Classically Black — Revisited

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

James Lee III was born in 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and began studying piano at what he considers a late age…12… when his father signed him up for lessons without his knowledge. He earned his Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Michigan, and includes among his composition teachers some prominent American composers: Michael Daugherty, William Bolcom, and Bright Sheng. He also studied composition as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and as a Fulbright scholar researching music in Brazil.

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Dr. Lee is a winner of the Charles Ives Scholarship, the Wladimir Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has quickly become a prolific and highly-in-demand composer creating an average of five new major works every year.

His orchestral pieces have been commissioned and premiered by the National Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among many others. His work has been championed by conductors Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Stephane Deneve, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

And most recently (January 28, 2023) his newest work was unveiled by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra… a work with western Illinois connections. His Visions of Cahokia was inspired by a visit to a UNESCO World Heritage site just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Cahokia Mounds, the ancient ruins of an 11th century native American metropolis, is considered one of the most important archaeological finds in North America. Lee said he wanted to “celebrate this Mississippian cultural community at the height of its existence before the mysterious decline and abandonment of the city.”

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

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You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

It’s time to meet Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the Year. A child of the 1970’s, Valerie Coleman hails from the traditionally black West End neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky.

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Beginning her music studies at 11, she had written three symphonies and won local and state competitions by the time she was 14.

Coleman double-majored in flute performance and composition at Boston University and mastered at New York’s New School.

In 1997 Coleman founded the Imani Winds (Imani is the Swahili word for faith), joining together five African American wind players. The ensemble champions composers underrepresented from the non-European side of contemporary music… influenced by Africa, Latin America, and native North America. Coleman said, “It came to my mind that role models are needed.”

The resident composer of Imani, Coleman has also added to the repertoire of her own instrument as well as works for other woodwinds, brass, strings, and full orchestra.

Coleman frequently employs the spoken word of historical figures, including Robert F. Kennedy and Cesar Chavez, as contrast within her musical works… and musically portrays the lives of heroes of popular culture, as in her wind quintet Josephine Baker: A Life of le Jazz Hot, and the clarinet quintet Shotgun Houses, which follows fellow Louisville West Ender Muhammed Ali from the ‘hood to the Rome Olympics.

Coleman has served on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, is on the advisory panel of the National Flute Association. and has been listed in the Washington Post’s Top 35 Women Composers.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Wynton Marsalis is the most famed member of a New Orleans musical dynasty. Born in 1961 to prominent jazz pianist and teacher Ellis Marsalis, he was named for another jazz great, pianist Wynton Kelly, and he got his first trumpet at age 6 from another famed trumpeter, Al Hirt.

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He studied classical music at school, and jazz at home. At 14 he performed the Haydn trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic, and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 two years later. The year after that he was admitted to the Tanglewood Music Center.

After attending Juilliard, where he is now director of Juilliard Jazz, Marsalis secured a unique contract with the Columbia record label: an equal number of jazz and classical albums. That paid off in 1983, when he became the only musician to win Grammy Awards in jazz and classical the same year, repeating the feat the next year as well.

Marsalis is founding Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, a constituent at that venue alongside the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.

Accolades continued to followed Marsalis as he turned more attention to composing. He has written concertos in collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra, created an updated sequel to Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, and became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields.

Marsalis has been awarded the National Medal of Arts, the National Humanities Medal, the New York Urban League’s Frederick Douglass Medallion for distinguished leadership, and has been named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Coleridge Taylor Perkinson was fated to write music. He was born in 1932 and raised in Manhattan, the child of a mother active in the arts as a piano teacher, church organist, and director of a theater company… who named her son after the great African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

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Perkinson attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City, the Manhattan School of Music (where he studied composition with Vittorio Giannini), and Princeton. He joined the faculty of Brooklyn College while he continued studying conducting during his summers in Europe, including at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

He would co-found New York’s Symphony of the New World in 1965, becoming its music director. He also held that post with choreographer Jerome Robbins's American Theater Lab, and with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Perkinson was a remarkably versatile composer: performing jazz piano with drummer Max Roach; arranging pop music for Harry Belafonte and Marvin Gaye; and, of course, he was highly trained in classical: composing sinfoniettas, sonatas, and choral works as well as television scores. For Ailey’s company, he composed the ballet For Bird, With Love, inspired by the music of jazz giant saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Perkinson's music has been described as having a blend of Baroque counterpoint; American Romanticism; elements of the blues, spirituals, and black folk music; and rhythmic ingenuity.

