It’s amazing what we aren’t taught/not informed of in the media and elsewhere. There is just so much good stuff out there, and it’s a shame that it isn’t given the type of attention that the negative is.

The whole White House Music Series has been inspired, but the classical musice workshop has been the one that has intrigued me the most, partly, because we don’t hear much if anything about the Black contribution to the classical music genre, both present and especially past.

That includes those who influenced Mozart and Beethoven!

I’ve only just learnt of the name Joseph Antonio-Emidy, (1775-1835), who had an amazing story.

He was born in West Africa, taken by slavers to Brazil and then Portugal in Europe, and went on to become a virtuoso violinist in the Lisbon Opera. George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860) and The Chevailler de Saint-Georges, Boulogne (1745-99) were important figures in the Paris classical music scene of the time, and other European cities, beyond.

Then there’s Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, born in London in the 1870s – whose father came from Sierra Leone, West Africa to England in the 1860s to study medicine and who qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons – who was sent to the prestigious Royal College of Music aged 15.

He travelled to the U.S., met Booker T. Washington, and it was fitting somehow to read that he was invited by the President to The White House, and that in 1901 a 200 strong African-American chorus, named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society, was founded in his honour in Washington D.C.

These talented few are the tip of the iceberg. I’m going to try and track down recordings of their compositions.

Oh, I do love my research!