The painful story of the connections between Elizabeth Keckley and Queens University of Charlotte -- and of a modern Margaret Bonds premiere at the intersection of those two.

An Interview with Isabel Dobarro and Patricia Kleinman [The interview below was occasioned by the release last October of what I consider...

March 17, 2025 Five years ago today, on St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, I set up my website , and the following day (March 18) I posted my...

With roots dating to the mid-1930s, Margaret Bonds's song "Note on Commercial Theater" has finally been published. Here is its story.

Kamala Harris's housing initiative reflects the influence of Rev. Hamilton Boswell, nephew of Margaret Bonds & grandson of Dr. Monroe Majors

Moods for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano at the International Florence Price Festival NO ONE has been more assiduous  about ensuring that the...

In some ways, the year 2023 was a year of revanchism and regression in classical music. Just a few years earlier, many voices –...

In the last few years, a music-publishing industry that historically has resolutely ignored compositions by composers of color and women...

IN TODAY’S POST: (1) European anti-Jewish intellectuals tender a hopelessly confused mélange of cultural anthropology, history, and...

This post and the following three are about the phenomenon of anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds that were pervasive in the musical worlds...

As a prefatory exercise for this post, consider the “rule of 4%”: less than four percent of the players in professional orchestras with...

In Parts 1 and 2 of this four-part post I attempted a systems-level analysis of the means and mechanisms (“linchpins”) by which racism...

In Part 1 of this series of systems-level commentaries on Racism in Romantic Music (RRM), I discussed how the pervasive racism of the...

Dear Constant Reader, I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, partly because I needed to recharge, partly because I’m currently...

The Mother of Florence B. Price The tombstone (a marker, really) is in Achor, Columbiana County, Ohio. On it is the name of Florence...

A Conspirare Premiere and a Gratuitous Youthful Photo Langston Hughes’s poem Joy was first published in the collection The Weary Blues...

Margaret Bonds’s Montomery Variations and Credo on the Same Program with the Hartford Chorale and Hartford Symphony Orchestra Margaret...

The Second Violin Concerto in 1953 It’s generally said that Florence Price’s moving and innovative Second Violin Concerto was premiered...

The world premiere of the “revised and extended” version of Margaret Bonds’s The Ballad of the Brown King (December 11, 1960) HISTORY WAS...

Fifty-one-year-old Owen Brady was found unconscious and riddled with bullets inside a wrecked and burning car that had crashed into the...