Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black

With its special focus on the theme ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹ in the 2025/2026 season, the DSO highlights the music of Black composers from four centuries and three continents. The orchestra maintains a tradition it launched in the 1980s with the rediscovery of Jewish and other composers persecuted by the Nazi regime and has carried on in the season themes ›No Concert Without a Female Composer!‹ (2023/2024) and ‘Orchestra for Democracy’ (2024/2025).

Artist in Focus Partners  What is Afrodiaspora?  Read the Essay

From very early on there have been composers and performers in the African diaspora – men and women musicians with African roots who, through migration, enslavement or other forms of dispersion, landed up in different parts of the world. And primarily in Europe and the Americas, they turned to European music, introducing the most diverse musical traditions and worlds of experience into their compositions.

In the core repertoire, concert life and the music-historical literature, however, they have hardly played a role until now. The DSO would like to change that and is setting an example with its season focus. ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹ presents music by composers of the African diaspora on the big stage: and not merely as thematic islands or isolated in special concerts, but rather as an integral part of many of the DSO’s 2025/2026 symphonic concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie.

Artist in Focus: Abel Selaocoe

Abel Selaocoe is »Artist in Focus« for the 2025/2026 season. The South African cellist is a virtuoso at crossing over between musical worlds, equally spellbinding on the classical podium, as a brilliant improviser or as the frontman of his ensembles. He will appear in four concerts between 19 and 22 March 2026: playing Montgomery’s concerto commission twice, in a symphonic concert and a Casual Concert, giving a solo concert at the Quasimodo and, finally, performing with his four-man Bantu Ensemble at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Mehr: »Artist in Focus« Abel Selaocoe

Partners

The DSO is thrilled to have the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and its Director and Chief Curator Professor Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as collaborating partners for ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹. With its focus on diversity and bringing people together, HKW strives to integrate different visions of our world. Its activities thrive on the variety of stories that the Germany of today has to tell in international exchange. The most important goal of this process is to avoid presenting cultures as the »other« but instead to make them accessible for experiencing. Concertgoers will see and hear this for themselves at two chamber concerts and an evening with our “Artist in Focus” Abel Selaocoe’s group at the iconic building in the Tiergarten on the banks of the Spree.

Above all, the DSO is grateful to George E. Lewis, who has guided the orchestra as curator for dramaturgical planning and in the selection of works. Lewis is a composer, musicologist, trombonist and professor at New York’s Columbia University and, jointly with musicologist Dr Harald Kisiedu, edited the bilingual two-volume essay collection »Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today« published by Wolke in 2023.

The DSO thanks the Commissioner of the Federal Government for Culture and Media for the generous support of ‘Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black’ as part of its programme ›Exzellente Orchesterlandschaft Deutschland‹.

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Essay: ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹

by Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis

The past decade has witnessed a tremendous increase in the visibility of Afrodiasporic classical composers. After a long period marked by a near-absence of scholarly and media discourses surrounding these composers, this season the DSO has taken a leading role in bringing to light this heretofore seemingly untapped resource by collaborating with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) to present the season-long initiative, ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹. Curated by composer and Columbia University professor George E. Lewis, DSO’s Head of Artistic Planning Marlene Brüggen and Thomas Schmidt-Ott, DSO’s Managing Director, this season reveals Afrodiasporic orchestral and chamber music as an international, intercultural, and multigenerational space of innovation that offers listeners new subjects, histories, identities, and pleasures.

What is »Composing While Black«?

The title phrase »Composing While Black« alludes to how US Black citizens, describing encounters with police in which they were detained for no apparent reason, jocularly named their supposed offense »Driving While Black«, a satirical takeoff on the actual legal offense of driving while intoxicated. The intent of the policing is to make the citizens feel that they are »out of place«. However, this series presents »Composing While Black« as a source of pleasure, excitement, and innovation, a new identity for classical music that embraces a panoply of historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections, and whose ultimate goal is not just diversity, but also a new complexity that promises far greater creative depth.. 

A Historical Perspective

Afrodiasporic classical music is of long standing, particularly in Europe. In the 16th century, there were the Black trumpeters and kettledrummers of Germany, as well as Vicente Lusitano, a pioneer of chromatic counterpoint. In the 18th century, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, not only composed symphonies, concertos, and operas, but was an important military figure in the French Revolution whose works were later banned by Napoleon. In the 19th century, there’s Beethoven’s ›Sonata mulattica‹, composed for Afro-Polish violinist and composer George Bridgetower, now generally known as the ›Kreutzer Sonata‹. Afro-Cuban violinist and composer José White Lafitte wrote concertos to international acclaim. Similarly celebrated was the enslaved American pianist and compositional Wunderkind Thomas »Blind Tom« Wiggins, who performed at the White House at age ten and had a repertoire of over 5,000 works. A half-century before early 20th century modernists such as Henry Cowell, Wiggins’s virtuosic piano music incorporated such extended techniques as tone clusters. 

