From Chevalier De Saint-Georges to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, black classical musicians and composers have been largely written out of the canon. This fascinating one-off asks why
Arts broadcaster Suzy Klein regularly attempts to rescue the legacy of black classical composers. And, equally regularly, says Klein, she receives messages damning her so-called “passion for negritude” (given the state of discourse around race in 2020, presumably many missives are considerably blunter than that). She continues undeterred with this documentary on BBC Four, co-presented with Lenny Henry, which does an appropriately unapologetic job of illuminating the racism underpinning the classical canon.
We begin in the 1500s, before the foundation of the Atlantic slave trade, when hundreds of African people were already living fairly ordinary lives in Britain. We meet a weaver with the remarkable and oddly telling name of Reasonable Blackman. Reasonable wasn’t a musician, but his contemporary, John Blanke – thought to be an African descendant of Catherine of Aragon – was. Thanks to his expertise as a trumpeter, Blanke maintained the favour of the notoriously fickle Henry VIII. For a few centuries, this would be as good as it got. With slavery came dehumanisation (George Handel personally profited from the trade), and with this dehumanisation came the establishment of the Europhile classical tradition that continues to this day.
