The Black Virtuoso Tradition

It will be a landmark event in excavating a part of the African-American cultural legacy heretofore barely even glimpsed. I am eager to be a partner in this vital activity.

Because of our current conversation about race, we now observe a seemingly desperate effort to make up for lost time, to present Black faces in the concert hall. I think that’s only fair. But if it’s going to become a permanent new way of thinking, there has to be new understanding.

Joe’s Dvorak’s Prophecy is on time, it’s a bull’s-eye. As Mark Clague puts it, “the future of American classical music is very much at stake. We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment.” Dvorak’s Prophecy explains how we got there. It proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful."
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Mark Clague, my colleague at the University of Michigan, has called the American music story he himself was taught “malnourished.” Mark further describes an “impoverished disconnect between the rich history of Black American music and the all-but entirely white and European classical-music repertoire studied in American music schools and, not coincidently, heard in the nation’s concert halls.”