Black classical composers to listen to

He died of syphilitic dementia and was buried in an unmarked grave. His opera "Treemonisha" wasn't performed until seven decades later. But Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" and 43 other ragtime piano pieces made him one of the 20th century's most influential composers. Melody in the right hand, accompaniment in the left, and those syncopations! Jazz? No, thoroughly classical in form and structure.

1933 saw the first orchestral premiere of a symphonic work by a black woman composer. The lushly orchestrated E Minor Symphony was one of 300 works by Florence Price, including chamber music, piano concertos, arrangements of spirituals and art songs. 200 of them, and additional documents, were found in 2009 in 33 boxes in a dilapidated house in a small Illinois city – Price's onetime summer home.

He was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music for "The Central Park Five," an opera about five New York black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of rape in the 1980s and later exonerated. His first opera "X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X," which premiered in 1986, also deals with the issue of race and political struggle. Anthony Davis is a solo pianist and music professor as well.

Ever heard of the "Bridgetower Sonata?" Had Ludwig van Beethoven not had a falling out with his erstwhile friend George Bridgetower, he might have kept the original name and not renamed his opus 47 the "Kreutzer Sonata." The prodigious violinist performed for the American president Thomas Jefferson and the English King George IV. Yet he died in poverty, and little of his own music exists today.

France's best fencer, prodigious violinist, Marie Antoinette's violin teacher, colonel in the republican army during the French Revolution, Chevalier de Saint-Georges has been called "the black Mozart." Misleadingly so, since the real Mozart envied him for his accomplishments. Several operas, 15 highly virtuosic violin concertos, symphonies and chamber works issued forth from the Chevalier's pen.

He's called "the African Mahler," but his late romantic concert music infused with folk melodies can stand on its own. Hugely famous on both sides of the Atlantic, the Afro-British composer toured the US three times and performed at the White House for Theodore Roosevelt. "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" of 1898 was performed 200 times in his short lifetime: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died at age 37.

The first black musician to conduct a major orchestra, the first to write an opera produced by a major company and performed on national television: William Grant Still is known for his Afro-American Symphony of 1930 but was an oboist and jazz arranger as well. Having studied under the French avant-garde composer Edgard Varese, Still wrote 150 compositions, including Hollywood film music.

Called "potentially the greatest trumpeter of all time" by fellow-trumpeter Maurice André, Grammy Award winner Wynton Marsalis has spiced up the world of classical music with four symphonies and, most recently, his violin concerto of 2019. His music is infused with touches of jazz, gospel and spiritual, and his scope is inclusive, from big band to symphony orchestra and from quartets to ballets.