Rachel Barton Pine Introduces 'Music By Black Composers, Vol. 2 + 3

December 11, 2023, 9:25 PM · Rachel Barton Pine has made it her mission to bring music by Black composers to the concert stage, to the recording studio and to the classroom.

To that end - today she has some exciting news for violin teachers and students: the release of Music By Black Composers, Violin Volume 2 and Music By Black Composers, Violin Volume 3- two books of sheet music containing a total of 31 works for violin by 20 Black composers. (Rachel celebrated with a Facebook live event Tuesday - click here to see that! She was joined by Sphinx Laureates, Music Institute of Chicago Artists of Tomorrow scholars, and members of Sphinx Virtuosi, Sphinx Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, D-Composed Chamber Music Collective, and Chicago Youth Symphony.)

MBC Volume 2, Hannah White and Randall Goosby

The cover of MBC Volume 2, with the violinists who performed the artist recordings for the book: Hannah White and Randall Goosby.

Volumes 2 and 3 follows the release in 2018 of Music By Black Composers Vol. 1, a book of 22 works at a Suzuki Book 1-2 playing level.

Both books are part of the Music By Black Composers (MBC) project, an initiative developed by the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation that aims to bring greater diversity to the ranks of classical music performers, composers, and audiences by making the music of Black composers easily available to all.

"The goal of the MBC Project is to spread awareness of Black composers and their music as broadly as possible," Rachel said.

The works in Volume 2 and 3 span four centuries, from the 1700s to the present, with composers from North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. They are aimed at students at a Suzuki Book 3 to mid-Book 4 playing level and appear in progressive order of difficulty. Each piece also has piano accompaniment and second violin accompaniment, and audio and video recordings are available on the Music by Black Composers website (click here).

When it comes to the pieces in the Suzuki books, you can go to YouTube and find professional performances of the "grownup versions" of these pieces - hundreds or even thousands of versions of kids playing them, teachers playing them, etc. "With this repertoire, it's almost like we are starting from scratch," Rachel said. "So I wanted to jumpstart that process." With that in mind, they created both pedagogical reference recordings and artist recordings for students to listen to.

The reference recordings correspond exactly to the bowings, fingerings and tempos that are on the page, and those are played by Rachel. The artist recordings feature violinists Randall Goosby and Hannah White, who play their own interpretations of the pieces.

The eventual goal is to have eight volumes of Music by Black Composers, going from beginner to advanced-concerto playing level.

Research for the books started in 2001, when the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation started collecting pieces by Black composers. By now they have collected more than 900 pieces and have a database with more than 450 composers.

Rachel spoke to me over the phone about the creation of Volume 2 and 3 (the steps of which are described in great detail here).

With so many works collected, "then it was a question of going through all the repertoire, to figure out what would be suitable in terms of pedagogical level," Rachel said. "We have a huge spreadsheet, listing each piece, then how they correspond in level to the Suzuki books - this one is Book 4, this one is Book 2, that sort of thing."

"But it's not as simple as that, because there are pieces that can be modified," Rachel said. A difficult piece can often be simplified to work for a more basic level. "For example, you can eliminate double stops, or take something down an octave, change the key, or use just a portion of a piece."

There was also repertoire that wasn't originally written for the violin, but could be adapted for it. "Just like in the Suzuki books, there were pieces that were originally vocal music or keyboard music - excellent melodies that can be lifted and made to work for the violin," Rachel said.

"So we played around with a lot of options," Rachel said. "It took countless hours, with the help of a number of very generous Suzuki teachers who helped me go through every single piece, one by one, sorting it all out."

The next step was narrow down the number of pieces for the book. For Volume 2 and 3, they had found about 80 "finalist" pieces that worked for that level (Book 3 to mid-Book 4), and then a panel of a dozen teachers and MBC Advisory Board members voted. "The pieces are in order of easiest to most difficult, and Suzuki teacher trainer Ed Kreitman helped in choosing the final progression order," Rachel said. "I'm so grateful to the experts who helped me figure that out."

