Classical music: Black and Latino musicians hope to change the image of the art form.

PLAYWRIGHT LORRAINE HANSBERRY coined the phrase 'young, gifted, and Black' ... and hit a nerve. Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin are among the many who have borrowed the phrase to spotlight the predicament of being an artist of color, to "have a lovely precious dream," as Simone put it, in a whitewashed society.

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The point is pushed to crisis in classical music. While Asian musicians have found a place in classical music--and, consequentlly, in audiences--Black and Latinos have not. With the exception of ethnic celebration concerts, stages and audiences remain heavily white. Nationwide, less than three percent of the members of symphony orchestras are Black or Latino. An analysis of 200 U.S. orchestras by the American Symphony Orchestra League in the 2000-01 season found that 1.4 percent of musicians were Black and 1.9 percent were Latino. For Black musicians, the numbers actually declined from a similar survey in the early '90s.

That's not to say that artists of color haven't influenced classical music. George Walker made headlines in 1996 as the first living Black man to win the Pulitzer Prize in music. (Scott Joplin posthumously won the honor in 1976, more than half a century after his death.) Walker's prizewinning composition Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra is a 16-minute piece that matches instrumental music with a tenor singing text from Walt Whitman's poem "While Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," which reflects on Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Lilacs was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and features complicated rhythms, melodies and time changes. While Lilacs may be his most famous work, Walker has published more than 70 compositions in a variety of forms, and his music is performed regularly across North America and Europe.

Walker's Pulitzer was followed by Wynton Marsalis's 1997 win. Marsalis, a Black genre-bending trumpeter and composer, took the prize for Blood on the Fields, a three-hour oratorio for three singers and a 14-member ensemble that follows the story of an African couple sold into slavery in the U.S. Blood is a hybrid of classical and jazz musical traditions. In an interview with PBS, Marsalis said that he uses the language of jazz in Blood's multiplicity of voices--the trumpet and the rest of the ensemble "speak" to each other. At the same time, Marsalis uses a brass chorale, which is otherwise seen in symphonies.

Despite the successes, classical music is still generally associated with rich whites, and that's hard to dispute considering the cost of attending a show. Tickets range from about $30-$115; even an orchestra's open rehearsals cost about $17 to attend. People of color, however, have influenced the history of this art, and today more musicians of color intend to change the image of classical music as the realm of dead white men. "There are, in the last 100 years, contributions by [Blacks and Latinos] that aren't terribly known," said Anton Armstrong, who leads St. Olaf College's major choir--a 75-member group with a long list of recordings and tour dates across the United States. The St. Olaf Choir specializes in classical choral music, and Armstrong is developing the choir's repertoire to include more music from Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.

"We're only just recognizing concert music from Latin America," Armstrong said. "Those pieces need to be performed, in public schools, everywhere."

Classical music is notoriously difficult to define, except in opposition to popular music. Typically associated with Western European orchestral music--particularly symphonies--classical music also includes smaller ensembles and choral music.

And it includes more than Mozart. Classical music is not only living and breathing in contemporary society, it is the medium of choice for many artists of color. Besides Walker and Marsalis, major figures in classical music include pianist and composer Eleanor Alberga, a Black Jamaican-born woman working in Britain. Alberga's music draws from her drama background, making for exciting performances on five continents. Meanwhile, Cuban composer Paquito D'Rivera's prodigious talents extend to clarinet and saxophone performance. He's pocketed an honorary doctorate from Berklee School of Music, six Grammys, and a 2005 National Medal of Arts, as well as notching more than 30 solo performances with the world's leading orchestras.

Another recipient of the 2005 National Medal of Arts is James DePriest, a Black man and one of the most accomplished conductors of classical music. DePriest has spent 25 years at the helm of the Oregon Symphony and made more than 50 recordings.

While it's less well-known, there's also a long historical precedent for Black and Latino musicians.

