African-American Classical Musicians You Should Know
Here are a few of our favorite African-American classical musicians!
There are so many talented African-American musicians who were buried and unrecognized due to the unjust limitations that came with their skin color. We would like to share with you a few of our favorite African-American classical musicians hoping to shine light to the African-American music community and giving them the acknowledgement they deserve.
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin (1868-1917)
Let’s start with someone you have probably heard of, especially if you follow this blog! Scott Joplin is the King of Ragtime. While not the first ragtime composer, he helped make it famous. Classically trained by a German pianist, Joplin wrote over 40 ragtime pieces for piano and even published a ragtime ballet! Joplin is probably most famous for The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag. His music inspired other Classical composers too, including Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. To learn more about Scott Joplin, check out our post, Who Is Scott Joplin?
Florence Price
Florence Price (1887-1953)
Florence Price faced many difficulties in her life. That did not stop her from being the first female African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra! The piece, Symphony No. 1 in E minor, is well worth a listen.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price attended the New England Conservatory, a prestigious music college in Boston. After graduating with honors, she moved back to Little Rock. However, good work was hard to find in the racially segregated South, so she moved to Chicago in 1927.
Price continued her studies in Chicago and from there, her career as a composer took off. Throughout her life, she composed over 300 works, including symphonies, organ pieces, piano concertos, and arrangements of spiritual songs. The music she grew up with inspired much of her composition. Listening to her works, one hears bits of spirituals and even the blues! In 1964, Chicago named an elementary school after her, cementing her legacy as one of the city’s great artists.
William Grant Still
William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Movie scores, Harlem Renaissance poetry, opera – there is a reason William Grant Still is known as “The Dean of African American Composers!” Born in Mississippi and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still started violin lessons at the young age of 14. He went on to teach himself other instruments and studied music in college. He made a living partly out of “commercial music,” which included writing for film scores. However, much of that work went uncredited.
Still’s career is full of firsts. His Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American” was the first composition by an African-American to be performed by a major American orchestra. He also became the first African-American conductor of a major symphony orchestra in 1936. His opera, Troubled Island, was the first by an African American to be performed by the New York City Opera, and the first to be nationally televised. In addition, Still set many poems of the Harlem Renaissance to music, including some by Langston Hughes.
Audra McDonald
Audra McDonald (1970–)
6 Tony Awards. 2 Grammys. 1 Emmy. Time Magazine named her as one of the most influential people of 2015. A Classically-trained soprano with a transcendent voice, Audra McDonald studied at the famous Juilliard School of Music in NYC. Since then, she has performed on countless stages and appeared in many movies, musicals, operas, and plays. She has sung with just about every major orchestra in the United States. McDonald even premiered works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, some of whom wrote songs specifically for her!
A few places you may have seen Audra McDonald: The Tony Awards! In fact, one performance the author recalls is of McDonald singing Summertime from Porgy & Bess at the 2012 Tony Awards. (If you want to see her sing Summertime in full, here you go!) Then, in 2013, she played Mother Abbess in the televised Sound of Music, in which Carrie Underwood played Maria. Her rendition of Climb Ev’ry Mountain gained much critical acclaim. More recently, McDonald was featured in the 2017 live action remake of Beauty and the Beast. There, you can see her singing the Aria in the opening scene!