From 1998 Perkinson worked in Chicago with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, and served as Coordinator of Performance Activities at the Center for Black Music Research, including directing the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Born in Chicago in 1913 to an activist family, Margaret Bonds began her studies with the best of Bronzeville… composers Florence Beatrice Price and William Levi Dawson. She completed Bachelors and Masters degrees at Northwestern University in piano and composition, but didn’t wait until she was finished to start making a splash… winning the national Wanamaker Foundation Prize in composition and becoming the first black to solo with the Chicago Symphony… on one of those occasions premiering her teacher Florence Price’s Piano Concerto.

In Chicago she performed and taught, opening the Allied Arts Academy, and composed songs, one of which ("Peach Tree Street") was used in the film Gone with the Wind.

In 1939 she became part of New York City’s Harlem Renaissance, where she edited, wrote tunes for popular songs, debuted on piano at Town Hall, began the Margaret Bonds Chamber Society (which performed works by black classical composers), and studied at Juilliard with Roy Harris.

Bonds had an especial affinity for poet Langston Hughes. She had first found his poems in the basement of the Evanston, Illinois Library, and in Harlem they became frequent collaborators: on many song settings, theater pieces such as Shakespeare in Harlem, and her most famous work, the Christmas cantata The Ballad of the Black King… a telling of the story of the wise man Balthazar at the Nativity.

She would also write song cycles, ballets, a mass, and the Montgomery Variations for orchestra: variations on a spiritual in memory of the Bus Boycotts and of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bonds then moved to the west coast, teaching music at the Los Angeles Inner City Institute and Cultural Center, passing unexpectedly in 1972 just after her 59th birthday.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Fela Sowande was born outside Lagos, Nigeria in 1905, the son of an Anglican Priest. Growing up a choirboy, he was taken under the wing of Nigerian church music pioneer Dr. T.K Ekundayo Philips, learning Bach and other European composers on the organ, as well as new native Yoruba works being introduced into the church service. At the same time, he led a band playing early Highlife dance music… a form mixing elements from Ghana and Cuba, influenced by jazz.

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In 1934 he would begin an almost two-decade stay in England: studying music at the University of London, playing organ for the BBC and for London churches, producing educational radio programs about African music, leading jazz bands, and even playing the piano solo in a performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

And he composed. Organ works based on Yoruba themes. Choral settings based on American spirituals. And orchestral works fusing Nigerian music with classical music. Sowande viewed all music as part of as a single human family, writing, “We are not prepared to submit to the doctrine of apartheid in art by which a musician is expected to work only within the limits of his traditional forms of music.”

Returning home to direct music at the new Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, he became one of the earliest African-born ethnomusicologists, awarded the MBE by Queen Elizabeth II and named a chief by the Nigerian government.

in 1968 Sowande moved again, to the U.S., to teach in the African-American Studies departments at Howard University, the University of Pittsburgh, and finally at Kent State University.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born and raised in Washington D.C.’s West End neighborhood. Brought up in a proud family of amateur musicians, Ellington carried himself with a refined grace and sharp wardrobe that earned him a lifelong nickname: ‘Duke.”

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The young “Duke” was influenced by ragtime and stride pianists, teaching himself harmony and embarking on a playing career at 17.

