The African Diaspora Music Project is a free online database, but it required more than internet research to build the collection of nearly 4,000 songs and more than 1,200 symphonic works.
Louise Toppin, an opera singer and professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance, worked as a research assistant to music scholars George Shirley and Willis Patterson in the late 1980s. She learned that many works by Black composers haven’t been published, have been underperformed or were never premiered.
Even Margaret Bonds, a high-profile composer of the 20th century, posed challenges in terms of bringing her music to a new audience.
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The African Diaspora Music Project exists because Toppin amassed one of the largest personal collections of works by composers of African descent. Since the website’s launch in 2019, the database continues to grow as more works are submitted and discovered.
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