JAVS Fall 2020

Feature Article

African-American Violists: A Retrospective By Christopher Jenkins

The relative lack of diversity within classical music audiences and performers has been a subject of interest for several decades. Recently, conservatories have increasingly prioritized recruitment of students of color and ICSOM orchestras have developed fellowships specifically for African-American and Latinx performers, while musicologists have also begun to explore the history of classical performers of African descent, with much of their attention focused on Afro-descended violinists, pianists, and composers. As classical music has become more diverse, African-American viola soloists and teachers such as Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Marcus Thompson, and George Taylor have established prominent reputations. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to African-American violists from earlier time periods. This lack of recognition is partly because the first generation of African-American violists did not begin to establish careers until the early and middle parts of

U.S. in the mid-20 th century, as evidenced by a list of such players collated by the New York Philharmonic in 1969 (see fig. 1). While some of these players, such as Marcus Thompson of MIT or Renard Edwards, one of the first African-Americans to join the Philadelphia Orchestra, are known today, research for this article, which included contact with alumni and archival offices at conservatories and phone and email interviews with former colleagues and students, uncovered very little or no information about many of the others. This article is intended to profile several of these African-American violists whose careers have concluded and who are no longer living, to provide a snapshot of their lives and the challenges they faced in developing their careers. The musicians profiled in this article did not win international viola competitions or positions in major symphony orchestras, a lack of conventional recognition that should be attributed to contemporaneous racial

the 20 th century, and their careers were often truncated or otherwise diminished because of the antiblack attitudes common in American society at that time. A relative lack of attention paid to violists in general has also obscured the careers of these players. Eileen Southern’s Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians , published in 1982, lists more than 150 prominent African American concert artists (string players or otherwise), 38 orchestral players and conductors, and 45 jazz string players. None of these are violists.

Figure 1. Detail image from list of Black musicians, compiled by the Ford Foundation in 1969. Courtesy of the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives. 1

But, in fact, there were a handful of African-American violists active in the

This article was awarded the second prize in the 2020 David Dalton Research Competition.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 2, Fall 2020

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