People of color Who Write Classical Music: Recovering “Lost” Music by Black Composers as Resistance and Revolution

20 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 1 82 No.1 PEOPLE OF COLOR WHO WRITE CLASSICAL MUSIC: RECOVERING “LOST” MUSIC BY BLACK COMPOSERS AS RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTION By John Michael Cooper Would anyone seriously assert that people of color don’t write or consume concert music, or that, if they do so, they must be doing so inauthentically? Such a situation would certainly be consistent with the marginal position of music by Black composers in the programs of orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles, and soloists in concert life. Moreover, it would be consistent with the tokenizing of their contributions as presented in the many textbooks that lay the foundation for US students’ knowledge of the world of concert music, as well as the courses that use those textbooks. The concert halls and classrooms alike give the undeniable impression that while Blacks are vitally important and great in repertoires outside the concert halls (such as blues, jazz, and spirituals), the concert halls themselves are, and have always been, the domains of Whites—most of them men, most of them European. This impression is only corroborated by the music-publishing industry, which offers precious little to challenge the notion that few Black composers have written concert music, and that what concert music they have produced has centered on repertoires that exist mainly outside of the concert hall. But that impression is false. In fact, the annals of Western music history should include a star-studded litany of Black creative voices that have effectively been written out of them. To name but a few, this roster includes Joseph de SaintGeorges , Chevalier de Boulogne (1745–99; a composer worthy of comparison with Mozart); George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778–1860); José Julián Jiménez (1823–80); Edmond Dédé (1827–1901); Louisa Melvin Delos Mars (ca. 1860–after 1926); Maurice Arnold Strothotte (1865–1937); Harry Burleigh (1866–1949); Scott Joplin (1867–1917); Will Marion Cook (1869–1944); Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869–1954); Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912); Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960); Florence B. Price (1887–1953); Helen Eugenia Hagan (1891–1964); William Grant Still (1895–1978); Marian Anderson (1897–1993), William Levi Dawson (1899–1990); Undine Smith Moore (1904–89); Howard Swanson (1907–78); Irene Britton Smith (1970–99); Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004); Margaret Bonds (1913– 72); George Walker (b. 1922); Julia Perry (1924–79); Leontyne Price (b. 1927); Valerie Capers (b. 1935); Mary Watkins (b. 1939); Dorothy Rudd More (b. 1940); and Regina Harris Baiocchi (b. 1956). Despite multifaceted careers as composers, teachers, and in some cases performers, most of these Black concert musicians figure only marginally on today’s concert stages and in classrooms. Most are not even mentioned in the music-appreciation and music-history textbooks that crucially inform performers’ and lay audiences’ perspective on music’s history. Of course, many complex issues are in play here—not least of all the politics of canonicity with regard to race and sex, the influences of exoticism and colonialism in constructing cultural identities, and so on. Most pressing, however, is the question of whether Black composers and performers of concert music were essentially doing what Langston Hughes memorably dubbed “climbing the racial mountain”—roughly, cultivating “White” music, and in so doing either speaking inauthentically or failing to meet an ethical and moral imperative to give artistic voice to a Black experience that had been brutally repressed for centuries.1 Yet Hughes’s essay, written and published in 1926, was intended not least as a defense of jazz and blues, a rebuttal of widely held perceptions of those characteristically Black musical genres as decadent and artistically insubstantial. The view articulated by Joel A. Rogers in an essay first published a year before Hughes’s essay and reprinted in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro is typical: For the Negro himself, jazz is both more and less dangerous than for the white—less in that, he is nervously more in tune with it; more, in that at his average level of economic development his amusement life is more open to the forces BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO. 1 | 21 82 No.1 of social vice. . . . The tired longshoreman, the porter...