Breaking the Sound Barrier: The Sphinx Organization and Classical Music

Oct 08 2007

I would like to thank everyone at Chautauqua for inviting me to be here with you today representing the Sphinx Organization, of which I am the Founder & President and which I am proud to say has had the opportunity to partner with the Chautauqua Music Festival for over five years!

Ashley Montagu was one of the great humanists and intellectuals of our time. His research and writings helped launch or contribute to significant social movements, including the emancipation of the disabled through his book The Elephant Man, and the women’s movement through his book The Natural Superiority of Women.

He also had a huge impact on the issues of race and how it was considered in the scientific world when he published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, which fought the growing popularity at the turn of the century of the idea of scientific racism. However, despite these great contributions to the elevation of the human race, the reason I mention such a man today is that he is quoted with words that touch a chord with me and my own life experiences.

The deepest defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

When I hear those words, I think to myself, what shall I consider of those whose accomplishments not only meet expectations but exceed what anyone might have thought them capable of?

As I share with you my story and the work of the Sphinx Organization, I ask you to consider the accomplishments of so many musicians, many of whose achievements have gone unrecognized for far too long. I will also share a poem or two that I have written that reflects the topic or period in my life that I am discussing, as I feel that the artistic word can often share more with less than mere prose. I hope you will indulge me.

I have a rather unusual history, which I think would have made it quite difficult for anyone to even remotely try to determine what I might be capable of becoming. Certainly by any statistical norms, being born a bi-racial baby on September 11, 1970 to an un-wed white mother in a small village outside of Monticello NY, and being immediately given up for adoption, did not set the stage for the highest expectations in terms of my future capabilities. So, what could have taken place that brought me to be here on this stage before you this morning? Well, without going into too many details of my background, I do want to give you a snapshot of how I came to be standing here today as it defines the work that I do everyday.

I was born to an African-American father who was a Jehovah’s Witness and a white Irish-Catholic mother in 1970, when interracial marriage was still illegal in several states. Given society and other pressures at the time, my mother was forced to give me up for adoption. I was then adopted at the age of two weeks by a white Jewish family in New York City. By the age of 13, curiosity had taken hold and I began what was to become an almost two decade-long journey in search of my birth parents. For those of you who may not know, current laws make it next to impossible for an adoptee to locate their birth parents.

So it is all the more surprising then when, after all my fruitless efforts, I was reunited with them about five years ago at the age of 31 through the website adoption.com. Not only were my parents together but I was to find that they had eventually married and that I had a full sister. We have since had the most amazing relationship, and my sister now attends my alma mater, the University of Michigan. People sometimes ask me why I care so much about diversity and why I have dedicated my life to pursuits that further that end. I have the easiest response to that question: “I am a black, white, Jewish, Irish Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness who plays the violin. I am the definition of diversity. I don’t have a choice but to do what I do.”

When I was five years old, my (adoptive) mother, who was an amateur violinist, became motivated to play her instrument again by Nathan Milstein’s recording of the unaccompanied Bach Sonatas & Partitas. Her practicing inspired me and as a result, I took a great interest in the instrument and began vigorously studying myself. I was also very lucky to have the opportunity to study with Vladimir Graffman as my first teacher. He was one of the great Russian teachers and taught the likes of Josef Gingold, who became one of the great violin teachers in America. I wrote a brief poem about my time with Graffman and called it My First Teacher.

Mr. Graffman was old,

Russian immigrant.

His apartment was brown, I remember,

I was only seven, it was East Side, mid-town.

He’d always say, you no talk you play.

He was dedicated

With my talent evident. He would sit at the big black grand piano,

Ejecting praise, criticism like a little Hobbit,

I’d correct the mistakes quickly, muttering,

He would question my practice hours sincerity.

He’d always say, you no talk you play.

I was Black,

Boy, that was different.

After Lalo was concluded, his offerings complete

Anguishing, I gauged his satisfaction,

rarely recognizing his mood.

Passing the bar meant one of those candies,

my pick of color even,

From that crystal jar sparkling on the side table,

oasis amongst the Earthen tapestries.

He’d always say, you no talk you play.

I’d loosen my bow, pack my violin,

Music and sugar succulent.

More often than not, savoring,

I’d return home with orange tongue, my favorite flavor.

