What accounts for their previous absence from concert halls when the scramble to present them now might have been possible all along? More than anything, the artistic questions facing classical music today go well beyond the simple dualism of keeping or tossing the canon they revolve most of all around access and the hurdles facing marginalized musicians. In this context, the sudden programming of music by a handful of historical Black composers-including Florence Price (1887–1953), Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), and William Dawson (1899–1990)-raises fresh questions about the nature of the canon’s historical contingency. With so few possibilities for performance, publishers and record companies were even less likely to offer support, and all along listeners have been left in the lurch. During the first half of the twentieth century, white conductors risked damage to their reputations for programming Black composers, and Black conductors risked being typecast for doing the same. The result can be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, hamstringing many ensembles-especially legacy institutions-with relatively narrow programming, and race has always been a telling line along which these exclusions have been drawn.

Despite recent commissioning efforts by the country’s wealthiest organizations, such as the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, classical music culture, far more than the culture of other arts, remains essentially fixated on canonicity-on apotheosizing “the greatest” composers and “the best” repertoire.

The canon’s narrow demographic is not a new issue-it has faced mounting public criticism for many years-but its persistence in concert halls decades beyond the literary “canon wars” exposes the industry’s thoughtless acceptance of its flaws. And, predictably, right-wing pundits found a new target, decrying the past year’s reform efforts as a “ suicide pact” or spelling the end of “ Western classical music.” The questions facing classical music today go well beyond the simple dualism of keeping or tossing the canon. But with summer and fall relaunches on the horizon, industrywide press releases revealed a noticeable increase in the number of composers and soloists of color on concert programs. The pandemic forced concert cancellations through spring 2021, leaving the industry relatively insulated from the raging political turmoil.

Singing Like Germans by Kira Thurman