Ellington moved to New York’s Harlem in the 1920’s and, after fits and starts, the young bandleader started recording for a myriad of labels and secured a defining residency at the famed ‘”Cotton Club”… a night spot fueled by the talent of the Harlem Renaissance, but intended for white-only audiences. But it was there that Ellington was able to develop and sharpen his compositional style, beginning to blend jazz call-and-response and blues with careful orchestration and the use of more ambitious forms--- through the 1930’s and 1940’s---and leading to the concert hall.

Such larger projects included the symphonic suites Harlem and Black, Brown, and Beige ("a Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America")… the ballets The River and Three Black Kings,,, and the film scores “Paris Blues” and “Anatomy of a Murder.”

Ellington considered his music "beyond category": part of a larger American music. And he certainly had fans in the classical world: composer Percy Grainger considered the three greatest composers to be Bach, Delius, and Ellington.

In 1965, the Pulitzer Prize music jury recommended Ellington for the honor, but in a highly controversial decision no prize for music was awarded. Quipped Ellington, “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

Perhaps in answer, in 1969 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“The Duke” finally was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music… posthumously… in 1999.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Finishing at Tuskegee, he moved north to the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, while playing first trombone for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

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Dawson began a teaching career, first in Kansas City, but then returning to Tuskegee in 1931 where he organized and directed the School of Music. He also founded and conducted the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which traveled the world, singing for two Presidents and all three major radio networks.

As a composer, most of Dawson’s best-known works are arrangements of traditional spirituals, still frequently performed by school choirs across the nation. But chamber and orchestral music were also part of his language, most notably his Negro Folk Symphony of 1934.

Premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the well-received symphony put Dawson on the concert hall map. He would revise it in the 1950’s after a trip to West Africa, saying that his work was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America.”

After a brief flurry of performances, though, the symphony would suffer a common fate of many major works by black composers… it disappeared from concert programs, until a revival in the last two decades.

After a long career at Tuskegee and a longer retirement, Dawson died aged 90 in 1990.

William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Finishing at Tuskegee, he moved north to the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, while playing first trombone for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

Dawson began a teaching career, first in Kansas City, but then returning to Tuskegee in 1931 where he organized and directed the School of Music. He also founded and conducted the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which traveled the world, singing for two Presidents and all three major radio networks.

As a composer, most of Dawson’s best-known works are arrangements of traditional spirituals, still frequently performed by school choirs across the nation. But chamber and orchestral music were also part of his language, most notably his Negro Folk Symphony of 1934.

Premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the well-received symphony put Dawson on the concert hall map. He would revise it in the 1950’s after a trip to West Africa, saying that his work was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America.”

After a brief flurry of performances, though, the symphony would suffer a common fate of many major works by black composers… it disappeared from concert programs, until a revival in the last two decades.

After a long career at Tuskegee and a longer retirement, Dawson died aged 90 in 1990.

William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Finishing at Tuskegee, he moved north to the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, while playing first trombone for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

Dawson began a teaching career, first in Kansas City, but then returning to Tuskegee in 1931 where he organized and directed the School of Music. He also founded and conducted the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which traveled the world, singing for two Presidents and all three major radio networks.

As a composer, most of Dawson’s best-known works are arrangements of traditional spirituals, still frequently performed by school choirs across the nation. But chamber and orchestral music were also part of his language, most notably his Negro Folk Symphony of 1934.

Premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the well-received symphony put Dawson on the concert hall map. He would revise it in the 1950’s after a trip to West Africa, saying that his work was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America.”

After a brief flurry of performances, though, the symphony would suffer a common fate of many major works by black composers… it disappeared from concert programs, until a revival in the last two decades.

After a long career at Tuskegee and a longer retirement, Dawson died aged 90 in 1990.

William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Finishing at Tuskegee, he moved north to the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, while playing first trombone for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

Dawson began a teaching career, first in Kansas City, but then returning to Tuskegee in 1931 where he organized and directed the School of Music. He also founded and conducted the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which traveled the world, singing for two Presidents and all three major radio networks.

