by Ross Thomas, City Lit clarinet and wind tutor
I am often asked by students for tips on how to find repertoire, pieces to learn for class. I normally advise going to a shop or a library where you can physically flick through scores, or search online for music by instrument, period, genre, style, difficulty, or to research composers of different nationalities who wrote for specific instruments. Wind players, especially those in earlier years of study, often struggle to find music, so you can also search for pieces for voice, as these will fit the range of most wind instruments. Upper winds might also check violin studies, lower winds look for cello music.
So, this got me thinking recently: when choosing a piece, what are the first attributes you look for? Aside from instrumentation and level of difficulty, composer might be high on your list. But what criteria would you use to choose a composer? You might already know some composers' names, or you might search online for “great composers.” Currently, Google returns an extensive gallery that is exclusively white males. Classic FM’s 50 greatest composers of all time are all white too.
Who came up with this list of great composers? What is it based on? What is greatness? We might think greatness is achieved through hard work, originality and creativity. Meanwhile, discussions on systemic racism illustrate that the great work of POC (people of colour) has frequently been overlooked throughout history. The above definition of greatness can’t be the only benchmark that has been used when compiling the great musical achievers of the past; if it were we would see a more diverse list. So why are the great composers who are POC not featured proportionately in the above Google list?
Not only have POC always produced great musical works but they have often also broken boundaries and exceeded the abilities of their white counterparts. The earliest notable example in classical music is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Bologne. In my recent blog post I looked at the time period when Bologne was at the height of his success and compared this with the same time period in Mozart’s life. Bologne was more accomplished than Mozart and was offered greater opportunities earlier in his career. Marcos Balter's recent article in the New York Times further details Bologne’s success and contribution to musical history, and notes Mozart's use of a violin melody borrowed from a violin work Bologne had written a year earlier. Bologne was not only a great composer but he influenced Mozart. So why is he not listed alongside Mozart in Google’s gallery of greats?
The classical music world will remain systemically racist if we—the consumers of it—don’t make a commitment to championing great works by people of colour alongside those of their white counterparts. The internet is ruled by algorithms based on clicks, popularity and trends which only amplify institutionalised inequality. So classical music remains stuck in a vicious, white cycle. This current lack of diverse representation means that we as individuals must make an effort to seek out the greatness that has always existed in this diverse, international culture.
We can celebrate the music of POC by searching for it, requesting it, playing it, commissioning it, arranging it, recording it, buying it, appreciating it, consuming it in every sense so that it becomes as commonplace as it should be. Because anybody can write great classical music. If you search for “great black composers” you are presented with a list as long as the list mentioned above. While we shouldn’t have to search separately to find examples of greatness in POC, it is imperative that we do this until we start to regularly see more equal representation.
So when it comes to choosing your pieces, why not look at the songs of Florence Price or Margaret Bonds (the latter was told by famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger that she needed no further study), piano works by Thomas Wiggins, or for intermediate standard players, these piano works by Francis Johnson. (What’s most interesting about Johnson is that he pioneered extended techniques on the flute and other instruments, but these scores are lost.) William Grant Still’s Suite for violin is spectacular, as are the Clarinet quintet by Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and George Walker’s Wind quintet and String quartets. Julia Perry’s Pastoral for flute and string sextet and Undine Smith Moore’s choral setting of We shall walk through the valley are stunning, as is the latter’s Afro-American suite for flute, cello and piano.
The above examples were put together from only a short search. Discover how easy it is to find great works if you click through this list of great black composers, to their Wikipedia or IMSLP pages and peruse their lists of works. So if you are at a loss for new pieces to learn this year (or even if you’re not!), why not try this approach.