Rachel did a lot of the arrangements herself, for those pieces that required them.

"The arrangements were pretty straightforward - taking a piano piece and lifting the melody," she said. "We hired some wonderful young African-American composers to help with making the remaining notes into nice-sounding keyboard part," Rachel said. "Unlike in Volume One, we did not have the piano accompaniment double the melody line." They did that deliberately in Volume One, to help along the beginning player. "But with the more complex repertoire in Volume Two, the keyboard part is independent. It's a nice evolution artistically, for the kids."

And while there was much attention to pedagogy in the assembly of this book, there was also a great deal of attention paid to the history of Black classical music.

"One of the things that we are very adamant about with our curricular volumes is that it's exclusively classical music," Rachel said. "That's not to say that other types of music aren't equally valid and important, but because for so long, classical music has not been fully recognized as a type of Black music, we wanted to highlight and emphasize the fact that composers of African descent from all around the planet have been writing through-composed art music for many centuries. So folk songs, traditional music from around the world, jazz, all those kinds of things -- we deliberately chose not to include."

That said, "we certainly have things that are based on spirituals," Rachel said. For example, "the composition by Clarence Cameron White, based on 'Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen' - but that's a very classical arrangement - it's not just the straight-up tune."

Volume 2 also includes a version of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" - a spiritual which in America is also known as the Black National Anthem. It was written at the turn of the 20th century by J. Rosamond Johnson.

"It is so important historically, and it is by an important composer," Rachel said. "We could have easily included one of his other works, but that seems like the one to include."

When it came to developing Volume 2 and 3, Rachel said it was useful to see how teachers and students used Music by Black Composers Volume 1, which has been in circulation since 2018.

"Sometimes, older, more advanced students are given these books as reading materials, or sometimes they're used in group class settings," Rachel said. "Sometimes, different kids in the studio will be assigned to different pieces, so that each kid is playing a different piece for a recital. Or sometimes teachers will pick and choose certain pieces to help kids with certain things that they're working on."

One suggestion that came from teachers was to have a smaller number of pieces in each book, and as a result, Volumes 2 and 3 includes 31 pieces, but those are divided into two books, Volume 2 with 16 pieces and Volume 3 with 15 pieces. Volume 1 contains 22 pieces.

Also, "we includee translations on the page of every single foreign word, in terms of composers' names and work titles," Rachel said.

Within the historical notes, there are also boxes with explanations of terms like "colored" and "negro" and "colony" and even "segregation" and "discrimination."

"When you're dealing with some of this repertoire, and some of this history, there's no way to not confront some uncomfortable topics," Rachel said. "But I think it's better to just have the history right there." It was important to include context, when it came to these works. "It's sad for me when kids learn a piece by Handel and they don't know that he's from the 1700s, or the Baroque period, or Germany, then they learn a piece by Beethoven and they don't know that he was composing in the 1800s. They don't even know the composer's first names or their life stories. But if you do want to know that about Handel or Beethoven, it's easy to find it with a quick Google search."

With lesser-known composers, it's not always that easy. "In the absence of that type of easy access with this repertoire, we wanted to make sure that people would know not just these wonderful melodies, but also what it is that they're playing," Rachel said. The books include pictures of the composers, biographies of the composer, and role model profiles of current Black classical artists.

"You literally have the printed book on the music stand, and the composer is looking right back at you, watching you practice their piece," Rachel said. She remembers when her own daughter Sylvia was very young, practicing pieces from Volume 1 such as Thomas Green Wiggins' "The Boy with the Axles in His Hands."

"She would always ask, 'Did Mr. Wiggins like my 'Boy with the Axles in His Hands'?" Rachel said, "and I would always say, 'I think he did, see look, he's smiling!'"

To purchase Music By Black Composers, Violin Volumes 2 and, click here.

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