Trombonist and educator Weston Sprott.
In Tuesday’s (9/5) San Francisco Classical Voice, Tom Jacobs writes, “When trombonist Weston Sprott joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 2005, he was one of the only Black members of that prestigious ensemble. Today, after years of personal advocacy and a society-wide racial reckoning, he can still count his Black colleagues on two fingers. So, in terms of diversity at his own workplace, he hasn’t seen a lot of progress over the past 18 years. ‘None, actually,’ he said. ‘Zero.’ Sprott speaks with quiet determination rather than righteous anger. But his cool demeanor should not be confused with any reticence to talk bluntly about why there are so few Black musicians in American orchestras. As he and three colleagues wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 2020: ‘The reason there aren’t more Black artists in orchestras isn’t blind auditions. The reason is racism.’ ‘The institutions we work in don’t exist in bubbles,’ Sprott said in a recent interview on the campus of the Music Academy in Santa Barbara, where he spent … this summer teaching…. ‘We’re not immune from [racism] because we’re classical musicians…. A lot of people support that idea that change needs to happen. That’s a reason for optimism. But we have to continue to hold the field accountable to see to it that those things actually happen.’ ”
