Alexis Ligon Holloway

ALEXIS HOLLOWAY, then a graduate student at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Composing Whiteness: Visuality, Racial Hierarchies, and Classical Music,” supervised by Dr. Lee D. Baker. This dissertation research provides one of the first ethnographic studies on the lived experiences of Black classical musicians in America. Despite nearly three decades of diversification efforts, Black musicians only make up 1.8% of professional symphonic musicians nationwide. However, this research has demonstrated a plethora of Black classically trained music creatives in the U.S. This absence is a result of the construction of classical music as an exclusively white genre. Caught at the intersection of invisibility (the false narrative of a lack of talent in Black American communities) and hypervisibility (constantly being perceived as in excess), Black classical musicians are devising creative ways to share their stories, make their presence known, and to challenge the hegemony of racial quietude. This ethnography investigates the underrepresentation of Black musicians in U.S. orchestras to understand how anti-Black racism shapes not only the profession but music itself. Approaching music as both an aesthetic/theoretical object and a workplace, this project asks: How do racialized aesthetic hierarchies coalesce on the Black body in pedagogical and performance practices? And how do Black musicians find strategies for resisting racist ideologies and structures so that they can continue to find enrichment in dedicating their lives to classical music?