(Clyde May/New York Times)
“We’ve been invisible,” the composer T. J. Anderson
declared, almost immediately after answering the phone for an
interview. “Like Ralph Ellison said, you know: We’re invisible, and any
chance we get for exposure is very important.” Ellison, who in his youth
aspired to be a composer before turning to literature, might have
sympathized with Dr. Anderson’s plight.
At
85, Dr. Anderson is an elder statesman among black composers, and his
forceful emphasis on visibility emanates from a career-long experience
of exclusion. “It’s inevitable, once you are identified — and you always
are identified because of race — there’s a certain different
expectation,” he said. “You know that you’re not going to be
commissioned by the major artistic institutions like the New York
Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.”
Why
do black composers remain on the outskirts of classical music? Along
with broader societal prejudices, there are also factors exclusive to
the classical world. Past musicians like James P. Johnson and Duke
Ellington, who wrote symphonic works alongside playing stride piano and
leading a big band, are typically confined to the jazz canon. Black
composers have been criticized in both African-American and white
intellectual circles for refusing to embrace mainstream commercial
trends. The influence of African-Americans on the orchestral tradition
is represented more often by Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” than William
Grant Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony.
And African-American music is often relegated to special events outside
the main classical season, like Black History Month concerts or Martin
Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.
***
There
was a time in classical music when black composers seemed on the cusp
of the mainstream. In the 1930s, pioneers like Still and William Dawson
wrote symphonies inflected by folk tunes and the blues that were given
their premieres by prominent American orchestras.
***
No
composer of this era was more impressive than Florence Price, the first
black woman to have a work played by a major American orchestra. Price
grew up in the Jim Crow South, divorced an abusive husband and had her
first symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her Symphony in E minor — available on an Albany recording — is a silvery, post-Romantic work that should be a cornerstone of the American repertory.
At
the height of her career, Price tried to convince Serge Koussevitzky —
conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra — to program her music. “To
begin with,” she wrote in a 1943 letter, “I have two handicaps — those
of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. I
should like to be judged on merit alone.”
The Boston Symphony has yet to play a note of her music.
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