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Following one of Europe’s biggest celebrations of Black music, Kira Thurman considers the continent’s history of supporting Black musicians.

In early September 1945, amid the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin, the Afro-Caribbean conductor Rudolph Dunbar stepped onto a podium and bowed to an enthusiastic audience of German citizens and American military personnel.

The orchestra had gathered in an old movie theatre functioning as a makeshift concert hall in the newly designated American zone of the city. First on the programme was “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Then came a fairly standard set of orchestral pieces, with Carl Maria von Weber’s “Oberon: Overture” followed by Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphony. But one piece stood out from the rest: William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony. When it premiered in 1931 in Rochester, New York, it was the first symphony by a Black American to be performed by a major orchestra.

Still’s symphony received a robust round of performances in the United States in the 1930s. That decade was a watershed for Black composers like him, who finally managed to convince powerful American ensembles to perform their music... Keep reading on The Independent.