The Philadelphia Orchestra and Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin record Florence Price's Symphony No. 1 at Verizon Hall for a 2020 streaming program. Photo by Jeff Fusco/Philadelphia Orchestra.
“The combination of #MeToo, protests after the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement shook the status quo of classical music with a force that might have no precedent,” writes Peter Dobrin in Monday’s (4/ 10) Philadelphia Inquirer (login may be required). “Hardly an orchestra, chamber music series, or opera company was left unchanged by these events. The programming of neglected composers—primarily women and Black and brown artists—has become standard in Philadelphia and across the country…. A reckoning was long due in classical music, which, like American society generally, had excluded more than half the human race from its power structures. But something critical is getting overlooked amid the fervor with which classical music claims its new sense of conscience: the artistic value of the works being unearthed…. William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony … is no less an outpouring of genius than Copland’s Symphony No. 3, often cited as the great American symphony, and the fact that the Philadelphia Orchestra had played the Dawson only one other time since giving its premiere nearly nine decades ago is indeed an injustice…. Much of this era is about the past, going back to hear the art we declined to hear the first time around. And it turns out we missed a lot.”
