A Voice. A Name. A Concert Hall.

Marian Anderson keenly observed the more pernicious elements of racism: “Sometimes it’s like a hair across your cheek. You can’t see it. You can’t find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing at it because the feeling of it is irritating.”

Elusive or obvious, racial prejudice has a permanent public antidote at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Marian Anderson Hall in Philadelphia. Long celebrated as a stellar vocalist and civil rights hero, Anderson (1897–1993) is a name set in stone at what once was Verizon Hall, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with a social resonance that has made itself felt since the hall’s June 2024 rededication in her name.

“It’s as if the name has been there for a long time. It has become entrenched,” says Leslie Miller, who with her husband Richard Worley, former board president of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, put forth the $25 million for the naming rights in perpetuity. “People have taken notice, in a variety of settings,” says Miller. “Richard and I have continued to be thanked for having done it. My standard reply: We’re getting so much more than we gave. It has been so gratifying to see people’s response and their agreement that this was a dedication that was painfully overdue.”

The renaming of the hall has already made its mark in Philadelphia, although the enduring impact of the new name may not be fully apparent or appreciated for years, says Ryan Fleur, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts (the Philadelphia Orchestra merged with the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, which uses the brand name Ensemble Arts Philly and was formed in 2021). Other Philadelphia organizations with parallel goals, whether continuing Anderson’s memory or paving the way for young Black musicians—even when not formally associated with each other—can’t help but experience a synergistic effect in promoting the Marian Anderson ethos. Collectively, these organizations form what might be called a posthumous Anderson village—one unlike any other.

At a time when corporate and individual donors expect major recognition for major contributions via “naming opportunities” for theaters and concert halls (not to mention sports stadiums), the rebranded Marian Anderson Hall is a standout: a concert hall named for a musical artist. More than that, it’s named for a Black woman artist who overcame racism to forge a groundbreaking singing career while taking very public stands against bigotry. There aren’t many concert halls named for musical artists (Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall may be the most prominent), and in Anderson’s case it’s also a kind of homecoming: she was a Philadelphia native who had a long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

For Americans of a certain age, Marian Anderson was a household name, not just from the famous 1939 concert that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial after she was banned for racial reasons from performing at Constitution Hall—her Lincoln Memorial performance was attended by 75,000 people and broadcast on national radio—but for singing at the presidential inaugurations of the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower (1957) and the Democrat John F. Kennedy (1961). She had built her career as a classical contralto with a once-in-a-lifetime voice who also embraced spirituals and music from the Black tradition; she toured nationally and internationally to some of the world’s foremost concert halls and performed with top orchestras, usually under the aegis of legendary impresario Sol Hurok. An important breakthrough came in 1955, when she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera and became the first major Black singer to break the color barrier there. Many felt that Anderson’s Met debut, coming so late in the career of an artist of her stature, had been delayed due to her race. Nevertheless, she persisted and retired with a 1966 recording of Brahms and Schubert art songs, coming full circle with her early successes in Europe where she had worked with the most cultivated artists in pre-war Berlin. In 2005, Anderson was honored with a U.S. postage stamp celebrating Black Heritage.

Yet when Savannah-born Joseph Conyers—principal bassist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the orchestra’s Education and Community Ambassador—first encountered an imposing, life-sized portrait of Anderson hanging in the Curtis Institute of Music in 1999, he did not know who she was. As a Black musician, he was very much aware of his contemporaries, but not the one who had made so many Black careers in music possible. “That portrait,” he says, “would greet me every day, not only on my way to the bass room. I specifically remember seeing the painting at my audition—my very first time in the building.”

Even without specific recognition, the painting showed that Black musicians belonged in the great conservatory. It also embodied one of Anderson’s best observations on the power of role models: If you can see it, you can be it.

“It has been so gratifying to see people’s response and their agreement that this was a dedication that was painfully overdue,” says Leslie Miller, who with her husband Richard Worley donated the funds to name the Philadelphia Orchestra’s home for Marian Anderson.

“In all of my years, these details—Marian Anderson awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, being the first Black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, being a delegate to the United Nations—had never surfaced to the top for me,” Conyers says in an email.

