The field of Classical music has long been dominated by white, mostly male, Europeans. Despite the considerable contributions of composers of colour to the field of 'Western' Classical music, their names are far less well-known than their white European counterparts. In school and university, we learned about and studied the '3 Bs' - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. We learned about white European men through the ages - from Handel, Vivaldi, and Mozart to Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, to name but a few. Perhaps, if you were lucky, you were introduced to female composers, like Clara Schumann - too often only brought up in the first place because of her relationships with her more famous male counterparts, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann.
Too often, there is a (mostly unspoken) sentiment in the field of academic music that there are not many composers of colour - "otherwise, wouldn't we have heard of them?" However, this thought process fails to consider a problem we are now trying to come to terms with in the UK, the US, and worldwide - that people of colour are systematically oppressed, and that for a person of colour to be as successful as a white person, the odds are never and have never been in their favour. It's far past time we encompassed music from people of colour into our everyday. This is by no means a definitive list, but I certainly hope it can act as a good introduction for those of you who, like me, still have work to do in actively combating racism in the arts. Included with each mini profile are links to relevant sources and recordings of their work.
1. Margaret Bonds: 1913 – 1972
and Margaret Bonds, Interview by James Hatch, Los Angeles, December 28, 1971. Quoted in Helen Walker-Hill, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 156.
Margaret Bonds was an American composer born in 1913. After studying composition with Florence Price, she attended Northwestern University in Illinois, where she was permitted to study, but not to live or use facilities there. Her years there are indicative of her first exposure to explicit racism, which she also remarked was where she first felt moved by the poetry of Langston Hughes, who would become a close friend and confidante. She continued to work closely with Florence Price after her graduation, performing the latter’s Piano Concerto as featured pianist with the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago in 1934, and in the same year was the first ever African American to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A gifted pianist and composer, she died in 1972 of a heart attack, following struggles with alcoholism and depression. Her ‘Troubled Water’ is evocative of her influences from folk and religious music, as well as a unique and refreshing approach to traditional harmonies. The intricate counterpoint and short ostinato are particularly noteworthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4tZHXROwc
2. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint Georges – 1745 – 1799
Born the son of a slave and plantation owner, Bologne became an influential composer in 18th century France. He received great acclaim during his lifetime, and was admired by John Adams, former US President, who described him as “the most accomplished man in Europe.”
There are widespread theories that Mozart, frustrated by his own lack of success at the time Bologne was so recognised, may have stolen the latter’s musical ideas. Moreover, it is speculated that the character of Monostatos, the villainous black character from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, was created from jealousy of Bologne's success. As director of the prestigious Concert des Amateurs, an orchestral society in Paris, Bologne earned substantial acclaim, as well as through his compositions of string quartets, symphonies, and concerti. His Symphony in D Major can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-sIoTQfio
3. Florence Price: 1887 – 1953
Source: http://www.florenceprice.org/
Florence Price was undoubtedly a composer of considerable talent, though sadly success for her was a continued struggle. She would “continue to wage an uphill battle – a battle much larger than any war that pure talent and musical skill could win. It was a battle in which the nation was embroiled – a dangerous mélange of segregation, Jim Crow laws, entrenched racism, and sexism.” (Women’s Voices for Change, March 8, 2013).
In 1933, she became the first ever African-American woman to have her work performed by a major symphony orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This piece was her Symphony No.1 in E Minor, written between 1931-32. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s4yY_A2A2k&t=6s) While there exists a strong influence of the work from Romantic composers such as Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, her own flavour is distinct – from the presence of spiritual melodies, to the innovative rhythmic motifs present throughout. When a music critic from the Chicago Daily News heard the work, it was declared “a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion… worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.” Its place here has, sadly, yet to be established.
4. Undine Smith Moore: 1904 – 1989
Nicknamed the “Dean of Black Music Composers”, Undine Smith Moore was a prolific pianist, vocalist, and composer during the 1950s, and was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her Oratorio based on the life of Martin Luther King Jr (an excerpt can be found here: https://youtu.be/7W_875VzSqA) Her style is a vibrant combination of her classical training and distinct elements from influences such as folk music and spiritual melodies. She uses both tonal and atonal idioms in her music, but it is perhaps best described as “freely tonal”, combining modal foundations with 20th century style. Of the philosophy of her music, she said: “In retrospect, it seems I have often been concerned with aspiration, the emotional intensity associated with the life of black people – the desire for abundant, full expression as one might anticipate or expect from an oppressed people determined to survive.”
