Separate and musical

In Philadelphia, music lovers have almost total recall of the city's proud history. They talk about Stokowski's children's concerts as if they happened yesterday, or rattle off the repertoire of North Broad Street's Metropolitan Opera House in the 1920s. The city has another musical history, though, a parallel tale of triumphs that has remained largely obscured, at least to much of the white classical music establishment.

Philadelphia was home to impresario and civic leader Samuel London Evans, who brought violinist Itzhak Perlman, soprano/mezzo Grace Bumbry, and mime Marcel Marceau to audiences here and around the world.

This was the city that embraced Sylvia Olden Lee, an important vocal coach to singers like Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman.

And it was the place that nourished other great African American artists, some of whom then had to go to Europe to find unfettered acceptance.

All these lives, and more than three dozen others, are the subject of Black Classical Musicians in Philadelphia: Oral Histories Covering Four Generations. Elaine Mack, its author, spent 1995 and 1996 interviewing her subjects - retired sopranos, principal players with major American orchestras, composers, conductors, and accompanists. She got to some at a critical moment - eager to talk, and still well enough to do so. Several have since died.

Mack labored long to realize the book. A cellist raised in Chicago, she moved to Philadelphia in 1989 with hopes of joining the Philadelphia Orchestra. She freelanced, and started attending concerts.

And she began to meet people - older African American musicians, like Curtis Institute of Music-trained pianist Blanche Burton-Lyles, who in turn introduced her to other musicians who had active careers in classical music.

"After four or five years here, it occurred to me that someone should know about these people," said Mack, now 55. "I had the interest, the training, and the time."

No one was going to fund the effort, she said, noting that grants and book advances - the traditional route - come with strings attached, even if she could get them. "Something about sitting around and waiting for somebody to say it's OK doesn't sit well with me."

So she funded the book herself, working as a custom knitter for a woman with twin daughters, making coats, sweaters, hats, scarves, and complete ensembles. ("She had lots of money and great taste," Mack said.) She taught English for three years in South Korea.

All the while, she was having her interviews transcribed. She edited them, then started the process of getting them into print.

"For eight years I could not find a publisher. The recurring reasons: It wasn't important enough, it wasn't interesting enough, and there was no market for it. People questioned my credentials. I wasn't an academic, so people said, 'Who are you and what right do you have to do this sort of thing?' "

Back in Chicago, she ran into an old classmate who put her in touch with Janis F. Kearney, a journalist who had been President Bill Clinton's diarist for six of his White House years, and whose Arkansas micro-publishing firm agreed to take on the book.

Mack (whose cello is in storage is Korea) currently divides her time between Philadelphia and New York, researching her next book, tentatively titled Black Men of the Vocal Arts. She's financing that effort by selling biscotti and baguettes at Metropolitan Bakery, and she plans to spend a year or two teaching English in Saudi Arabia starting in August.

"It'll take me a few months to save enough to do another book," she explained.

"My immediate response - and my response now, 15 years after meeting her - is her incredible tenacity and commitment to something she thought was so important to American culture," says Leslie Burrs, a successful flutist and composer whom Mack interviewed. "That really stood out."

She's also obviously a good listener. Mack says she grew up in a family that told stories, and aside from some introductory material and footnotes, that's what her book lets her subjects do.

Though it does not say so explicitly, the book underlines the extent to which the white and black classical music worlds operated separately, or maintained an uneasy coexistence. (The city had two musicians unions for decades: Local 77 for whites, and, from 1935 until 1971, Local 274 for blacks.)

Other histories have covered slivers of this territory. City directories, such as Music and Dance in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, provide a good snapshot of the mid-20th-century players, black and white, but not with any sense of personal voice. Mack creates a lively implied conversation among her interviewees, who include violinist John Blake, philanthropists Doris and Leon Bullock, pianist Leon Bates, and flutist Demarre McGill.

Philadelphia-born harpist Ann Hobson Pilot, 66, describes auditioning to study with the legendary Carlos Salzedo at the Salzedo Harp Colony in Camden, Maine, but was rejected because the harpists stayed in people's homes, and Salzedo felt her color would create a problem. "That was my first real rejection, you know," she said.

It didn't seem to discourage her ambition, and it surely didn't hinder her career: She recently retired from the Boston Symphony Orchestra after three decades in the principal chair.

Violinist Booker Rowe, 69, recalls that he "wasn't too popular" when he joined the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970. One day, at work, "I saw something very repulsive written on the wall. I didn't mention it to anybody, and it didn't have my name, but I knew it was referring to me."

If the book documents friction and opportunities denied, it also names heroes. It's clear that without Settlement Music School to provide low-cost training and the Fleisher Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia to supply orchestral parts, Philadelphia's black classical musicians would have had a steeper hill to climb.

An impressive hive of classical groups took hold from the 1940s through the 1980s. The amateur Philadelphia Concert Orchestra (previously the E. Gilbert Anderson Memorial Symphony) and professional Philadelphia Piano Ensemble were busy. DraMu Opera Company put on not only Faust, Carmen, and Il Trovatore, but also Ouanga by black composer Clarence Cameron White. Philmont Opera Company did a Don Giovanni set in Harlem, and relocated Wagner's Ring Cycle to Africa.

Entire generations of classical musicians never would have developed without Louis G. Wersen, director of music for the Philadelphia public schools in the 1950s and '60s. He cast the net wide, with talent the sole criterion.

"There was no room for egos, only quality," said violinist Rowe of Wersen's All-City Orchestra of high schoolers. "His aim was not to exclude anybody, but to improve everybody."

The trajectories described are startlingly similar: These musicians grew up in homes where music was played; they were exposed to it in public schools; they had parents who were supportive and generally aspirational; and they were lucky enough to find a mentor whose support made a difference. Many journeys to conservatory began in church.

Mack doesn't weigh in on controversies, correct interviewees, or attempt to settle differences, and sometimes you wish she would. When several speakers belittle Gershwin as a mere "arranger," a thief, and an exploiter of African American material, you find yourself gasping in vain for a moderator. But passivity also allows for valuable raw discourse when questions are raised about whether Porgy and Bess is an opportunity or a dead end for black singers, or the tired refrain that it's fine for blacks to do lieder and opera, but they're better at jazz and gospel.

Sometimes a subject hammers it out himself. Tenor Gregory Hopkins, 54, is enraged when a competition judge hears his Handel, Schubert, and Strauss, then tells him he should sing spirituals.

"I was incensed! I was humiliated! I walked off in a huff!" said Hopkins, now artistic director of Harlem Opera Theater. "How dare he say such a racist, bigoted statement, as to think that because I'm Black, that's what I have to sing! I prepared at the Curtis Institute, and from Temple University. I know this repertoire. Why should I have to sing 'Negro' spirituals?

"But why not? It didn't occur to me then; I was too busy being angry. Now I've come full circle. . . . There's power in our performing this material with real humility and real spirituality and real musicianship, so that it reaches us, and we reach other people through it."

We don't hear Mack's questions - all 49½ hours of her taped interviews are now housed at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago - but it's clear that her own journey shapes the conversation, much to the good of the issues she exposes.

Mack herself never did join the Philadelphia Orchestra, which has had the same three African American members since the 1970s.

"I suppose race was a factor," she says of her unsuccessful auditions, twice to be a substitute and once for a permanent position, "but so was my temperament. An orchestra expects a certain level of conformity."

(Orchestra president Allison B. Vulgamore responded in an e-mail: "There is only one aspect that separates one candidate from another and that is pure artistic excellence.")

"I could have done it when I was younger," Mack said. "But my aspirations changed."