All the Black Dots
Elisions: Connecting Through Sounds Diversity
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Connecting all people through shared emotion is why I conduct. Although sound is temporarily manifested in concert halls, I strive to imbue each audience member with a forever experience.
Who cares what color you are if the music’s good right?
It can’t be ignored that color, race and ethnicity effect the perception of underrepresented artists of color (UAOC’s). We often don’t look like — or share the same cultural repertoire — as the musicians, administrations, audiences, and the composers we play.
Harvard sociologist, Erasmus prizewinner and 2019 Carnegie Fellow Michele Lamont defines cultural repertoire as all the information we send out about who belongs and what is valued.
So how can we contribute where we’re least expected?
I might be the last artist invited to conduct a Bruckner Symphony, but why is that? We’ve grown to expect that Bruckner is best from old White accented European men who need a stool. After all, classical music is an exported White European genre. Only my gender fulfills these expectations.
Some realize we’re all vessels for the composer, and wouldn’t bat an eye to hire someone like me for a Bruckner subscription program. They request Bruckner, Wagner or Mozart, because it’s squarely a part of my musical tradition. Music equitably belongs to everyone.
Mobilize music’s expressive equity towards racial equality
Artists play from their lived experience. The daily lived experience of UAOC’s is tumultuously more disparate than most of our colleagues. Excluding our voices from the canon denies audiences an essential and uniquely profound perspective. Creating great art through the rungs of oppression gives us something special to play, sing and conduct about. Fortitude through racial inequity is the exact resilience most composers require (think Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or Mr. Bruckner).
Timely is the need to think openly and often about unconscious biases in the engagement and programming of underrepresented artist of color.
If you don’t, who will?
Noted conductor, educator and social justice advocate Brandon Keith Brown seeks to engineer society from the podium by decreasing the racial stigmatization of underrepresented minority classical musicians. Brown is a prizewinner and the audience favorite of the 2012 International Sir Georg Solti Competition for Conductors, and guest conducts prominent European orchestras including the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester-Berlin, Badisches Staatskapelle, Staatskapelle Weimar, members of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Jena Philharmonie among others. Upcoming debuts include the Konzerthaus Orchestra Berlin, WDR Funkhaus Orchestra Köln, Cape Town Philharmonic, the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra and the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra. He is a student of David Zinman, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur and Gustav Meier, graduating with a master’s from Johns Hopkins University. Initially trained as a violinist, he attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music studying under Roland and Almita Vamos.
Website: www.brandonkeithbrown.com
Speaking request: info@brandonkeithbrown.com
Follow me on Instagram: @brandonkeithbrownconductor