Sadly, out of the over 100 pieces written between the 1920s and her death in 1989, only 26 of them were ever publicly performed, highlighting once again the rarity of Western Classical musicianship’s exposure to black American music. Her Afro American Suite can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8NN9Vj1xc
5. Bright Sheng: b.1955
Source: brightsheng.com Born in Shanghai in 1955, Sheng is a leading composer, pianist, and conductor. During his time spent in the Qinghai Province, Sheng’s work features folk melodies from the area, and much of his career has been spent fusing Western and Asian musical cultures. Sheng left China in 1982 for the United States, where he studied with the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Chou Wen-Hung. Sheng’s work has been celebrated and performed by prestigious orchestras worldwide, and in 2016, the San Francisco Opera premiered his opera Dream of a Red Chamber to substantial critical and public acclaim. The opera’s libretto is based on one of China’s most well-known classic novels – as famous in China as Romeo and Juliet in the Western world. Extracts of the opera can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWPQQY8ibE
6. Julio Racine: b.1945
Source: https://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/Racine.html Julio Racine is a Haitian flautist and composer, whose style encompasses both Haitian traditional folk melodies and the cultural traditions of Vodou ceremonies. As well as this, his music is also evocative of the styles of European modernists such as Béla Bartók. After studying in Kentucky between 1970 and 1974, he returned to his native Haiti, where he was involved with the organisation of the summer camp for Haitian young musicians, the École de Musique Saint Trinité. After various associations with the U.S., including his attendance in a conducting symposium with Leonard Bernstein in 1979, he eventually relocated to Kentucky in 2001, where he still lives. Despite leaving Haiti, much of his work is currently dedicated to the revival, arrangement, and orchestration of traditional Haitian melodies. His String Quartet No.1 can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CorxuuaatAM
7. Lina Mathon-Blanchet: 1903 – 1994.
Source: https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-50882 Lina Mathon-Blanchet, otherwise known as Lina Mathon-Fussman or as Lina Fussman-Mathon, was an Afro-Haitian composer and pianist. Like Julio Racine, she was profoundly interested in the folk melodies of Haiti and the cultural tradition of vodou, both of which were incorporated into her musical style. Indeed, she is cited as the first musician to incorporate vodou as an artistic tradition in Haiti. She was evidently a natural musician from early childhood, and performed around the world during her lifetime with musical groups she helped to found. One performance, namely at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall, was the first performance by black people in that venue’s history. Her impact on Haitian artistic life has been profound. As well as being a musician of considerable renown, she is also remembered as a cultural ambassador for the artistic merit of the Haitian community. Her A Haitian Tale for wind quartet and drum can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3HP62--LZU
8. Toru Takemitsu: 1930 – 1996
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/feb/11/contemporary-music-guide-toru-takemitsu
Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu is considered one of the leading Japanese composers of the 20th century. After being exposed to Western Classical music via American radio in the years after the war, he immediately became enamoured with the style, and despite being largely self-taught appeared to have a natural instinct for instrumental timbre. In 1951, he helped found the Jikken Kōbō, or ‘experimental workshop’, designed to encourage cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration. Among Takemitsu’s most significant influences are John Cage and Stravinsky, though his Perhaps his best-known and one of his most significant compositions is his Requiem for String Orchestra, written in 1957, which was admired greatly by Stravinsky. It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZqazBElZHg
9. Isang Yun: 1917 – 1995
Sources: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isang-Yun and https://yun-gesellschaft.de/en/isang-yun-en/biography/ Isang Yun was born in Korea, but became a naturalised citizen of Germany in 1971. After living and studying music for some time in Japan, he returned to his native Korea during the Second World War and was active in the anti-Japanese resistance movement there. Following imprisonment in South Korea as an alleged Communist in the late 1960s, he moved to Berlin, where he remained until his death. While much of his music combines Western instruments with Eastern compositional and performance practices, he also derives inspiration from Taoist philosophies and also from his own experiences of political protest. For instance, he recalls his own experiences of imprisonment in his Cello Concerto (1976), which can be found here: https://youtu.be/5VBATxrlSPc
10. Francis Johnson – 1792 – 1844
Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214510?seq=1 and https://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/JohnsonF.html
Francis Johnson was an American multi-instrumentalist and composer of the Antebellum period (the term used for the Southern U.S. slave-reliant economic system). It was incredibly difficult to gain recognition as a black composer at this time (indeed, most black people struggled for their humanity to be recognised at this time), and Johnson was one of very few who were acknowledged at the time as a composer of renown. He was transformative for African-American culture in many ways: he was the first African-American to have his works published as manuscript; the first to give public concerts, and the first to perform in racially integrated concerts in the United States. Of what little survives, there are works for piano which include dances and patriotic marches. One such work, the Victoria Gallop, can be found here: https://youtu.be/9cbakwvbjug
