Resonant Messages

I have been playing the piano since the age of three, but for most of my time at the instrument I was oblivious to the long history of African-descended classical musicians. Today, as a music historian and performer, I am drawn to narratives from and around the African continent and diaspora: to make sense of the histories and contributions that were suppressed during my earlier education, and to also make sense of my own place within what I now know to be an incredibly diverse Western art music tradition. Through processes of learning and unlearning, I have arrived as a classical musician, empowered by the knowledge that people of African descent have long participated in a genre regularly mischaracterized and propagandized as being “not for us.”