For One Violinist, Elevating Music By Black Composers Is A 20-Year Mission

For One Violinist, Elevating Music By Black Composers Is A 20-Year Mission

Growing up in Chicago, Rachel Barton Pine took it for granted that there was a great body of classical music by black composers.

She heard it on the radio. She played it in local orchestras as a student. The Center for Black Music Research is in Chicago.

So, when the violinist recorded her first concerto album in 1997, she naturally included music by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-European composers.

One of the pieces she found was a 1927 work called “Levee Dance,” by the Tennessee-born composer Clarence Cameron White. It’s one of the pieces that Pine has recorded for a new album called Blues Dialogues, for violin and piano.

NPR

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/01/680740275/rachel-barton-pine-music-by-black-composers-blues-dialogues