Twitter.com: Less than '1% of music performed by North American orchestras was composed by blacks or latinos, despite a rich repertoire.'

[Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799)]

Twitter.com/artfulmanager

Aaron Dworkin (b. 1970), Founder and President of the Sphinx Organization, http://www.SphinxMusic.org, is featured at AfriClassical.com and is an authority on diversity in classical music. He has often addressed the need for orchestras to hire performers of color. In fact, many of the Black and Latino performers who have joined orchestras in recent years are Sphinx laureates.

Aaron says that less than “1% of music performed by North American orchestras was composed by blacks or latinos, despite a rich repertoire.” The 41 Composers of African Descent who are featured at AfriClassical.com represent a tiny fraction of the thousands of composers of color who have enriched the classical repertoire over the centuries. Why do North American orchestras program so few of the distinguished compositions of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Adolphus Hailstork, Florence B. Price, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, William Grant Still and George Walker, to name just a few whose works are readily available?