Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 11

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
authentic and robust audience of Black female, domestic workers factor into the juggernaut
of art music criticism and tastemaking?
The metaphor expanded includes many untold or interrupted stories, such as New Orleans
and Puerto Rico: records, tools, instruments, compositions, and entire oral histories
lost in displacement and environmental devastation; entire creative habitats undone;
audiences wiped out. Under what circumstances are these master artists producing
excellence, while simultaneously finding themselves absent from the larger momentum
shaping the American cultural landscape? The possibility then for CMA to commission
iconic artists, such as Andrew Cyrille, Wayne Shorter, David Murray, Nicole Mitchell,
Dafnis Prieto and Oscar Hernandez, has its foundation in unraveling vertical constructs
of culture: notions that have not only undermined sustainability for the individual artist,
but also contributed an artifice in place of an authentic grasp of aesthetic development.
At the end of American Composers Forum’s day-long Racial Equity and Inclusion Forum
in Minnesota (American Composers Forum 2019), 4 President and CEO of the League
of American Orchestras, Jesse Rosen, addressed the following proposition presented by
an audience member: “There is a systematic problem of both unintended bias and blatant
racism in orchestras who [sic] don’t really want change, particularly audiences and
boards ....” Rosen acquiesced, “Orchestras have a lot to answer for, there’s no question
about that. We have a history of active discrimination in our field, and we’re living the
legacy of that impact ... deep and extensive ... there’s no mistake about that. And there are
many people in orchestras who still like it to be pretty much the way it’s been, and are not
really advocating for change.” Orchestras, according to a 2018 New York Times article,
are among America’s least racially diverse institutions (Cooper 2018). In a 2014 study,
African American musicians made up only 1.8 percent of the nation’s players. In a recent
blog post, “Black Classical Composers Making News; Now Activate the Audiences,” audience
development expert Donna Walker Kuhne (2019) recounts a music critic’s observation
on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of flutist and composer Valerie
Coleman’s Umoja, Anthem for Unity. “That it took it 120 years of actively commissioning
composers before landing on this demographic says a lot about how little the orchestra
has noticed the city it has lived in all this time.” It was the first time the orchestra had ever
performed a classical work by a living African-American female composer.
Rosen’s concluding remarks at the Equity Forum, in contrast, did not offer a promise
of change nor an intervention for an inclusive future of the orchestral world; rather, he
proceeded to defend the exclusionary nature of symphonic music: “Why do orchestras
want to play dead white music? One of the reasons is that people want to hear it. It’s
the transactional reality ... I don’t know how you tell kids in the three hundred youth
orchestra in Venezuela that they are pillars of white supremacy, or the five professional
orchestras in Mexico City that they are pillars of white supremacy ... in Soweto where
4 The complete live stream of the “2019 Racial Equity and Inclusion Forum” is available at https://
livestream.com/accounts/12638076/Artists4Equity/videos/195975002.
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