Dworkin, Afa S

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    Sphinx Was Ahead of the Curve on Diversity in Classical Music

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    It was the late 1990s, and Afa Sadykhly Dworkin saw a woman crying backstage at a concert hall in Michigan.Dworkin was there helping to run a competition for young artists started by the Sphinx Organization, a newly founded group devoted to fostering diversity in classical music. When she spied the woman in tears, she assumed that a bow or string had broken. But when she tried to help, the woman waved her off, saying that although her child had lost the competition, her tears were happy ones.“I’m crying because we thought my daughter was the best,” Dworkin recently recalled the woman telling her. “There’s no one who lives near us who plays at her level, so we came assuming we were going to win. And we didn’t win anything, but she has a family now. She has all these sisters and brothers now.”Sphinx, which turns 25 this year, has come a long way since that first competition. While the prize-awarding event remains at the core of its activities, the organization, which Dworkin now leads, has also started training programs and ensembles, and has pushed for more diverse repertory and orchestra rosters. It has promoted young soloists and arts administrators, and operates an ever-expanding annual conference. With a burst of new attention to phrases like diversity, equity and inclusion over the past two years, Sphinx’s steady, patient work has come to seem prescient.“They were raising the profile of the critical importance of diversity in orchestras before almost anybody was,” said Simon Woods, the chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “And before the League. They were there before everybody.”But perhaps Sphinx’s most fundamental and meaningful achievement has been its simplest one, the part that crying mother caught onto: creating a community of people who had thought they were the only one of their kind, or close. Forming what those in the Sphinx network call “la familia.”From left, members of the Sphinx Virtuosi, Hannah White, Alex Gonzalez, Clayton Penrose-Whitmore and Thierry Delucas Neves, at Carnegie.Rafael Rios for The New York Times“It’s so much more than our life’s work,” Dworkin, 46, the organization’s president and artistic director, said in an interview in October, the morning after Sphinx’s 25th-anniversary gala concert at Carnegie Hall. “It’s a family. It’s a society.”When Sphinx started, Dworkin was an undergraduate violin student at the University of Michigan. Raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, she had come to the United States as a teenager, when her father feared that political shifts at home might not be friendly to mixed-heritage part-Jews.Her parents were well educated — her father a chemical engineer and her mother an academic — but music wasn’t on their radar as a career option. Dworkin begged to play an instrument, though, so at 7 she entered the Soviet Union’s tightly organized music education program, and chose the violin. It quickly became her passion.The move across the Atlantic was a shock; she spoke no English. But with the help of a devoted teacher, she began to piece the language together. Then Aaron Dworkin, a transfer student from Penn State, enrolled in her teacher’s studio at Michigan.“We started talking immediately,” she said. “He’d zeroed in on something more than his own fiddle playing. He was interested in repertoire.”The child of a white mother and Black father, Aaron had been adopted by a Jewish family and raised in New York City. He introduced Afa to Black composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and told her about the negative assumptions people had made about his artistry as almost always the only person of color in classical music settings. (After a decade as friends, then colleagues, they married in 2005.)Xavier Foley, a bassist and composer whose piece “An Ode to Our Times” was performed at the gala.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesAmaryn Olmeda, the winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division in 2021, rehearsed Carlos Simon’s solo “Between Worlds.”

