The word “modern” and its derivative “modernism” can refer to historical moments that mark dramatic breaks from the past, or describe processes such as industrialization, the rise of the urban, and the ascendance of technology and secularization in society. In the context of Western culture, going back to the fifth century, the term has articulated people’s attitudes about their relationships to the past, the present, and the future to which they aspire. As the American philosopher Marshall Berman put it, modernism is “any attempt [by people] ... to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.”

For African-descended artists — particularly composers of art music — this making themselves “at home” has meant creating works that expressed their understanding about their place in the concert world. At least, this has been a widely accepted view, and based on their precarious and undervalued presence in institutions of art music-making and presentation, this statement holds some truth.

Even the choice to work with eclectic musical material — folk music, atonal Serialism, and more — were considered a “political statement” within this interpretation. But Afromodernism can also address larger questions, such as: “What was modernity to African Americans at various historical moments?” and “How were these ideas represented artistically and engaged with critically?”

The New York Philharmonic’s exploration of Afromodernism prompts us to engage with both its contemporary manifestations and the long history of Black artists who have attempted to make spaces of their own in the art music world and beyond. Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (2024), a collection of essays edited by Harald Kisiedu and George Lewis, highlights three areas of neglect that worked against the wide-scale acceptance of African-descended composers: scholarship, programming, and journalism. While the climb has been steep, there have been efforts in these realms for more than a century.

The late-19th-century writer, amateur musician, and impresario James Monroe Trotter expressed this impulse in Music and Some Highly Musical People. In the first general survey of American music of any kind — an anthology published in 1878, a little more than a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, which helped to create, en masse, an African American modern citizen — Trotter documented the careers of Black musicians working primarily in the classical sphere through biographical sketches and, most importantly, scores composed by Black musicians. His aim was both aesthetic and political: to instill race pride, a sense of cultural nationalism, and “relations of mutual respect and good feeling” between the races. He was advocating for his subjects’ place in America and, specifically, the concert world.

The New York Philharmonic’s Afromodernism programming joins the many recent attempts to put Black classical musicians on the art establishment’s radar. It also extends to amplifying the recognition of Black art-music composers from other points throughout the African diaspora. From the African continent to Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, Black composers have developed innovative voices in all sonic sectors. Since the early 20th century, fantasies of a return to Africa reflected in the 1903 musical In Dahomey (composed and written by two Black creators, Will Marion Cook and Jesse A. Ship) and the circulation of sonic materials from across it today, the diaspora remains an important conduit for creativity.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the so-called Harlem Renaissance galvanized cultural ideals of aesthetic freedom and inclusion that Black composers (even Black popular musicians) had been working on for decades, including through the embrace of African history and artifacts as a source for “New Negro” modernism. Think of William Grant Still’s opera Troubled Island, based on the Haitian Revolution. As participants in the artistic avant-garde, Black composers explored diverse sonic worlds, resisting the restrictions that society placed on them and defying discrimination from critics and audiences who sought to discipline their muses into “safe” and predictable aesthetic conventions. Composers like William Dawson, Florence Price, and Still — all of whom had works performed by major orchestras during their lifetimes — combined European musical forms with African American sonic materials, leading to influential stylistic results. But their successes didn’t necessarily translate into ample opportunities for themselves or others.

The Civil Rights period following World War II saw societal changes that reshaped Afromodernism’s impulse and catapulted it forward. In the world of composition, Black musicians made inroads into professorships and other institutions that could facilitate, even subsidize, their boundless creativity. Modernity became equated with equal rights, activism, globalism, anticolonialism, and technological access, and was expressed through aesthetic experimentation. The future of Afromodernism is here. That impulse is alive and thriving through projects like Composing While Black, the last 50 years of musicians’ activism and creativity, a burgeoning body of scholarship, and an increasing representation in artistic programming. Contemporary African art music now stands as a dynamic, modern expression. These musicians no longer must abide notions of racial, national, or aesthetic purity. And, partly due to an explosion of interest in earlier composers like Price, women composers have now taken their places as leading voices.

To return to Berman’s reflection, Afromodernism has made itself at home.

The NY Phil’s exploration complements performances with discussions, exhibits, and more:

• Afromodernism — Music of the African Diaspora, October 17 & 18
  Thomas Wilkins, conductor; Seth Parker Woods, cello 
  Works by Carlos Simon, Nathalie Joachim, D. Baker, and Still
• Young People’s Concert: The Future Is Unity, October 19
  Thomas Wilkins, conductor / co-host
  Works by Price, Carlos Simon, Sowande, Still, and an NY Phil Very Young Composer
• Sound On: Composing While Black, Volume II, October 25
  Free concert at MoMA by International Contemporary Ensemble,
  Works by Jalalu Kalvert-Nelson, Daniel Kidane, Hannah Kendall, Tebogo Monnakgotla, Joshua Uzoigwem, and Leila AduGilmore

Learn about — and register for — events beyond the stage, including the fashion exhibit at FIT and The Unanswered Questions discussions at nyphil.org/afromodernism.

A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is a music historian, pianist, composer, and professor emeritus of music at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the author of Who Hears Here: On Black Music Pasts and Present, The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop, and Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop.