O’CONNOR: In my career, I have given more than 600 performances as a soloist with orchestra, and I have appeared on roughly the same number of country music albums as a session fiddler. I am afraid to say that diversity in country and bluegrass music is just as bad as, if not worse than, it is in classical music, despite the fact that black people have a much more extensive history playing country music than playing Mozart and Brahms. (In fact, at the turn of the century, nearly half of all Appalachian string bands included black musicians.) But these days, are there really that many black musicians who want to play Mozart, Brahms, Johnny Cash, and George Jones? I do not fault anyone who does not want to participate in making certain kinds of music. Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that we are freer now than ever before to make choices about the kinds of cultural activities we want to take part in. On some level, looking at racial breakdowns of mostly white orchestras playing mostly white men’s music is as peculiar as looking at the racial composition of country music session players in Nashville, banjo players at bluegrass festivals, heavy metal guitar players in hard rock bands, or athletes in the National Hockey League. Doesn’t this mostly come down to what choices people are making for themselves? A provocative question for Dr. Aaron Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, an organization whose central mission is to create more opportunities for African American and Latino musicians in symphony orchestras and falling short of those goals. Read the discussion here: markoconnorblog.blogspot/2014/01/why-symphony-orchestras-never-got-darker.html Photo: Willie Weeks was the only African American musician in the Nashville studios that OConnor remembers from his session playing days in the 1980s. Weeks was a favorite bass player of Eric Clapton and George Harrison as well.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:14:27 +0000