    Rafael Rios for The New York Times“He had a problem with the world,” she said, “and he was going to do something about it.”What he had in mind was a competition — with the goal of discovering the musicians of color who were out there, and of building camaraderie among them. He was fearless about fund-raising and asking for assistance, and with the university as a partner and Afa working frenetically on the side of her violin teaching and playing, the inaugural Sphinx Competition took place in Ann Arbor in 1998.“It was never designed to be an affirmative action mechanism,” Aaron Dworkin said in an interview. “We told our jurors, ‘If you find no one rises to the right level, don’t give it.’ And there have been a couple of years of the competition in which we didn’t give certain awards.”The organization grew organically as issues presented themselves. “They have been really good at creating programs or initiatives where there is a gap,” said Blake-Anthony Johnson, the chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta and an alumnus of Sphinx LEAD, which is aimed at fostering arts administrators of color. “They have found all the crevices of nationwide issues, and tried to home in on them.”Some parents complained that their children had to play on cheap, borrowed instruments, so Sphinx organized higher-quality loans. Scholarships were arranged with prominent summer programs. Early on, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington offered performance opportunities for competition winners.Sphinx began to serve as something of a management firm, and also started a summer program of its own, the Sphinx Performance Academy; a large orchestra; a training structure for young children, Sphinx Overture; an elite touring chamber ensemble, now called the Sphinx Virtuosi; the annual conference, SphinxConnect; Sphinx LEAD; and a regranting program to support others’ projects, the Sphinx Venture Fund.Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said: “I’m very positive about Sphinx because they actually do something. Sphinx isn’t theoretical. They provide specific, effective programs.”What they have not ever wanted to do was create their own edifices. “One option would have been to start a kind of Sphinx Conservatory, but the vision was never separate but equal,” Afa Dworkin said. “It was how do we nurture, empower, lift up and create on-ramps within the existing structure. Aaron knew the talent was out there, so he wanted to find it, nurture it, give it a level playing field. He didn’t want a new Juilliard; he wanted Juilliard to look like New York.”In 2015, Aaron became the dean of the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of Michigan. It was a potentially uncomfortable moment for Sphinx: Finding a successor to an organization’s founder is always delicate, and in this case the most obvious candidate was the founder’s wife.“I have to give the board credit,” Afa said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you’ve always been around.’ They looked at other things out there, and took a six- or seven-month process to see if I was the right person.”She has remained in charge even though, two years after starting, Aaron stepped down as dean, saying in a statement it was “necessary for me to have the opportunity to focus more on my family.” (Afa said that his packed schedule at Michigan had been “taking a toll” on their two children.)“There are definitely things we disagree on,” she said of her husband. “Direction, choices. We have different aesthetics relative to music. I really love new music, and Aaron has an absolute dedication to the Romantic era. But he has given me plenty of space; I can’t think of one place where he overstepped.”The Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie. The group made its international debut in Brazil, and will perform next year in England.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesHer days in New York last month leading up to the Carnegie gala were a swirl of meetings, coffees and lunches with donors, alumni, staff, musicians and composers. Everyone had advice to give and receive, and logistical challenges to present to her. Most pressing, the Sphinx Virtuosi was then about to make its international debut in Brazil, and has also been planning events next year in England, as well as recording projects. She fielded everything with the calm humor and gentle decisiveness of a den mother.“She has no vanity about her,” said Victoria Robey, a member of the organization’s board. “She just wants to see Sphinx be the best it can be. And she’s fantastic at fund-raising. She doesn’t do it in an aggressive, transactional way; she does it in an organic way. Donors want to have the mission explained to them; they don’t just want to plop down their money and disappear. She builds with warm cohesiveness.”Alexa Smith, an associate vice president at the Manhattan School of Music, said, of her fellow Sphinx LEAD alumni: “One of the things we have all agreed has been impactful has been having the community, having people all over the country, where we can lean on each other. It’s somehow not competitive. And that’s a cultural thing that comes from Afa.”There have been debates, both within Sphinx and from outside, about the organization’s tactics. The Dworkins’ preference for quietly lobbying legacy institutions has struck some as old-fashioned in a culture dominated by call-outs fueled by social media. And although string players have always had a home at Sphinx, some in the field wish that there were more programs for other types of instrumentalists, too.The violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, who has been involved with Sphinx from its early years, said that she has observed the musical level and socioeconomic status of the average Sphinx Performance Academy student steadily rise. Is the program, in that case, truly opening doors for those who would otherwise lack opportunities?And racial diversity in orchestras, dismal when Sphinx was founded, remains stubbornly low, though there are profound disagreements in the field about how to address the problem. Sphinx, true to its tradition of working within existing institutional bounds, has resisted calling for the elimination of the prevailing system of blind auditions, instead starting the National Alliance for Audition Support to offer financial assistance, coaching and other resources.Both the pandemic pause on performances and the broad push for racial justice in 2020 brought Sphinx more attention and resources. The mood was celebratory at the Carnegie gala, which featured a spirited performance by Sphinx Virtuosi members and a precociously poised solo from the 14-year-old violinist Amaryn Olmeda, who won the competition’s junior division in 2021. Nine years ago, Aaron Dworkin had taken the Carnegie stage for a speech in which he sharply criticized the field’s stagnancy; but this year, brought on as the 25th-anniversary honoree, he offered an uplifting, optimistic slam poem.“I think we owe them a lot,” said Woods, from the League of American Orchestras. “Not only for having a vision, but for plugging away at that vision year after year. For me what is really interesting is, it feels like their time has come. The work that they’ve been doing is now beginning to translate into meaningful change.”Even to the point where its leader can speculate — however hypothetically — about a world in which Sphinx would not be necessary.“On a practical level, is there enough talent today for that to be true, for Sphinx to become superfluous?” Afa Dworkin said. “Absolutely. Is our society and sector ready for it? No, not totally.”“I just think,” she added with a smile, “we have a little ways to go.” More

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      Review: Sphinx Virtuosi Bring an Intriguing Vision to Carnegie Hall

