“A cone of silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its diaspora,” writes composer and musicologist George E. Lewis in Saturday’s (7/4) New York Times. “The work of Black composers is more often heard if they are working in forms thought to exemplify ‘the Black experience’: jazz, blues, rap…. I want to highlight some of the ways African-American composers have explored what it means—and could mean to be American…. If Black lives matter now more than ever, hearing Black liveness in classical music also matters.” Among the works Lewis highlights are the first movement of William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, “The Afro-American” (1930); Alvin Singleton’s Mestizo II I; Tania León’s Horizons; Haitian-American composer, flutist, vocalist, and electronic artist Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti (“Women of Haiti”); Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin; Courtney Bryan’s Yet Unheard; Thomas Wiggins’s The Battle of Manassas (1863, “created by an enslaved Southern composer in ostensible tribute to the first major Civil War battle won by the Confederacy, the work can be heard today as an anticipation of that regime’s collapse”); Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America; and the operas of Anthony Davis, including his 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera The Central Park Five.
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