11. Gamal Abdel-Rahim: 1924 – 1988.
Sources: http://www.gamal-abdelrahim.com/Biography.html and https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000000026
Gamal Abdel-Rahim was an Egyptian composer and musicologist, and is considered one of Egypt’s most prominent musicians. In the 1950s, he studied composition and piano, and became the first Egyptian to study academic composition in Europe. After returning to Egypt, he taught at the Cairo Conservatoire, where he was instrumental in establishing the first composition department in the Arab world. He was instrumental in introducing his students to different musical idioms – many of his former students are now prominent figures in Egyptian music, including Rageh Daoud, who is now a leading film composer.
Abdel-Rahim’s musical style is best described as a fusion of Arab and Western styles, comprising of Egyptian folk melodies using contemporary Western techniques. One of his signature idioms is the use of microtonal harmony, which was rarely used in Egyptian music prior to him. His most famous work, the symphony Osiris, can be found here: https://youtu.be/teN8v4Zg73k
12. Tan Dun: b. 1957
Tan Dun is likely to be one of the more well-known names on this list, due to his famous film scores from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, as well as his work for the music of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Born in the Hunan region of China, from an early age Dun was fascinated with the millennia-old cultural traditions of shamanism, which sparked his interest in music. Due to the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong from the 1960s-70s, he was discouraged from a career in music and was instead sent to work on a rice farm where, ironically, his interest in music flourished even further. In 1977, he studied at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where he was influenced by the likes of Toru Takemitsu and George Crumb. Upon moving to New York in 1986, he was able to study the music of such composers as John Cage, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. His work is an authentic fusion of his Chinese upbringing and Western minimalist influence – a good example of this is found in his Memories in Watercolour for piano, which can be found here: https://youtu.be/HqSk_KXHP1M
13. George Walker – 1922 – 2018
George Walker was an American composer, pianist and organist. In 1996, he became the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, yet he had been active for many decades prior. Walker represents a number of ‘firsts’ for the United States: he was the first black performer to perform in Manhattan’s town hall; he was the first black performer to appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra; in 1950, he was the first black instrumentalist to be signed by a major force in management – the National Concert Artists; and in 1956, he was the first black recipient of a doctorate from Rochester, New York. His influences in composition are broad – while he favoured the likes of Rachmaninoff and Chopin as a concert performer, compositionally, his style is more modernist, though his fusion style was marked by his study with Nadia Boulanger in the 1950s. His work, Lilacs, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy0NwJt6uJE
14. Chinary Ung: b.1942
Born in Cambodia, Ung moved to the United States in 1964 to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied as a clarinettist and conductor, before turning towards composition. Ung has since taught at prestigious institutions throughout the U.S., and has been Professor of Composition at the University of Composition since 1995. His music fuses Western and Eastern traditional musical styles marked by his interest in Khmer cultural and musical traditions, as well as the rhythmic organisation of such composers as French-born Edgard Varèse. The Water Rings Overture, the first track of his Singing Inside Aura album, is an excellent introduction to his intriguing compositional style. It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maWODvQ-7_g