The Listening Body and the Power of the Good Ear

Abstract

Formal musical training in the Western classical tradition was difficult for African Americans to obtain. Even while Marian Anderson had established a reputation as an outstanding singer early in her career, many of her auditions failed for logistical and racial reasons. Permission to fill out an application at one Philadelphia music school was refused outright. Friends and advisors pressed her to continue to seek formal education because if she hoped to enter the classical arena, her voice needed the particular aspects of musical refinement offered by study of the operatic repertoire. Having started with a voice that had been largely shaped through gospel choir experience in an African American church in Philadelphia, Anderson’s sense of comfort with operatic pedagogy took her through trials with several teachers well into her twenties.¹

Yeah! We wanna dance to that. Jus’ let the strings class do that beat and keep it goin’. And with that the three girls launched the music class into hip-hop.

—Ruth Gustafson, “Practicum Notes”

Only rarely was a black student accepted by a white teacher, and in every case there was the risk of unpleasantness. Agnes Reifsnyder, an experienced voice teacher whom many found utterly free of prejudice and sympathetic to the needs of black students, felt constrained to ask Agnes Pitts, a talented young black contralto, to go around to the back door on Saturdays when she came for her lesson. Only in this way could Reifsnyder hope to keep her white students.

—Allan Keiler, Marian Anderson