William Zick, a white man, has made it his full-time work to represent Blacks in classical music as a historical and global phenomenon at the encyclopedic website www.africlassical.com. The site's earliest highlighted performer dates back to the 16th century. But it wasn't until the early 1990s, when Zick was riffling through a record store, that this former employee of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights first encountered classical musicians of color.

"Thirty years of listening to classical music, and I'd never heard of a Black composer," Zick said. "I thought: This is a civil rights issue. It's a civil rights violation to leave a whole people out of the remembered history of classical music."

Besides spotlighting contemporary Black musicians and composers, www.africlassical.com represents their history. For example, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was an extraordinary Black violinist who played with Ludwig van Beethoven. One of Beethoven's most famous compositions was originally titled The Bridgewater Sonata to display the star musician's talents. An ill-timed falling out between the men caused Beethoven to retitle it The Kreutzer Sonata.

Zick seems to be onto something: as of last October, his website had received more than 120,000 hits in the year, from more than 120 countries. He also maintains a French counterpart to his website, particularly for French-speaking African people, that receives about one-fifth of the hits, he said.

While an online Latino compendium does not yet seem to exist, their history in classical music is nonetheless deep. Ilmar Gavilan, a Cuban-born violinist, sees classical music as intimately tied to his homeland.

"Classical music is the grandparent of salsa," Gavilan said. "It's so true! Everyone thinks salsa is so cool and ethnic, but musically, with the harmonies, Cuban music is more than 50 percent related to classical music."

But classical music's image remains stagnant. Even as contemporary artists of color are bringing well-deserved recognition to Latin American classical music and the talents of Black and Latino musicians, change is, of course, all too slow.

While Gavilan emphasized that he "doesn't have a complex" as one of the few Latino musicians on most stages, he can't help but notice the absence. He remembered one person who was surprised to learn he was a violinist. "The guy said 'Really? You look like a trombonist.' I can't help but think that was pretty racially charged," Gavilan said.

While Aaron Dworkin isn't an immigrant, he shares the outsider experience as a Black child adopted by white parents and raised in Hershey, Pennsylvania. "I often didn't fit in," he said. "Not at all. Not in the Black crowd or white crowd. For me, classical music was something I turned to many times."

Classical music offered him comfort and hope. "I always loved music," Dworkin said. "I had childhood dreams of being a soloist--of being a Black violinist winning competitions."

Dworkin began playing violin at age 5, inspired by his mother who was an amateur violinist. It wasn't until he studied music at the University of Michigan that he asked questions about the color of his art.

"The underlying division became very prevalent for me," Dworkin said. "I started thinking about why I was always the only Black violinist. At competitions, I really began noticing no minorities onstage, none in audiences. And up to that time I didn't know there were any Black composers." With a few good teachers and the school's extensive musical resources, Dworkin explored the history of Black accomplishments in classical music. Ultimately, he came up with the idea for the Sphinx Organization, a national nonprofit that would train musicians of color and donate musical equipment to communities of color. While one of his teachers offered Dworkin "tremendous support," others, he said, felt that as "nice" as the idea sounded, there was no way he would be successful.

"People felt like the potential talent in minority communities wasn't there," Dworkin said.

Ten years later, Sphinx Organization is a reality in Detroit and Massachusetts. Its trademark is the Sphinx Competition, which encourages the talent of young Black and Latino string players while spotlighting them on a national platform.

"One reason the competition is important is because it brings very high visibility to the musicians, an awareness that African-Americans and Hispanics are playing at the absolute highest level," Dworkin said. "It gives the musicians needed experience in managing competitions well. It offers resources to develop their professional careers--mentorships, contacts."

The Sphinx Organization awards $800,000 a year to young musicians and runs two academies for aspiring musicians. Competition laureates participate in a Musical Encounters program in which they act as role models for young people in underserved schools across the country.

Gavilan and Melissa White, a Black violinist in her final year at the Curtis Institute for Music, were both top winners in the Sphinx Competition.

