For example, she cites the music of Michael Abels, which includes orchestral pieces, concertos, operas and genre-defying film scores. Music written by today’s Black composers contains “echoes of jazz and spirituals, embracing the fullness of American music,” Downes says. “Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience,” according to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra website. Montgomery, from New York, has written solo, chamber, vocal and orchestral works. (© Lester Cohen/Getty Images/The Recording Academy) Carlos Simon attends the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles this month. That’s where I preach,” he told The Washington Post. Simon, an Atlanta native grounded in gospel music, frequently composes for the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera and has written commissioned pieces for the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and Jessie Montgomery, composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Today’s African American classical composers bring a fresh perspective, Downes says, citing Carlos Simon, composer-in-residence at the John F. In recent years, an awareness of African American composers has been “exploding within the community of artists and music lovers,” Downes said. In addition to discovering Joplin’s Treemonisha (which many scholars believe inspired George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess), Downes came across the works of Florence Price (1887–1953), the first African American woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra, and William Grant Still (1895–1978), whose prolific output includes five symphonies and eight operas. Lara Downes (Courtesy of Max Barrett/Lara Downes) After studying piano for much of her life, as a young adult she explored her own African American heritage by seeking out the works of Black composers, and learned that Black Americans had written concertos, symphonies and operas. While Black musicians and composers are widely recognized for their outsized role in American popular music, they’ve also made sizable inroads in classical circles.ĭownes admits that she herself grew up thinking that classical music was a European tradition. “It all traces back to ragtime.” A rich musical heritage “Every kind of popular music we listen to has the syncopated beat” that ragtime introduced, she says: jazz, the blues, rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. Ragtime’s syncopated beat “was the innovation,” according to Downes, and caught the world’s imagination.
Ragtime was a precursor to jazz, “a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries,” she explains, and Joplin influenced jazz pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941) and Duke Ellington (1899–1974).
When Joplin appeared in Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, “ragtime had reached the broader public for the first time,” and it was a sensation, Downes says.
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