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Stories   >   Rachel Barton Pine introduces 'Music By Black Composers, Vol. 2' / Violinist.com

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Rachel Barton Pine introduces 'Music By Black Composers, Vol. 2' / Violinist.com

Posted: December 11, 2023

Violinist.com's Laurie Niles writes……Rachel Barton Pine has made it her mission to bring music by Black composers to the concert stage, to the recording studio and to the classroom.

To that end - today she has some exciting news for violin teachers and students: the release of Music By Black Composers, Violin Volume 2 - a set of two books of sheet music containing 31 works for violin by 20 Black composers. (Rachel will be "unboxing" the books in a Facebook live event Tuesday - click here to see that! She'll be joined by Sphinx Laureates, Music Institute of Chicago Artists of Tomorrow scholars, and members of Sphinx Virtuosi, Sphinx Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, D-Composed Chamber Music Collective, and Chicago Youth Symphony.)

MBC Volume 2, Hannah White and Randall Goosby
The cover of MBC Volume 2, with the violinists who performed the artist recordings for the book: Hannah White and Randall Goosby.
Volume 2 follows the release in 2018 of Music By Black Composers Vol. 1, a book of 22 works at a Suzuki Book 1-2 playing level.

Both books are part of the Music By Black Composers (MBC) project, an initiative developed by the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation that aims to bring greater diversity to the ranks of classical music performers, composers, and audiences by making the music of Black composers easily available to all.

"The goal of the MBC Project is to spread awareness of Black composers and their music as broadly as possible," Rachel said.

The works in Volume 2 span four centuries, from the 1700s to the present, with composers from North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. They are aimed at students at a Suzuki Book 3 to mid-Book 4 playing level and appear in progressive order of difficulty. Each piece also has piano accompaniment and second violin accompaniment, and audio and video recordings are available on the Music by Black Composers website (click here).

When it comes to the pieces in the Suzuki books, you can go to YouTube and find professional performances of the "grownup versions" of these pieces - hundreds or even thousands of versions of kids playing them, teachers playing them, etc. "With this repertoire, it's almost like we are starting from scratch," Rachel said. "So I wanted to jumpstart that process." With that in mind, they created both pedagogical reference recordings and artist recordings for students to listen to.

The reference recordings correspond exactly to the bowings, fingerings and tempos that are on the page, and those are played by Rachel. The artist recordings feature violinists Randall Goosby and Hannah White, who play their own interpretations of the pieces.

BELOW: Here is the Artist Recording playlist for MBC Volume 2, featuring violinist Hannah White and pianist Matthew Hagle; as well as violinist Randall Goosby and pianist Zhu Wang. Peruse the list by clicking on the three bars in the upper right corner of the video screen.


The eventual goal is to have eight volumes of Music by Black Composers, going from beginner to advanced-concerto playing level.

Research for the books started in 2001, when the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation started collecting pieces by Black composers. By now they have collected more than 900 pieces and have a database with more than 450 composers.

Rachel spoke to me over the phone about the creation of Volume 2 (the steps of which are described in great detail here).

With so many works collected, "then it was a question of going through all the repertoire, to figure out what would be suitable in terms of pedagogical level," Rachel said. "We have a huge spreadsheet, listing each piece, then how they correspond in level to the Suzuki books - this one is Book 4, this one is Book 2, that sort of thing."

"But it's not as simple as that, because there are pieces that can be modified," Rachel said. A difficult piece can often be simplified to work for a more basic level. "For example, you can eliminate double stops, or take something down an octave, change the key, or use just a portion of a piece."

There was also repertoire that wasn't originally written for the violin, but could be adapted for it. "Just like in the Suzuki books, there were pieces that were originally vocal music or keyboard music - excellent melodies that can be lifted and made to work for the violin," Rachel said.

"So we played around with a lot of options," Rachel said. "It took countless hours, with the help of a number of very generous Suzuki teachers who helped me go through every single piece, one by one, sorting it all out."

The next step was narrow down the number of pieces for the book. For Volume 2, they had found about 80 "finalist" pieces that worked for that level (Book 3 to mid-Book 4), and then a panel of a dozen teachers and MBC Advisory Board members voted. "The pieces are in order of easiest to most difficult, and Suzuki teacher trainer Ed Kreitman helped in choosing the final progression order," Rachel said. "I'm so grateful to the experts who helped me figure that out."

Rachel did a lot of the arrangements herself, for those pieces that required them.

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