Rachel Barton Pine
November 23, 2019
Growing up in Chicago, took it for granted that there was a great
body of classical music by black composers. She heard it on the radio.
She played it in local orchestras as a student. The Center for Black
Music Research is in Chicago. So, when the violinist recorded her first
concerto album in 1997, she naturally included music by Afro-Caribbean
and Afro-European composers.
“I wasn‘t thinking about any of the social justice aspect or anything
like that,” Pine says. “But after the record came out, I started
getting a huge number of requests from students and parents and teachers
about, you know, ‘Where can I find repertoire like this for kids of
different levels?‘ “
So she began a nearly 20-year quest to catalog as much of this music
as she could find. She had some time on her hands: Two years earlier,
she was caught in a closing Chicago train door and dragged 200 feet. She
lost one leg and severely damaged the other, and had more than 40
surgeries. But during the long recovery process, she devoted some of her
spare time to searching for music.
“You know, going to the Library of Congress and digging up the one
copy of this and that, and going to the Haiti music archives in
Montreal. Going to the attic of the composer‘s grandniece to sort
through unsorted boxes of papers and manuscripts. I mean, there have
been some amazing archaeological adventures,” she says.
One of the pieces she found was a 1927 work called “Levee Dance,” by
the Tennessee-born composer Clarence Cameron White. It‘s one of the
pieces that Pine has recorded for a new album called Blues Dialogues,
for violin and piano.
YouTube
“My parents would put on Chicago blues records when they weren‘t
playing the classical station when I was growing up, and it‘s just sort
of been in the air,” she says. “I mean, I really consider it to be my
indigenous music — of, you know, of where I live.”
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