“Why didn’t I know about this growing up? Why haven’t I seen this?” filmmaker Bill Nicoletti said about Anderson and her story when he unveiled the 2019 documentary Once in a Hundred Years: The Life and Legacy of Marian Anderson. That was followed in 2022 by PBS’s American Masters documentary, Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands. In 2021, Sony released “Beyond the Music—Marian Anderson: Her Complete RCA Victor Recordings,” a lavishly packaged box set of 15 compact discs and a photo-filled 227-page book.

“Naming the hall after a business enterprise is just fine for football stadiums and baseball fields,” says donor Richard Worley, former board president of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association. “There’s dignity to not being that commercial.”

Living Remembrance

What does it take to sustain a memory? Even one as powerful and far-reaching as Anderson’s?

When the naming rights to the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall were due to expire on December 31, 2023, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s then-president and CEO Matías Tarnopolsky proposed to Worley and Miller a hall rededication. Most donors want their names on the building. They did not. “That would be boring,” says Miller, herself a trailblazing civic leader and past president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association.

“Naming the hall after a business enterprise is just fine for football stadiums and baseball fields,” says Worley, former board president of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association. “There’s dignity to not being that commercial.” Anderson was Tarnopolsky’s proposal—one that felt inevitable despite a process that can become complicated when working out all the details.

In Philadelphia’s rich history of world-changing Black musicians, Billie Holiday (1915-1959) already has a concert hall named for her—in Brooklyn. Jazz legend Sun Ra (1914-1993)—another Philly great—was perhaps too avant-garde for consideration. But Anderson? “Who could be more appropriate for a great permanent stage?” says Worley.

Thanks to the Philadelphia Orchestra and other organizations, Anderson is gaining increased recognition in her hometown. The National Marian Anderson Museum—in a home that was once hers, less than a mile southwest of the renamed concert hall—is now re-opened after being closed for repairs. The youth orchestra program Play on Philly, for communities historically excluded from high-level musical training, now has the Marian Anderson Young Artist Program, hatched in collaboration with the Anderson family, which creates individualized education programs for selected high-school-age (or younger) students. They’re known as “Anderson Artists,” though what that looks like is up to them. “I get to connect students with resources to purse music,” said Dr. Anna Meyer, who manages the program, teaches at Temple University, and is also a working musician. “Our roster is full at 14. We now have 11.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra works with the United Negro College Fund for scholarship opportunities in Anderson’s name. On the performance front, the Marian Anderson Initiative—described as a showcase for “composers and artists who embody Marian Anderson’s legacy”—continues the orchestra’s previous commitment to Black composers, led by Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Nézet-Séguin wasn’t the first to discover the long-neglected concert works of Black composer Florence Price (1887–1953), though he and the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded and toured with her symphonies, and worked with the orchestrations in a partnership with publisher G. Schirmer to create accurate editions of her works. World premieres by contemporary Black composers next season include Tyshawn Sorey’s Piano Concerto and Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 5 (“Liberty”) featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. More forgotten or neglected works are planned: Symphony No. 2 by Julius Eastman (1940–1990) and Wood Notes by William Grant Still (1895–1978). The latter composer’s Symphony No. 2 (“Song of a New Race”) was performed this season by the orchestra, which had given its world premiere in 1937.

Besides having historic impact, Anderson was a figure of great style and dignity, patrician but not regal, always sumptuously dressed. And the voice? Miller knows it well from the recordings her grandfather played for her: a voice not of this world, welling up from the center of the earth, or, when singing her signature “Ave Maria,” radiating heaven-sent benevolence. Attached to the Kimmel Center, the name is in the heart of Philadelphia, emblazoned on Rafael Viñoly’s architectural wonder whose soaring glass ceiling creates its own utopian sky.

“Marian Anderson means so many things to so many people worldwide,” Fleur says about the different ways her memory is being kept alive. “I found that people impart their meaning of Marian Anderson based on where they’re coming from. It all depends on the lens. To Philadelphians, she was the hometown girl. To people who are aspiring opera singers, she’s a great classical artist. She was deeply successful in Europe. She broke ceilings.” And, in the words of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, Anderson had the kind of voice heard “once in a hundred years.”

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 print issue of Symphony magazine.