Why Is American Classical Music So White?
NPRWhy Is American Classical Music So White? More difficult to decode is the relationship African American music has had — or should have had — with America's classical music tradition. Horowitz joined me to talk about what he sees as a long series of missed opportunities, from Antonín Dvořák's insistence in the 1890s that the "Negro melodies" were the future of American music, to the acclaimed but undervalued work of African American composers like Florence Price and William Grant Still. That trove of melody-rich, expressive black music could have taken root in America's classical music, Horowitz maintains, but it didn't — and as a result, our classical music has remained overwhelmingly white and increasingly marginalized. Near the end of your essay, you write: "Might American classical music have canonized, in parallel with jazz, an 'American school' privileging the black vernacular?"
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