"I was completely shocked my first year at how many Black people were playing classical music," White said. "My first year (1998, Sphinx's second year) it was just 15 people, not even that many, but it was more than I'd ever seen."

Sphinx's focus on young Blacks and Latinos echoes Armstrong's ideas about the roots of classical music's lack of inclusion.

"Training needs to come at a young age," Armstrong said. "It's not every child that will become a musician, but in schools, we have a commitment to expression, to reading and writing, to mathematics. Music--they have it maybe once, twice a week. It's never taken as seriously."

"When they cut school budgets, arts are the first to go," Armstrong continued.

"It's incumbent upon us to reexamine how we look at arts education at primary and middle school levels. Too often it's seen as frivolous extras."

Schools stripped of the arts disproportionately affect communities of color, which typically have fewer resources to devote to them. Attending to the arts is a strain for many families.

"Classical music is usually something for the evenings," White said. "You dress up for concerts, and you're quiet, and your audience probably listens at home or plays a little themselves. Already, this narrows the audience to a higher financial bracket, people who've had that education and upbringing."

White said that this setup makes the music itself seem unappealing.

"Maybe they can't afford a ticket, maybe they don't have dress-up clothes, and if you don't know what you're listening to in the first place, it's just not that fun. You'll fall asleep," White said.

Sphinx's mission is one that hits at different levels: resources, exposure and education. Dworkin's work was affirmed when he received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, providing him with $500,000 and cultural leverage that will support the organization's powerful work for some time.

But there's fear that Sphinx will bear more than its share in evolving classical music to the next level. That is, Sphinx's work may let other participants in classical music--orchestras, conservatories, choruses, composers, conductors and administrators--have an excuse to not hire and cultivate the talent of Black and Latino musicians. Dworkin said the classical music community has not even begun to address racism.

"Classical music has a combination of things involved: the historical context of prejudice and racism plays a part, and also the disparate constituents that have a voice--an orchestra board and key funders, for example," Dworkin said. "For them to come to agreement to organize a cohesive strategy and really bring about change, it's extraordinarily difficult. Especially when there's so little diversity in the orchestra or the board or the funders."

Perhaps with greater inclusion on the stage, the administrative side of classical music will follow, fully representing the talent of Black and Latino musicians at all levels of the art form. Dworkin said that it takes "desperate passion," patience and vision, but that, yes, he has faith in a new reality.

"The future holds great possibilities."

Anna Clark is a freelance writer.

RELATED ARTICLE: CLASSICAL MUSICIANS OF COLOR

WYNTON MARSALIS is a genre-jumping trumpeter and composer, who has made 16 classical and more than 30 jazz recordings--and earned eight Grammys in both modes. In 1997, he was the first jazz artist to win a Pulitzer Prize in music for one of his hybrid works. 'Blood on the Fields' is an oratorio about slavery, nearly three hours long and partly improvised.

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SANFORD ALLEN is a classical violinist who was the first Black musician to become a regular member of the New York Philharmonic. He teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick and serves on the board of the Sphinx Organization.

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HARRY T. BURLEIGH, who was born in 1866, was the grandson of slaves. He composed over 200 original choral and chamber works, blurring folk and spiritual traditions with the European forms he learned from his teacher, Dvorak. Dvorak in turn used what he learned from Burleigh about American spirituals in his New World Symphony.

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ANTON ARMSTRONG, is a Black conductor of the St. Olaf Choir. He's taken his conducting talents around the world, including to New Zealand, where he served as the first Peter Godfrey Visiting Professor of Choral Music at the University of Auckland. Recent scholarly work includes a chapter entitled "Practical Performance Practice in the African American Slave Song" in Volume One of the series Teaching Music Through Performance in Choir.

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TANIA LEON is a Cuban-born composer and conductor who cofounded the Dance Theater of Harlem, She often hooks her music to literary works and has collaborated with John Ashbery, Wole Soyinka, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid and other writers to create unique art pieces.

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