The name of the great contralto and civil rights icon now lives above the doors to the grand hall in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.
Marian Anderson arrives in London in 1952. On June 8, the Philadelphia Orchestra named its main performance hall in her honor.History, we know, is always in the making — an aggregate of small actions, reactions and interactions, every flap of every butterfly’s wings. Yet most of the time, we have no idea what will come of any of it. Even when circumstances converge to highlight a transformative moment, there’s no seeing the flow of the future.
She couldn’t foresee that she herself would break the color barrier, 16 years later on one of America's most revered stages, as the first Black singer to perform at New York’s.
Anderson is one of what I call my fairy godmothers, the Black and brown women in music history who have watched over and inspired me as I’ve built the dream, and then the reality, of my life in music. It’s not an overstatement to say that without them I wouldn’t be who I am, doing what I do.said much the same thing that evening in Philadelphia, as the host of a gala concert to inaugurate the newly named Marian Anderson Hall.
Soprano Angel Blue performs with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra during a concert celebrating the renaming of the orchestra's main performance space as Marian Anderson HallWe all felt the truth of that bond when Blue broke down in tears of gratitude as she sang the last notes of the aria “Vissi d’arte” from— a colleague and friend of Anderson’s, and a composer who took her own place in the history books in 1933, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s...
Still, I suppose that every time you send your hope and courage out into the world, on the wings of a thought or a song, you become some small part of history, of an unknown future. Come next spring, before I step onto the stage of Marian Anderson Hall, I’ll be sure to take a moment to touch her photograph in the wings. I’ll think of everything she couldn’t know in 1939, and everything we can’t know now.
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