As a composer, most of Dawson’s best-known works are arrangements of traditional spirituals, still frequently performed by school choirs across the nation. But chamber and orchestral music were also part of his language, most notably his Negro Folk Symphony of 1934.

Premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the well-received symphony put Dawson on the concert hall map. He would revise it in the 1950’s after a trip to West Africa, saying that his work was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America.”

After a brief flurry of performances, though, the symphony would suffer a common fate of many major works by black composers… it disappeared from concert programs, until a revival in the last two decades.

After a long career at Tuskegee and a longer retirement, Dawson died aged 90 in 1990.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

James P. Johnson grew up in New York City listening to the rags of Scott Joplin and studying classical piano and theory with an Italian teacher. He soon was able to take ragtime piano to the next step, inventing a technically difficult style called “stride”… named for the large leaps required of the player’s left hand. At that point Johnson became the last great rag pianist, and the first great jazz pianist, with a long performing and recording career.

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He was also a clever and extremely successful songwriter: his ‘Charleston” is, even today, the first music that comes to mind when anyone mentions “The Roaring 20’s.”

But his ambition was not confined to pop music. One example was his response to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”… Johnson’s 1927 ‘Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody” for piano and orchestra. Premiered at Carnegie Hall and orchestrated by William Grant Still, it’s viewed by many to be the more authentic jazz rhapsody.

During the Great Depression, as popular taste turned to swing, Johnson was able to live off his songwriting royalties and used the time to pivot… writing symphonic compositions. A “Harlem Symphony,” a jazz piano concerto, an orchestral suite, an opera with poet Langston Hughes. These works made Johnson a prophet of what would come to be called “Third Stream” music… a joining of the worlds of classical and jazz. Performed in the 1930’s and 1940’s, this body of work would disappear until scholars were able to coax Johnson’s family to reveal some of the manuscripts in the 1990’s.

Johnson’s performing career ended with a severe stroke in 1951. He would die four years later, almost unnoticed by the media.

But with renewed interest in his music, James P. is still relevant to both jazz and classical listeners.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

The Dean of African-American Composers. William Grant Still was only three months old when his father died. His mother moved to Little Rock Arkansas, where he started playing violin as well as teaching himself oboe, clarinet, saxophone, viola, cello, and string bass. A high school valedictorian, he began medical studies at Wilberforce University, but the pull of music was too strong. Taking his modest inheritance, Still enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory, working his way through while being awarded composition lessons without charge.

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After Navy service in World War I, Still worked for major figures in Harlem: W.C. Handy, Eubie Blake, Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Langston Hughes. He started arranging and conducting for the Black Swan record label and for the radio networks, while still studying with composers George Whitefield Chadwick and Edgard Varese.

In 1931 his original works moved to the forefront: his first symphony, the “Afro-American,” was premiered and became hugely popular… the most-programmed American symphony until 1950. Its success led Still to Hollywood, where by day he was a stalwart of major studio film score arranging, and on his own time a composer of symphonies and operas.

He was a man of many firsts: the first African-American to conduct a major American orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television.

Still was a rarity among black composers, in that he was widely acknowledged in his lifetime. His works were performed frequently, he received at least 8 honorary doctorates, and he has continued to be referred to as… The Dean of African-American Composers.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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.

She graduated high school as valedictorian at age 14 and entered the New England Conservatory of Music (at first passing as ‘Mexican’) where she studied with Boston composers George Whitefield Chadwick and Frederick Converse, graduating with honors.

She returned to Little Rock before Price and her attorney husband joined the great migration northward to Chicago in 1927. She became part of the Bronzeville renaissance… Chicago’s answer to Harlem’s cultural flowering… as she resumed study and began to publish. And to be performed: many of her works made a splash at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ World’s Exposition, especially her 1st Symphony, the first work by a black woman to be presented by a major orchestra.

