Why are there so few black people in classical music? [View all]

[Jeebo]

This is something that has been bothering me a lot, for a long time. I just watched a video on YouTube of an orchestra in Berlin performing Mahler's second symphony. That symphony is one of my favorites, 80 minutes of heavenly bliss to me. That symphony requires a LOT of people, a huge orchestra and a huge choir. I didn't count them, but there must have been 140 or 150 people on that stage performing that wonderful music. Out of that many people, even in central Europe, you would think there would be at least a half dozen black people, wouldn't you? There were a few Asian faces and a few more that looked like they might have been Hispanic, but not one single black face. Not one. And I spent all of those 80 minutes trying to find them. I looked, really hard.

I watch a lot of classical music performances on YouTube and this happens everywhere. Almost never do I see a black person among the performers. Even huge ensembles like the one I just watched. They're all white people.

Is there some kind of racial discrimination going on here? I don't think so. Classical music people are intelligent people, cultured and educated and aware, and I am sure they are beyond that kind of stupidity. Is there some reason why black people don't like classical music? I'm trying really hard to be careful in the way that I pose that question, because it would be too easy to say something that somebody might interpret as racially insensitive or invoking racial stereotypes, but I am trying to identify the reasons why black people just don't have anything to do with classical music. Maybe this is a social or cultural issue that some master's or Ph.D. student in sociology could write a thesis or dissertation about.

In case you're wondering, I'm a 74-year-old white man. If I were the head man in a big city orchestra somewhere, or even a medium-sized city, I would launch a recruitment effort trying to recruit black people into my orchestra.

-- Ron