For those who might have clicked on this post title thinking they were going to get a contemplation of racial and gender inequities, I apologize for what may seem like false advertising. What I am really contemplating is that sooner rather than later, I will be a dead white guy.

OK. I will be noting that my race and gender have biased me as a musical consumer to the work of other dead white guys; that their work has largely shaped my perception and judgment of all music, and that even the work of musicians of color and other genders is judged (by me) against a “standard” set by dead white guys. I just don’t know what to do about that. I am who I am. I have lived when I have lived. And I am impoverished in terms of what I have heard and experienced.

I am not trying to paint myself as a victim. I claim nothing of the sort. I am guilty. I claim no exemption for my cultural upbringing. I am guilty. I have been blind, but not blinded. I have been deaf, but not deafened. I am fully responsible for my choices of that to which I should listen, and that to which I should attend.

For the most part, I have listened to, and attended to dead white guys. If I have any defense at all, it is that these dead white guys have produced some amazing stuff. The Pope Marcellus Mass, Spem in alium, the St. Matthew Passion, Don Giovanni, Die Winterreise, Beethoven Op. 111, Brahms’ symphonies (all of them!), the Verdi Requiem, Das Ring, Mahler 9, Wozzeck, Le Sacre du printemps, Knoxville Summer of 1915, Appalachian Spring, Mass… These are all life-changing experiences. And there are so many more.

Yet…how many more lives might have been changed had Amy Beach written a second, a third, a fourth symphony. Her first and only was so good…so achingly good! (Which is not to say that only symphonic music matters. Amy Beach wrote a lot of great music for smaller forces. But the most public statements are symphonies, operas and ballets.) How many more lives might have been changed if Florence Price’s music had been even more widely performed and recognized for the truly great music that it is. William Grant Still…Adolphus Hailstork…Margaret Bonds…

I have no excuse. These composers are all my heritage. I have succumbed to the siren call of the dead white guys—whose music I will extol with my last breath. Yet there is so much more of which I have been willingly ignorant.

So, I look to the faces of my students. Thankfully, they seem so much more willing to go beyond the DWGs. They value the important works of our European legacy, but they seem so much more willing to look past that to the wonderful things that the rest of the world has to offer.

Thank God!