Sliding the rickety gate shut,

as I pulled the elevator lever,

always returning to the lobby late.

That ride almost as fun as the Bartok duets;

There was no practice time to prepare for when he died.

That time I would have complied.

He’d always say, you no talk you play.

I remember sitting in Carnegie Hall when I was 8 years old listening to Isaac Stern perform. The impact that experience had on me and the sense of awe it built in me about music has stayed with me all these years. However, I do not recollect seeing Sanford Allen around the same time. Who, you might ask, is Sanford Allen?

Well, in 1961, this young man sat on the stage of Carnegie Hall as not only the first black member of the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra’s history, but as the first full-time African-American member of a major American orchestra. One might wonder what people thought he was capable of as he was growing up? And I wonder why no one told me about Sanford or his accomplishments, or the fact that he entered the Juilliard School at the age of ten, or that he premiered Sir Roland Hanna’s Sonata for Violin and Piano at the Kennedy Center or premiered Blue’s Forms, a piece written for him by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, a leading African-American composer. Why had no one told me or seemed to take note of these remarkable differences between what someone had become and what had been expected they would be capable of?

When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Manhattan to Hershey PA – a drastic social change for me, transitioning from the center of the world’s great metropolis to a town that had at the time (despite the constant smell of chocolate in the air) only one chocolate-colored family in my school. I wrote a poem about the experience and entitled it Moving.

Cement courtyards

giving way to landscaped lawns.

From the streets where

everyone’s a stranger,

To pleasantries provided

on every block.

Bustle and rush

slowing into serenity,

Five dollar movies

down to two-fifty.

Fair-weather friends replace

life-long companions,

Public school grounds

becoming selective suburban campus.

Blackness not uncommon

to uncommon being black,

Homeroom filled with fifty

slimmed to barely twenty-five.

Crustacean in an ocean

evolved to sea bass in a bowl of goldfish,

Comfortable happiness,

haphazardly disintegrating.

Trepidation, random rebellion,

ostracization succeeding,

Mosaic Manhattan extermination;

procreation Hershey.

After beginning my studies with Graffman at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, I continued developing on the instrument through lessons at the Peabody Preparatory Music Institute in Baltimore, and served as Concertmaster of the Harrisburg Youth Symphony. I then spent my junior and senior years of high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. After Interlochen, I began my tenure as a college student at Penn State, where I was Concertmaster of the Penn State Philharmonic, and then went on to complete my Bachelors and Masters in Music at the University of Michigan. In all of those musical environments, I was either the only or one of less than a handful of minorities.

Interestingly enough, it was not until I was working on my degrees at the University of Michigan that I first learned there were any black composers. I literally went into a lesson one day and my teacher said, “Do you have any interest in playing music by black composers?” I looked at him kind of startled and said, “You mean black classical composers?” He smiled and began to pull volumes of works off his shelves. This then led to the incredible expansion of music I performed as I focused on the works of black and Latino composers for my undergraduate and graduate recitals.

And it led me again to question why no one had told me of William Grant Still, Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson, David Baker, Joseph Boulogne St. George (an Afro-French contemporary of Mozart’s), or the countless other minority composers whose accomplishments litter the annals of the classical music repertory. Why had no told me about George Polgreen Bridgetower, a well-known black violin virtuoso who was good friends with Beethoven and who premiered Beethoven’s famous Kreutzer Sonata with him in 1803 in Vienna. Beethoven wrote the work for him, which is why you see, in Beethoven’s original manuscript, the inscription, “Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto.”

Why had no one told me that the great Frederick Douglass played the violin or that his grandson, Joseph Douglass, was the first black violinist to tour the United States as a recitalist in the early 1900s? And so, it was within the context of these questions and my immersion in the incredible music that I had recently been exposed to, combined with the lack of any minorities to be seen in the audiences or on stage at classical music concerts, that I was led to found the Sphinx Organization.

It was also at this time that I began to reflect on all the feedback that I received as I was growing up from peers and adults. And their comments were often not supportive of understanding the role of minorities in classical music. On the contrary, they sought to distance me from my racial heritage, and this led to my authoring the title poem of my book of poetry They Said I Wasn’t Really Black.

Born from white and brown young skins,

I was so diff’rent from the pack.

Adopted by Caucasians at just 2 weeks of age,

They couldn’t of known about the other people;