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      An ensemble of 18 string players who are Black and Latino set a reflective and spirited tone on Friday, with solos by the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines.“Tracing Visions” was the intriguing title of the program Sphinx Virtuosi, an ensemble of 18 top-notch string players who are Black and Latino, presented at Carnegie Hall on Friday. As Afa S. Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, explained in comments to the audience, that phrase spoke both to the organization’s mission and the music played so impressively on this night.You have to have a vision, to conceive one carefully, before you can write it out and realize it, Dworkin suggested. Sphinx began in 1997 as a “social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” an ambitious mission statement more essential at this moment than ever. Based in Detroit but with nationwide reach to some 100,000 students and artists, Sphinx puts string instruments in the hands of children and provides them training; sponsors a national competition that awards stipends, scholarships and performance opportunities; and has a development project for emerging artists, among other initiatives.Sphinx Virtuosi, which is in the midst of a national tour, is the most prestigious outlet of the organization; and the splendid performances showed why. A beguiling account of the opening work, Xavier Foley’s “Ev’ry Voice,” set a reflective tone. The music is like an episodic rumination on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black national anthem.” At first, segments of the melody are played in tentative, harmonically rich strands. Then, while violins ascend to high, softly tender lines, in lower registers other strings begin stirring, as if to get this piece up and running. There are passages of bustling riffs, hard-edge chords, a burst of swing and, finally, a fanfare. This led to Florence Price’s wistfully lyrical Andante cantabile movement from her 1935 String Quartet No. 2, which came across with glowing richness in this version for string ensemble.Various players took turns introducing works. One member explained that the Brazilian violinist and composer Ricardo Herz had adapted “Mourinho,” a bracing dance song in the Brazilian forró style, especially for Sphinx. Since the original was alive with percussion, the string players here slap and tap their instruments to evoke the rhythms that capture the festive vibe of the music, as indeed they did in this arresting performance.The cellist Thomas Mesa performed a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers.Jennifer TaylorThe Cuban American cellist Thomas Mesa spoke at some length before playing Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven” for solo cello, a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers during the pandemic. The title alludes to the communal ritual of applauding, shouting and banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. for those heroes. Mesa played it magnificently.Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” which received its New York premiere by Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie in 2014, has become almost her signature piece. The music takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores, fractures, transforms and comments upon the tune and its complex associations. Scored for a solo string quartet both with and against a background string ensemble, the piece received a vibrant, assured performance here.The charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines was the soloist in the two next pieces: The British composer Gerald Finzi’s “Come away, come away, death,” a sternly beautiful musical setting of a Shakespeare poem (from the song cycle “Let Us Garlands Bring”); and Carlos Simon’s “Angels in Heaven,” an arrangement of a spiritual sung during baptisms (“I know I’ve been changed”). Tines invited the audience to join in the final refrains of the church song. Many members of this audience clearly knew it well, judging from the vigor of the response.The program ended with the breathless, wild and wailing “Finale furioso” from Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings. The prolonged ovation that followed was no surprise. More

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      The Changing American Canon Sounds Like Jessie Montgomery

