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American Violinist Aims To Raise Profile Of Black Classical Music Composers From Around The World

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Although few people can name even three black classical composers, the Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton Pine can name 350.

Pine’s RBP Foundation Music by Black Composers (MBC) project has recently released four landmark initiatives celebrating these composers:  MBC Violin Volume I, the first in a series of pedagogical books of music exclusively by black classical composers; the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation Coloring Book of Black Composers; a timeline poster of over 300 black classical composers; and Pine’s Blues Dialogues, an album of classical works written by 20th  and 21st-century composers of African descent, released by Cedille Records. Of the 54 composers represented among these initiatives, 22% are women.

These four initiatives aim to place black classical composers and much of their previously overlooked music into today’s cultural consciousness. In doing so, the RBP Foundation hopes to inspire black students to begin and continue instrumental training, make the music of black composers available to all people and help change the face of classical music and its canon.

Rachel Barton Pine Foundation

Serving on the honorary committee for the RBP Foundation’s MBC project are trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, violinist Joshua Bell, actor Leslie Odom, Jr., jazz bassist and composer Stanley Clarke, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, pianist and composer Billy Childs, television commentator Gretchen Carlson, pianist and pedagogue André Watts, Kevin Sylvester and Wilner Baptiste from Black Violin, violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain and double bassist Chichi Nwanoku.

According to Pine, black composers have created masterful classical music for centuries, yet they are underrepresented in concert programming and in classical music education, silencing a rich vein of works from global consciousness. As young musicians seldom have the opportunity to study and perform classical music by black composers, she believes aspiring black music students struggle to participate in an art form in which they do not appear to belong, perpetuating a lack of diversity on stage and among audiences.

With this in mind, over the last 15 years, Pine and her foundation have collected over 900 works by over 300 black composers from the 18th to the 21st centuries, representing Africa, North and South America, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and Oceania.

In his program notes for the album, Mark Clague, associate professor of musicology, American culture, and African-American studies at the University of Michigan, writes, “Each track draws strength from the tradition of Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Blind Willie Johnson. and Bessie Smith… There are quotes of American fiddle tunes, sonic references to the signal processing of electronic dance music, repairs offered to the racist traditions of minstrelsy, gospel hymns and spirituals, upbeat boogie woogie dance tunes, and screams of anger, frustration, and despair at the killing of black Americans by those charged to protect them. Each composer draws from the cultural tributaries of the African diaspora, and each has come to terms with the power of this heritage to forge an utterly personal expression of universal community across time, place, and people.”

The idea for MBC started with a recording Pine made for Cedille Records in 1997 called “Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries.” The album featured historic compositions by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-European composers from the Classical and Romantic eras that had been previously overlooked. Soon after its release, Pine found herself sitting on diversity panels and fielding questions from students, parents, teachers and colleagues about where to find more works by black composers. She quickly discovered that most repertoire by black composers is out of print or only exists in manuscript. So, in 2001, her foundation committed to the Music by Black Composers project.