Paul Freeman redefined what orchestral music could be via the "Black
Composers Series" and Chicago Sinfonietta.
(Brian Kersey / Chicago
Tribune)
February 7, 2019
Everyone in musical Chicago — and beyond — knows how hard Paul
Freeman worked to bring sorely needed diversity to classical music.
The
most famous facet of the late conductor’s campaign was the Chicago
Sinfonietta, which Freeman established in 1987 to open up minority
staffing and repertoire in American orchestral music.
But Freeman made an equally important – though far less celebrated –
contribution in the mid-1970s, when he recorded the landmark “Black
Composers Series” for CBS Masterworks. On its nine LPs, Freeman
documented signal compositions by William Grant Still, George Walker,
Hale Smith, Olly Woodrow Wilson, T.J. Anderson and other black composers
who had been mostly excluded from concert and recorded life in America.
Thanks
to Freeman’s efforts, listeners finally were able to savor and study
contemporary recordings of Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” (1930),
Smith’s “Ritual and Incantations” (1974) and earlier works, such as Jose
Maurico Nunes-Garcia’s Requiem Mass (1816).
The “Black Composer Series” was reissued in the mid-1980s by the
nonprofit College Music Society, and now – at last – it’s out again, for
the first time in a Sony Classical boxed set of separately jacketed CDs
remastered from the originals. In addition, the new package includes a
disc titled “Symphonic Spirituals,” featuring music for voice and
orchestra recorded by Freeman and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in
1979.
Though the repertoire gathered here barely scratches the
surface of black creativity in classical music, it makes a powerful
statement about scores long ignored or worse.
Predictably, not everyone saw the virtue of Freeman’s labor of love.
“Some people criticized me when we released the ‘Black Composers Series,’” he told me in 1990.
“Some people said: ‘Why do we have to ghetto-ize music?’
“The
reason is that some issues must be ghetto-ized to get noticed, before
they become part of the mainstream. When I recorded the ‘Black Composers
Series … most people hadn’t even heard of the music on the set. Today
many of those pieces have become part of the standard repertoire.”
Certainly
works by Still, Anderson, Smith, Wilson, David Baker, Ulysses Kay and
Walker (the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize in
music) are heard in concert more now than when Freeman first released
his series of recordings. Next season, for instance, Chicago Symphony
Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti
will conduct Still’s “Mother and Child” and the Symphony No. 3 of
Florence Price (who faced double discrimination as a black woman in
classical music).
Freeman’s dedication to this cause arose, in part, from the racism he experienced first-hand.
“When anyone used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always would say: ‘a musician,’” Freeman told me.
“And they would always say: ‘Ah yes, like Louis Armstrong.’
“Now,
at that point in my life, I didn’t know how important Louis Armstrong
and jazz music were. But I did know that I had no desire to be the next
Louis Armstrong or anything like it.
“At the time, I couldn’t
understand why nobody said to me: ‘Ah yes, like Arturo Toscanini.’ The
implied message was that my role was to be Armstrong, not Toscanini, and
that hurt.”
The “Black Composers Series” and Chicago Sinfonietta
represented Freeman’s response to such slights, which eminent choral
conductor Robert Shaw illuminated for me in 1988.
“I think we have
to admit that one of the reasons so few works by black composers turn
up in the concert hall is that, in generations past, most gifted black
musicians didn’t even bother to pursue classical music; they went
straight into the popular fields, where they were treated more humanly
and welcomed,” said Shaw, one of the earliest American conductors to
advocate for concert music by black composers.
“We also have to
admit that white society is generally indifferent to black culture, and
this is an indifference shared not only by the unenlightened but also by
the intellectual elite.”
Freeman made musical history with the
“Black Composers Series,” but he knew that would not be enough – that
listeners needed to encounter this work in concert, particularly played
by an ensemble that encouraged diversity.
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