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The wider picture

I was left with mixed feelings about BBC Four’s interesting documentary Black Classical Music: the Forgotten History. On one hand, Suzy Klein and Lenny Henry both made valid points about certain works by various black classical composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price deserving more attention in the repertoires and recordings of orchestras and performers – such inclusiveness provides positive role models to encourage a greater number of black people into classical music.

However, I think that their notions of deliberatereveals extreme competition, with the relative handful of black classical composers merely struggling to be heard above the cacophony of the combined talents of over 20,000 mainly white European composers and musicians, most of whom are now also long forgotten but who likewise also each typically wrote hundreds of quality works that rarely, if ever, see the light of day.