After a divorce she raised her children and continued to compose. She made a solid professional living writing educational piano works, but also four symphonies, three concertos, suites, overtures, quartets and quintets, dozens of songs and piano solos… most of them believed lost after she died of a stroke in 1953.

She then became perhaps the most overlooked American symphonist of the 20th century. Overlooked enough that her 2nd symphony is entirely missing, and her 4th symphony was thought lost as well--- until 2009, when many lost Price manuscripts were discovered, scattered around a vandalized long-empty summer house just outside the rural Kankakee County hamlet of St. Anne, Illinois.

And the discoveries and reconstructions continue, with an explosion of recordings and publications and Grammy awards, making Price the greatest unlikely classical star so far in the 21st century.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Composer Robert Nathaniel Dett was a native of Drummondville, Ontario, a town founded by slaves who had escaped to Canada. The young Dett started piano at three years and lessons at five. His grandmother introduced him to spirituals, and his mother to Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Tennyson.

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He was the first black American to graduate from the Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied composition and piano, and was introduced to the idea of incorporating spirituals into classical music, such as Antonín Dvorak’s use of American elements in the “New World” Symphony. And he discovered the music of a fellow admirer of Longfellow poems, the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who also was fascinated by African- and Native-American music.

Dett toured as a concert pianist before embarking on a teaching career. His nearly two decades of work at the Hampton Institute in Virginia included becoming its first black director of music; founding its School of Music; and creating the Internationally-touring Hampton Institute Choir, which specialized in African American sacred music, including Dett's own compositions and arrangements.

Said Dett,“We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people ... But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it… unless our musical architects… fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics.”

Though already successful, Dett continued to grow: studying at Columbia, Northwestern, Harvard, and with master composition teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

While advising a U.S.O. tour during World War II Dett suffered a fatal heart attack… championing black American music to the end.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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

Coleridge-Taylor's mother was English, but his father, a medical student, was descended from American slaves freed by the British and evacuated to Nova Scotia at the end of the Revolutionary War. His family then continued to Sierra Leone, established as a free black colony by Britain.

Brought up in south London, the young Samuel showed strong talent on the violin, and his family pooled resources so the 15-year-old could study at the Royal College of Music. He changed his study to composition and was a star pupil of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. On completion he was appointed professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music.

One of his early works caught the attention of Sir Edward Elgar, who called him "far and away the cleverest fellow going.” On that reputation Coleridge-Taylor was able to have his first oratorio published before it was even performed… his adaptation of part of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, was a runaway international hit, described by Sir Hubert Parry as "one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history."

On its strength two sequels were commissioned, and Coleridge-Taylor embarked on three tours of the U.S., where he became increasingly interested in the idea of integrating African, African-American, and Native American music with classical… the way Brahms and Dvorak did with Hungarian and Bohemian folk music.

The interest was mutual: Coleridge-Taylor was famed in the African-American community. Schools were named for him and a giant chorus, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society, was founded in Washington, D.C.

Tragically, Coleridge-Taylor’s bright light burned out early, passing of pneumonia at the age of 37.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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. Quitting the railroad, he became an itinerant musician playing red light districts throughout the South, until he took a band to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Joplin, playing cornet and leading his arrangements of cakewalks, found they were very popular with the Midway crowds.

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The next year Joplin settled in Sedalia, Missouri, playing at black social clubs and teaching (many of those students becoming the next generation of rag composers) until 1899, when his “Maple Leaf Rag" was published. “Maple Leaf” was not only one of the most influential of rags, it also gave Joplin steady royalty income for the rest of his life, and earned him the nickname “King of Ragtime.” He next moved to St. Louis, composing and publishing, as well as presenting his first opera, A Guest of Honor, now lost

Seeking greener pastures, Joplin moved on to New York City to find a producer for a new opera featuring a new kind of hero: a black woman educator. But Treemonisha, lacking backers, was never fully staged in his lifetime. In 1917 he was admitted to an asylum with dementia and died three months later.

