1619, their musical traditions landed with them. Four centuries later, the primacy of African American music is indisputable, not only in this country but in much of the world. How that music has evolved, blending with or giving rise to other traditions \u2014 from African songs and dances to field hollers and spirituals, from ragtime and blues to jazz, R&B and hip-hop \u2014 is a topic of endless discussion.<\/p>\n More difficult to decode is the relationship African American music has had \u2014 or should have had \u2014 with America\u2019s classical music tradition. Today, it\u2019s not uncommon for\u00a0Kanye Wes<\/a>t or\u00a0Kendrick Lamar<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0perform<\/a>\u00a0alongside a symphony orchestra, yet African Americans generally aren\u2019t performing in those orchestras themselves. Less than 2% of musicians in American orchestras are African American, according to a\u00a02014 study<\/a>\u00a0by the League of American Orchestras. Only 4.3% of conductors are black, and composers remain predominantly white as well.<\/p>\n All of these ratios are skewed, of course, by decades of institutional racial bias. Still, it\u2019s fair to wonder why the\u00a0sound<\/em>\u00a0of American classical music, especially as it developed in the early 20th century, remained so European, drawing heavily from the harmonic language of\u00a0Johannes Brahms<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Richard Wagner<\/a>. Had the vernacular of slave songs, spirituals and jazz taken root in our classical music, we would have a different landscape today \u2014 and a classical sound that is uniquely American.<\/p>\n Joseph Horowitz says it almost happened. In his\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0\u201cNew World Prophecy,\u201d published last week in the autumn edition of\u00a0The American Scholar<\/em>, the cultural historian argues that the seeds of a truly American sound were sown but never watered, as American composers in the late 19th century largely resisted the influence of African American music. Horowitz, who has written numerous books about the history of music in America, pays special attention to\u00a0George Gershwin<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 one white composer who did embrace black music \u2014 and a handful of African American composers who found genuine success in the 1930s, only to see it quickly fade. William Dawson\u2019s\u00a0Negro Folk Symphony<\/em>, premiered by the\u00a0Philadelphia Orchestra<\/a>\u00a0with superstar conductor Leopold Stokowski, is held up in particular as a neglected American treasure.<\/p>\n Horowitz joined me to talk about what he sees as a long series of missed opportunities, from Anton\u00edn Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s insistence in the 1890s that the \u201cNegro melodies\u201d were the future of American music, to the acclaimed but undervalued work of African American composers like\u00a0Florence Price<\/a>\u00a0and William Grant Still. That trove of melody-rich, expressive black music could have taken root in America\u2019s classical music, Horowitz maintains, but it didn\u2019t \u2014 and as a result, our classical music has remained overwhelmingly white and increasingly marginalized.<\/p>\n William Grant Still\u2019s\u00a0Afro-American Symphony<\/em>\u00a0was premiered in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WHY IS AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC SO WHITE? Tom Huizenga Antonin Dvorak predicted that American classical music would draw from African American traditions. A new article wonders why American classical music has remained so white. When the first enslaved Africans landed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2795,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"large":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/conductor-index.jpg",374,374,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/?author=1"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"classical music<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"WHY IS AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC SO WHITE? Tom Huizenga Antonin Dvorak predicted that American classical music would draw from African American traditions. A new article wonders why American classical music has remained so white. When the first enslaved Africans landed...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2753,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions\/2753"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/composersofcolorcollective.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}