In honor of Black History Month, host Kevin Doherty suggests five prolific composers who should be featured on classical music playlists year-round.
Florence Price (1887-1953)
By all accounts, Florence Price seems to be one of the most in-demand composers today. Even though she passed away in 1953, a decade-old discovery of much of her music in an abandoned home just south of Chicago has musicians from soloists to large orchestras racing to record and perform her music. Price holds the distinction of being the first African-American woman to have one of her symphonies performed by a major American orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.
William Grant Still (1895-1978)
William Grant Still is often referred to as the Dean of African-American composers. Very much a trailblazer, the Mississippi native was the first black composer to have his music performed by a major American Symphony Orchestra. His Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American” was premiered in 1931 by the Rochester Philharmonic in New York. Still’s compositional voice is considered to be a benchmark in the vernacular of 20th-century American music.
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)
Margaret Bonds was a composer and a concert pianist who was the first black soloist to ever perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That performance was of a Piano Concerto written by her composition teacher Florence Price. Bonds was also very involved with the Harlem Renaissance and a close friend of the poet Langston Hughes. The bulk of Bonds’ music was written for voice and piano, setting much of Hughes’ poetry in the process.
George Walker (1922-2018)
George Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996, becoming the first African-American composer to accomplish one of the grand feats of classical music. Walker was also an in-demand concert pianist, and after becoming the first black recipient of a doctoral degree from the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester was a revered academic.
Valerie Coleman
A flutist and one of the founding members of the quintet Imani Winds, Valerie Coleman is also a prolific composer who fuses traditional classical music with elements of jazz and Afro-Cuban music into her compositions. The Grammy-nominated Coleman was named one of the Top 35 Women Composers (past and present) by the Washington Post in 2017. Her former group Imani Winds will be coming to Sacramento this month and performing a couple of Coleman’s arrangements. | 