After the first World War Joplin’s classically-tinged ragtime would disappear, evolving into several styles of jazz. But over a half century later the King of Ragtime would return in a big way.

Musicologists in the early 1970’s rediscovered Joplin’s works. Treemonisha was finally produced, and a surprise hit recording of his rags led to their prominent use in the Academy Award–winning score to the 1973 movie The Sting, which led to the two-step “The Entertainer” becoming a top ten pop hit. To complete his re-coronation, in 1976 Joplin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for contributions to American music.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.
You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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.

Young Burleigh worked many jobs… streetlamp lighter, newspaper hawker, printer’s devil, and stewarding aboard steamboats on Lake Erie… before securing a scholarship to attend New York City’s National Conservatory of Music.

The story goes that Burleigh was working his way though school doing odd jobs around the building when the Director… the world-famous Czech composer Antonin Dvorak… heard Henry’s impressive baritone voice singing spirituals in the hallway. Burleigh said: "I sang our songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals." Dvorak in turn said: "In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

After Conservatory, Burleigh became a noted concert soloist of art songs and opera arias and, of course, African-American folk songs, even singing for King Edward VII in London.

n 1894 he became a soloist for St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City. His appointment found some opposition at the then all-white church, and the trustee’s vote was close with, of all people, financier J.P. Morgan casting the deciding vote. But the parish soon came to love their first-rate singer, whose career at the church lasted 52 years until his retirement.

As a composer and arranger Burleigh published between two and three hundred original works, and his famous settings of spirituals, including “Deep River” and “Go Down Moses,” were instrumental in popularizing the genre.

Burleigh was also a founding and board member of ASCAP and was the 1917 recipient of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for outstanding achievement by an African American.

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You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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… "the first [newspaper] editor in the south to openly advocate secession."

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Most likely autistic, the young Wiggins exhibited a talent for sound, including reproducing piano music he heard Bethune's daughters play. By the age of five he was composing. Bethune encouraged all this, giving Wiggins a special room, complete with piano. A neighbor remembered, “He made the piano go for twelve hours out of twenty-four."

Bethune started profiting from Wiggins early on. He hired his slave out, starting at age eight, to a promoter who billed him as "Blind Tom," touring across the country, performing up to four shows a day. A Wiggins recital included part of his memorized repertoire of 7,000 pieces as well as astounding imitations of wildlife sounds and public figures. One witness reported the performance of three pieces of music at once: 'Fisher's Hornpipe' with one hand and 'Yankee Doodle' with the other, all while singing 'Dixie.’

Wiggins earned Bethune up to $100,000 a year… over $3 million today… making Wiggins probably the most highly paid… or should we say “profitable”… musician of the 19th century.

After the Civil War Wiggins was never truly freed. He continued to be indentured by contract to Bethune and then Bethune’s son, who’s accidental death caused custody to fall to an unscrupulous wife of a short marriage. Wiggins continued to tour, eventually on Vaudeville’s Orpheum circuit, until a probable stroke caused partial paralysis. Even so, he continued to play piano at all hours until a final, fatal stroke silenced him in 1908.

In the end neither worldwide fame, nor dozens of published compositions, nor numerous lawsuits were able to free the man some have called “The Last Legal Slave in America.”

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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

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Taught at first by his father, an amateur violinist, White’s first recital was accompanied by none other than the famed New Orleans pianist and abolitionist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who happened to be touring Cuba at the time. Gottschalk was so impressed he proceeded to raise money to help send the 18-year-old to Paris for further training.

José White did indeed reach the Paris Conservatory, winning the Prix de Rome in violin, and becoming a French citizen in 1870.

White’s 30 or so compositions for violin, including virtuoso-level etudes and a technically challenging concerto, were chiefly written for himself and his very own Stradivarius… the 1737 ‘Swansong,” so-called because it’s believed to be Stradivari’s last.

