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CD Review— Eighth Blackbird: Singing in the Dead of Night

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by Lilyanna D’Amato

I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know. 

Thus begins the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’ intensely evocative poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which describes the haunting flight of a blackbird against the backdrop of a devastatingly still, snowy night.

Enigmatic but vivid, Stevens’ imagery now serves as the artistic cornerstone of a premiere contemporary classical ensemble: Eighth Blackbird. [Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Musicians: Entertainer Josephine Baker 

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by Lilyana D’Amato

In the decade following the First World War, French popular culture was dominated by images of negrophilia: the disconcerting obsession with and seizure of Black — specifically African — culture. 

Introduced to African folk art through global imperialism and colonialism, the French became fascinated with racialized depictions of the “savage” Black body, fetishizing Blackness through painting, sculpture, film, and performance. In the early 1920s, avant-garde Parisian artists began appropriating Black culture as a means of exploring what they saw as the juxtaposition between the “primitive” and changing notions of modernity. 

When entertainer Jospehine Baker, the hugely influential African American expatriate, arrived in Paris in 1925, she became the face of this racialized mania. Her body and persona came to signify the exotic, used to satisfy colonialist sexual fantasies.

[Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Classical Music: 
Composer Florence Price

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by Lilyanna D’Amato

In November, 1943, composer Florence Price began a letter to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky with a painful admission: “to begin with, I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”

Acutely aware of the classical tradition’s discriminatory leanings, Price was direct. She desperately needed Koussevitzky to program her compositions. The work of a woman composer is predetermined, she said, “to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility… add to that the incident of race — and I hope you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”

At that point in her career, she had already achieved unprecedented success. The first-prize winner of the 1932 Wanamaker music contest and the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, she was a distinguished member of the Black intelligentsia, fraternizing with the likes of W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She had received national acclaim for her nearly faultless virtuosity, and yet, she never heard back from Koussevitzky. [Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Classical Music: 
Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier
de Saint-Georges

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by Lilyanna D’Amato

While many of you may recognize this week’s composer, Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, perhaps you know him by a different name: “the Black Mozart.”

Deeply problematic, the nickname casts this virtuosic musician as the lesser equivalent of a White counterpart. In his article, Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George and the Problem With Black Mozart, Julian Ledford suggests that through this biased comparison, Saint-Georges becomes “a mythicized inferior of the status quo’s perfect symbol of 18th-century classical music.”

Historically, this is how the Western canon has always understood Black classical music: in contrast to a supposedly superior model. By severing Saint-Georges’ name from Mozart’s, we restore the legacy he is owed — a reckoning long overdue.

Born in the French West Indies colony of Guadeloupe, Joseph Boulogne spent his childhood on a plantation near Basse-Terre. [Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Classical Music: Shirley Graham Du Bois

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by Lilyanna D’Amato

As America finds itself in the midst of a centuries-overdue reckoning, classical music must follow suit. A tradition long criticized for its exclusionary, Eurocentrist snobbery and stark lack of diversity, there remains a cruel, discriminative legacy behind the classical canon. One that, very purposefully, led us to Brahms and Wagner but kept us from Bologne, Price, and Still.

“The Legacy of Black Classical Music” hopes to remind us of those musicians and composers whose voices went largely unheard, whose careers were left obscured by the pernicious disease that is systemic racism. In this weekly series, we will explore the lives and contributions of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Florence Price, Josephine Baker, William Grant Still, and Joseph Boulogne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges) — rich and valuable lives largely omitted from Western music history. Let us listen and learn together, celebrating their mastery while also taking the time to critically consider our own complacency in their erasure. For, in this admission lies the beginnings of vital change.

The first musician on our list is Shirley Graham Du Bois, whose tenacity, creative ferocity, outspoken personality, and intellectual prowess led her on a career spanning the globe. Born in Indianapolis in 1896, she spent her childhood immersed in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where her father served as a preacher and activist. [Read more…]

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