Classically Black

Black classical musicians have been composing substantial music for centuries. This February, we shined the spotlight on a score… one every weekday… of great composers with roots in Africa.

We met Le Mozart Noir… the man who not only was a world-famous swordsman, but an acknowledged master of the violin bow and the composing quill, playing duets with Queen Marie Antoinette. We visited a city of Creole musical dynasties, when New Orleans was home to the finest orchestras in the new world. We rediscovered a woman tirelessly composing in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, many of whose works were likewise rediscovered: in a dilapidated downstate summer house, leading to a worldwide wave of interest in her music. And we heard a sinfonietta by a 2oth century New York composer… who himself was named after an Afro-English composer whose interest in American music made him a 19^th century fan favorite in the U.S.

Looking for the music? TSPR Music Director Ken Zahnle shares all the compositions he featured on Ovation on a Spotify playlist.

William Grant Still

Ken Zahnle

The Dean of African-American Composers.
Florence Beatrice Price

Ken Zahnle

Florence Beatrice Price was a daughter of a music teacher and of the only black dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they had settled after losing their home and business in the great Chicago fire.
Robert Nathaniel Dett

Ken Zahnle

Composer Robert Nathaniel Dett was a native of Drummondville, Ontario, a town founded by slaves who had escaped to Canada.
Samuel Coleridge Taylor

Ken Zahnle

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was British, African, and American… as was his music.
Scott Joplin

Ken Zahnle

The once and future King… of Ragtime.Scott Joplin grew up in a family of railway workers in Texarkana. He learned music from a German Jewish immigrant while starting a vocal quartet and teaching mandolin and guitar.
Henry Thacker Burleigh

Ken Zahnle

Henry Thacker Burleigh was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1866. His grandfather, who taught his grandson to sing traditional spirituals and slave songs, had been born a slave and purchased freedom for his family in 1832.
Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins

Ken Zahnle

Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins was born in 1849 on a Georgia Plantation. Blind from birth, he was sold along with his parents to General James Neil Bethune…
José Silvestre White Lafitte

Ken Zahnle

José Silvestre White Lafitte, also known as Joseph White, was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1836, to French and Afro-Cuban parents.
Charles Lucien Lambert, also known as Lucien Lambert, Sr.

Ken Zahnle

Charles Lucien Lambert was born in New Orleans to a transplanted New Yorker and a free Creole woman of color.
Esmonde Dédé

Ken Zahnle

Esmonde Dédé was born in New Orleans in 1827, a member of the fourth generation of a free creole family of a thriving city of music.