Black Classical Musicians and Composers: An Overview

Virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Bologne was born in 1745 in Guadeloupe to a French nobleman and an enslaved woman of Senegalese descent. When he was only a child, his father brought him to France to be part of the aristocracy. He became a Gendarme de la Garde du Roi, and King Louis XV bestowed upon him the title that most know him by: Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He had a notable patron, Marie Antoinette. His celebrated violin concertos and notable operas earned him the moniker “The Black Mozart,” yet it was Chevalier who was more popular in Paris at that time. Composer and music director Bill Barclay argues that Mozart should have received the title “The White Chevalier.” After Bologne, there were many Black composers who received similarly diminishing nicknames, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, “the African Mahler,” and Ludovic Lamothe, “the Black Chopin,” among others.

When adaptor and director Justin Emeka began work on his adaptation of A Doll’s House, he began to imagine the new character of Helen, Torvald Helmer’s younger sister. In this version, Torvald and Helen are Afro-Guyanese immigrants; Helen is a self-taught cellist who is visiting the Helmers in New Jersey to audition for the prestigious Juilliard School. As he was writing, Emeka recalled Caylen Bryant, a former student of his at Oberlin College, and her work on cello and upright bass inspired the character; Two River Theater is grateful to have Bryant join us as the character of Helen and to also feature her original music for the production. Throughout A Doll’s House, Helen practices her cello in preparation for her audition. Emeka describes the music as follows:

“Music in this production isn’t decorative; it’s a living presence. Helen’s cello becomes a language for what the household cannot say aloud, carrying memory, longing, restraint, and possibility through sound.”

The dulcet tones of Helen’s cello welcome us to the holiday season in the Helmer household; they dance a tarantella, and they turn “silence into music.” But in the 1950s, how would rarified institutions like Juilliard have responded to Helen? In 1952, the Boston Symphony Orchestra began hosting “blind” auditions to promote gender parity among their musicians, meaning auditioners performed behind a curtain. Eventually, they realized they had to ask the performers to remove their shoes, because the sounds of a woman’s heels gave them away. It wasn’t until 1966 that the New York Philharmonic hired their first woman—the noted double bassist Orin O’Brien.

But it wasn’t only the “boys’ club” that would have made classical music a harder world for Helen to break into. The renowned Nina Simone studied classical music from childhood, and after high school she went to Juilliard for the summer of 1950 to prepare for her own audition to the famed Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Curtis denied Simone admittance—she attested that it was due to her race—and only two days before her death in 2003, Curtis granted her an honorary degree. Conversely, pianist Hazel Scott, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, studied at the Juilliard School starting at the age of eight in 1928; by her teens, she was frequently on the radio with her classical-infused jazz, and she was playing with the likes of the Count Basie Orchestra by the mid-1930s. Composer Florence Price was the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: her Symphony No. 1 in E Minor.

World-famous contralto Marian Anderson first performed at Carnegie Hall in 1928 but was denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1939 the opportunity to sing at their DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. There was an outcry from the NAACP; many DAR members, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the organization. At the urging of the First Lady, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and others persuaded the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, to organize what became the famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1955, Anderson became the first Black performer to sing at the Metropolitan Opera.

World-famous cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was hailed by the BBC in 2016 as their Young Musician of the Year; in 2018, he played at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Niles Luther, composer and cellist, who served as principal cellist with Rootstock Republic, has played on Good Morning America and worked with artists ranging from De La Soul to Solange Knowles. Courtney Bryan, a composer and pianist, received the 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Award; like Caylen Bryant, our Helen in A Doll’s House, she studied at Oberlin College and Conservatory.

For Helen in A Doll’s House, she would have had extraordinary Black artists and musicians to look up to, yet she would have faced equally extraordinary challenges in pursuit of her cello career. Yet, as Marian Anderson said,

“If you have a purpose in which you can believe, there’s no end to the amount of things you can accomplish.”