Composing Erasure: Race, Visuality, and the American Orchestra

Abstract

My multi-modal, interdisciplinary dissertation research provides one of the first ethnographic studies on the lived experiences of Black classical musicians in America. Despite nearly three decades of diversification efforts on the parts of schools, music institutions, and NGO, Black musicians still only make up 1.8% of professional symphonic musicians nationwide. However, my research has demonstrated that there is a plethora of Black classically trained music creatives in the United States. This absence is a result of the construction of classical music as an exclusively white genre—a notion that has been maintained by orchestras, music teachers, music scholars, and audiences alike. However, while Black classical musicians are perceived as invisible within these elite white spaces, they are also made to feel hypervisible, experiencing microaggressions and racist comments from all directions.This multi-sited ethnography investigates the underrepresentation of Black musicians in North American orchestras to understand how anti-Black racism shapes not only the profession but music itself. This project is situated in two cities, New York and Los Angeles, which are well-known as epicenters of music, and are also racially and ethnically diverse places. Additionally, much of my research has been digital, as Black musicians often find solidarity in virtual networks. Approaching music as both an aesthetic/theoretical object and as a workplace, this project asks: How do color-blind racism and racialized aesthetic hierarchies coalesce on the Black body in pedagogical and performance practices? How do Black musicians grapple with the simultaneous and contradictory experience of being both invisible and hypervisible within the realm of orchestral performance? And how do Black musicians find strategies for resisting racist ideologies and structures so that they can continue to find enrichment and joy in dedicating their lives to classical music?