A precursor of this series was the landmark ›Black Composers Series‹, released on CBS Masterworks Records between 1974 and 1978, which documented orchestral works by a number of composers whose music is featured this season, including Bologne, Hakim, Walker, and Adolphus Hailstork. The title, ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹, owes a great deal to the notion of »diaspora aesthetics« advanced by the African American composer Olly Wilson, whose ›Shango Memory‹ (1995) is featured twice.

Intercultural Influences

Afrodiasporic classical composers regularly present intercultural references in their music, pointing to the idea that classical music is itself a melange of diasporas. Thus, African composers Joshua Uzoigwe and Justinian Tamusuza  combine sounds reminiscent of their musical traditions to create what Nigerian composer Akin Euba called »a new type of composer, one who uses an idiom that is partially based upon that of European art music.« William L. Dawson’s 1934 ›Negro Folk Symphony‹ explores cultural connections between West African, African American, and European forms, while Howard Swanson’s ›Short Symphony‹ (1948) showcases refined harmonic language, lyrical expressiveness, clear formal structure, and syncopated rhythmic drive to blend European and African American traditions. 

Literary and Spiritual Inspirations

Literary and spiritual references abound in Afrodiasporic composition. In one of her most famous works, the art song ›The Negro Speaks of Rivers‹ (1942), American composer Margaret Bonds sets to music the eponymous poem by Langston Hughes, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the influential African American cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Bonds enhances the text with blues-infused harmonies and lyrical vocal writing. Carlos Simon’s ›Fate Now Conquers‹ (2020) was inspired by an entry about the ›Iliad‹ in an 1815 Beethoven notebook, as well as harmonic structures in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, while Talib Rasul Hakim addresses his engagement with the Hindu concept of the Supreme Being in ›Visions of Ishwara‹ (1970), his first work for large orchestra.

Confronting the Experience of Enslavement

Two deeply personal and poignant works that confront the experience of enslavement are Billy Childs’s Saxophone Concerto, ›Diaspora‹ (2023), which sets poems by Claude McKay, Maya Angelou, and Nayyirah Waheed, and George Walker’s ›Lyric for Strings‹ (1990), dedicated to the memory of his enslaved grandmother. Both works convey themes of loss and hope, creating an atmosphere of deep reflection.

Virtuosity, Excitement, Innovation

Grammy winner Jessie Montgomery’s world premiere work was co-commissioned by the DSO and Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Lincoln Center Festival, Aspen Music Festival and Utah Symphony Orchestra, and will be performed by this season’s »Artist in Focus«, the exciting, genre-busting South African cello virtuoso Abel Selaocoe. DSO audiences will also be able to hear one of the world’s most audacious experimental composers, Anthony Braxton, on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, whose output includes six operas as well as orchestral and chamber works. 

Afrodiasporic Classical Music in Europe

Many are surprised to find that some Afrodiasporic composers are also European, or what is sometimes called »Afropean«. In fact, ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹ features composers from France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as the USA, Haiti, Nigeria, and South Africa. Swedish composer Tebogo Monnakgotla’s string quartet offers dramaturgical interplay between the »wooden bodies« of the four instruments, while British composer Hannah Kendall draws on histories of the transatlantic slave trade – a topic that should be of central historical interest for European audiences as well.

Afrodiasporic Classical Music at the DSO

This emphasis by a major orchestra in featuring the works of Afrodiasporic composers throughout an entire season is without precedent worldwide. Today, Afrodiasporic composers are more active than ever, and there are many more Afrodiasporic composers to discover in future seasons. To be exposed to this multiplicity of experiences, aesthetics, and musical practices contributes to an incredible enrichment of the historical context, intellectual atmosphere, and listening experience of classical music. 

Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis

George E. Lewis (pictured right) is a composer, musicologist, trombonist, and professor at Columbia University in New York City. Dr Harald Kisiedu is a musicologist, author, saxophonist, and Docent at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. Together, they edited the 2023 bilingual anthology ›Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today‹ (Wolke Verlag) in 2023.