He toured the world as a concert artist of the first order. While visiting the Americas White took a detour for over a decade in Brazil, where he served as court musician and Director of the Imperial Conservatory for the Emperor Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro, before returning to Paris for good.

But cosmopolitan as White was, he is still remembered in Cuba… where a music conservatory is named after him, and his beloved miniature La bella Cubana is an unofficial national song.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Charles Lucien Lambert was born in New Orleans to a transplanted New Yorker and a free Creole woman of color. The Lamberts were an active musical family in a city where Free people of color constituted a special class, with privileges not available to most free blacks. In fact, Charles’ father Richard conducted the Philharmonic Society… the Crescent City’s first concert orchestra, staffed with both white players and musicians of color.

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Footloose, Lambert would move to France and then, in the 1860s, to Rio de Janeiro, where he became a member of the Brazilian National Institute of Music and operated a piano and music store. He was so associated with French romantic music there that some historians have mistakenly referred to him as a Frenchman.

In 1869 he had a reunion with another famed New Orleans musician, the visiting white French creole Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Lambert and his son helped perform a huge work of Gottschalk's requiring 31 pianos!

As a teacher, Lambert’s legacy lived on in the great Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth… and in his own son Lucien-Léon Guillaume Lambert.

Referred to as Lambert Jr. (pictured) he studied in France with Jules Massenet and became a better-known musician and composer than his father. In 1905 he recorded three wax cylinders for the Pathè Company in Portugal… believed to be the first classical music recordings ever made by a performer of African descent.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

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. The Crescent City already boasted symphony orchestras and the Theatre d’Orleans, one of the leading opera houses on the continent for half a century.

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The young Dédé was a violin prodigy who would learn music theory from the New York-born Charles-Richard Lambert, himself part of a New Orleans black classical dynasty.

Dédé worked as a cigar maker to save money to travel to Paris, where he became a student and an auditeur at the Paris Conservatoire.

In the early 1860s, Edmond took a post in Bordeaux to conduct the ballet company at the Grand Théâtre there, where he would also lead bands at the popular cafés in the city.

Dédé continued to compose. His Quasimodo Symphony premiered in 1865 back home in New Orleans, to a large audience of prominent local free people of color and visiting Northern whites.

He returned to New Orleans just once, in 1893, when three benefit concerts were held in his honor, featuring the city’s elite musical innovators, including the teacher of a future musical star… pianist Jelly Roll Morton.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

You can find the playlist HERE

You can listen to Classically Black episodes HERE. You can here full episodes on Ovation at 11am during February. Historical information about each composer airs on Morning Edition at 7:18am and All Things Considered at 5:48pm.

Violinist, composer, conductor, impresario, swordsman, duelist, cavalry commander, royal bodyguard, revolutionary… le Mozart Noir.

All of the above describes one of the most amazing characters in history… let alone music history… that you may never have heard of. Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-Georges was born in the French-held Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, son of a married French businessman and his Senegalese slave. Sent off to school in France at age seven, and to fencing academy at 13, he studied… and quickly mastered… the science of fencing and the art of the violin. By 20 he was a chevalier… a member of Louis XVI’s bodyguard… and famed composers had written for or dedicated works to him.

Famed as a fencer throughout Europe… he would use that as a diplomatic skill with the likes of the Prince of Wales to argue for the abolition of slavery… he was also renowned in France for his musical skills as a composer: writing quartets, operas, symphonies, and a dozen violin concertos; as a virtuoso; and as a conductor, organizing orchestras and commissioning Haydn’s Paris symphonies.

Beloved by the monarchy, he was a favorite of (and played private duets with) queen Marie-Antoinette. Nevertheless, he was also a hero of the Revolution, commanding the first all-black regiment in Europe, the Legion St.-Georges. He partook in perhaps one last revolutionary adventure (accounts differ) to Haiti, before re-devoting himself to perfecting his artistry on the violin.

If you are interested in hearing this episode: check out our Classically Black — Revisited playlist at Ovation On-Demand.

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