I went to a Philly Pops concert at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on May 15, 2022, a beautiful, sun-streaked Sunday. It had been dreadful all weekend, the weekend I went up to New York to cover a concert at the Jazz Gallery on Saturday night, staying in New Jersey the Friday night before, each city connected by the same cloudy, dark sky. NY lulled with an overhanging fog that was so thick, buildings lining 9th Avenue disappeared into the sky, no tops to prove that they ever stopped climbing—towers of Babel. But that Sunday was beautiful while still among us lay a pandemic, a tightening, possibly global—and nearly so—war, and an irreparable division over pregnancy and abortion. No one was tuned into the news of a racist shooting in Buffalo the day before so that Sunday, still, was beautiful.
I was a speck standing in the lobby with the audience before the show started. I couldn’t see where the black people were. I walked the floor, from the front entrance on Broad St. to the central sky-light dome above the middle of the lobby. Then I walked all the way to the back of the building.
I couldn’t find the Black people. I took selfies to unfocus myself and scan slowly through the audience behind me because maybe I missed someone and I just needed to zoom in to take a closer look.
Growing up in Atlanta, I was at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s (ASO) concert hall at the Woodruff Arts Center every weekend. The ASO raised me, groomed me, painfully trained me for the profession of classical percussion. The Talent Development Program (TDP) under the ASO provided lessons, assisted with buying instruments, and prepared the funneling of Black students into summer music camps. TDP gave all the students tickets for every ASO concert in the classical season, and I never once considered how expensive a habit like that was, impossible for Black kids not sponsored and made evident by the $110.00 ticket I thought to buy at the beginning of the concert. Two of my brothers and I were in TDP and studied with Tom Sherwood, Chris Martin, and Ralph Jones—the principal chairs of their sections. We took lessons every week, practiced for hours every day, were in all the top orchestras and wind ensembles across the city, state, southeast region, and country. We sold incredible recitals to the public, then at the Interlochen Arts Camp, we were internationally recognized by playing in and soloing with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, which I did as a winner of its international concerto competition.
But while that sounds good, there was a lot of bad for us as well. We weren’t treated all that well in our own sections, sometimes by our own conductors and faculty professors. And it came from different directions: even when attending the concerts, not all, but many of the ushers made us feel like we didn’t belong. The worst one challenged us every weekend about whether we had tickets to the concert despite us being there every weekend with our tickets. His name was Eugene. Now that I think about it, we should have called him “Mean Eugene,” but the very truth of the matter was that we cared more about the music than how we were being treated. That’s why we went all the way to conservatories, won orchestra positions, played around the world, but eventually became public school teachers, non-profit founders, and teaching artists for those non-profits around the country. We wanted to see more Black students coming after us that could go just as far, and further.
I haven’t played in any orchestra with another Black percussionist, man or woman. All along the way, I’ve had incidents where white, male percussionists said demeaning things to me, one yelling out into a room full of percussionists about my inadequacy to defend the layout we had for a percussion ensemble piece. We had already vigorously rehearsed it that way and the concert was in a couple of days, but he wanted to change our placement and I said, “No. it’s too late.” Or another percussionist putting his mouth to my ear to whisper a chant about how “I’ll never be able to make it. I’ll never be any good.”
They know who they are. Then there are the percussionists who never treated me harshly. All those percussionists were around when things like that happened. But no one spoke up to stop the humiliation and disrespect being dealt me. They got quiet. They breathed very slowly and momentarily froze because they knew what they were seeing was wrong even though they did nothing to stop it. Those percussionists know who they are, too.
I didn’t go in to see the Philly POPS concert that Sunday. I didn’t want even one more performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in my life. Instead, I stayed in the lobby and kept an eye on the audience when they first poured in, then poured out for intermission, and then once again after the concert was over.
While washing my hands in the bathroom during intermission, an older, sophisticated, and slender Black lady wearing a flawless cream-colored suit leaned into me with one shoulder, her front facing the direction of my back, and said, “Are we the…only?”
While she yet spoke, I turned to her and snapped my neck nodding my head.
“Yep,” I responded while she continued her slow-moving question.
“Are we the only in the…”
“Yep.”
“…in the audience?”
“Yup,” I said again.
This never happened to me before. The 25 years I graced these concert halls, the one, two, possibly three other Black people have never leaned into me to say, “What’s going on here?” I never asked what was going on myself because I was there for the music, the training of my ears to hear rather than my eyes to see who was on the stage.
There are more Black musicians on stage now because of the efforts we put in to change it, but also because George Floyd was murdered. Yet the audience still looks the same. And the percussion sections do, too.
Look: Evolve 