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      This composer’s music — improvisatory, open to influence, personal yet resonant — will be hard to miss in the coming season.The history of classical music in the United States is one long identity crisis: the search for a homegrown sound, free from European influence. That anxiety has manifested itself time and again as self-sabotage, with some composers — almost always white men — exalted as pathbreakers, while truly original work coming from artists of color has been overlooked.That has changed in recent years: in fits and starts, then suddenly, with the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Classical institutions en masse have made earnest, if sometimes clumsy, efforts to rise to the moment and grant overdue attention to the marginalized composers who have always had answers to the question of America’s musical identity.One composer the field has especially turned to is Jessie Montgomery, whose often personal yet widely resonant music — forged in Manhattan, a mirror turned on the whole country — will be difficult to miss in the coming season.The number of times Montgomery’s orchestral works were programmed more than doubled each year from 2017 to 2020, said Philip Rothman, her publishing agent. (And that’s just a corner of her output.) Several years ago, that number was about 20; in 2021, it is expected to be nearly 400, including at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. And her calendar is booked with commissions far into the future, including as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new composer in residence.Some of the spotlight on Montgomery is a product of pandemic restrictions; many ensembles have made cautious comebacks with small-scale pieces for strings, which are the heart of her body of work. But her swift rise to prominence is also the result of orchestras overhauling their repertoires to more prominently feature composers of color — an achievement that can sometimes feel like a burden on a single artist to speak for a whole race or nation.A new portrait of American sound has nevertheless emerged, with Montgomery’s music providing some of the latest, crucial touches.“She’s pretty much changing the canon for American orchestras,” said Afa S. Dworkin, the president and artistic director of the Sphinx Organization, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in music. “The true language of American classical music is something that will distinguish our canon, and she is shaping its evolution.”Montgomery’s sound was influenced by her artistically rich and culturally diverse upbringing in New York.Tamara Blake Chapman for The New York TimesMONTGOMERY, 40, is a child of the Lower East Side, born to artistic parents. Her mother, Robbie McCauley, made theater that interrogated the country’s racial history; her father, Edward Montgomery, ran a studio where the young Jessie would sometimes hand-operate the elevator for jazz, punk and opera musicians.With Montgomery studying violin in one room; her father composing in another; and her mother rehearsing or writing in a home studio, their apartment had the feel of an artist residency. “There was no routine,” Montgomery said in a recent interview. “Everyone was sort of in their own modules doing their own thing. But I was always in a state of wonder.”She was exposed from an early age to the downtown milieu of her parents, while learning violin techniques and repertoire suited to both the uptown establishment and the world of improvisation.Her teacher Alice Kanack, Montgomery recalled, “created these improvisation games with the philosophy that each child has their own individual, innate, creative voice, and that it has to be encouraged while they’re young.” Those games provided a natural segue to composing, which she began in earnest at 11.By the 1990s Montgomery was a serious student who also spent her nights with friends raving in Queens to house music and hip-hop; there were, she said, “a lot of drugs.” But violin was something of a salvation for her, and she followed it to the Juilliard School. (Leaving the city was never a question because, she said, “I was still in the mind-set that there’s no other place like New York.”)Violin also led Montgomery to the Sphinx Organization’s annual competition. It was the first time she had been asked to play a piece by a Black composer.“I lived in New York, so I was always used to having all different kinds of cultures in my friend group,” Montgomery said. “So that was not unusual. But this was purely Black and Latino kids. And how we all stayed in touch and continue to collaborate with each other is really the strength of the organization.”She has been associated with Sphinx for years, performing in the Sphinx Virtuosi chamber ensemble and eventually building a relationship that extended to teaching at the Sphinx Performance Academy and, shortly before the pandemic, being awarded the organization’s medal of excellence.“Jessie was a beautiful chamber musician from the beginning,” Dworkin said. “Then she had a voice as a composer. It wasn’t until several years in that I knew there was this other side.”There was a third side to her artistry as well: teaching. Shortly after graduating from Juilliard, she joined Community MusicWorks in Providence, R.I. — inspired in part by her own education at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and by her mother’s community-based practice.“I use the word rigor a lot, but I think the thing that makes anything valuable is the amount of rigor, the amount of focus. The amount of energy that you’re putting into it is the thing that really counts,” she said. With that guiding her, she added, “I watched kids’ lives in some cases change from really, really challenging situations to — you know, five or six of the students were the first in their family to go to college, and some of them to Ivy Leagues. It was intense, but beautiful.”Throughout her career, Montgomery has tried — with mixed success for her sanity — to balance pedagogy with performance and composing. She was a founding member of the chamber group PUBLIQuartet and later joined the Catalyst Quartet.“When Jessie joined, it felt like Catalyst became what we always envisioned it to be,” said Karla Donehew Perez, a fellow violinist in the group.Catalyst became a sounding board for Montgomery’s writing. For the 2015 album “Strum: Music for Strings,” the group recorded some of her most widely played works: the spirituals-inflected “Source Code”; the vivid “Strum”; and “Banner,” which deconstructs and builds on the American national anthem. With Imani Winds, the quartet also premiered the nonet “Sergeant McCauley,” about one of Montgomery’s great-grandfathers and the Great Migration.Together, the Catalyst players also undertook major projects — most recently, the series “Uncovered,” which devotes albums to composers who have been overlooked because of their race or gender. But Montgomery felt increasingly unable to devote the time the quartet needed from her, which she described as “24/7, 365 attention.”“That doesn’t feel balanced within the quartet,” she said, “especially when they’re performing my pieces and I’m reaping the benefits of that.”Last year, Montgomery announced her departure from Catalyst — a difficult decision that made for a tense conversation. “It’s not a fully repaired relationship,” she said, “but it’s mostly repaired.” (Donehew Perez said that Montgomery is like a family member to her, and remains “a great, lifelong friend.”)Montgomery continues to perform, including as part of her improvisation duo Big Dog Little Dog, with the bassist Eleonore Oppenheim. She also played her music in the Pam Tanowitz dance premiere “I was waiting for the echo of a better day” this summer and has a new collaborative project in the works, with exploratory rehearsals beginning in September.But the bulk of her work in the future — with commissions currently planned until 2024 — will be her writing, which with its improvisatory spirit, embrace of widely varied influences and preoccupation with personal history reflects her upbringing.“I have this idea in my mind that there’s something beyond fusion,” Montgomery said. “There’s this other sound I’m going for that is a culmination, like the smashing together, of different styles and influences. I don’t know that I’ve achieved that yet.”Observers might disagree; the composer Joan Tower described Montgomery’s music as having “a real confidence” and a blend of references that “intertwine in a cohesive way.” And Alex Hanna, the Chicago Symphony’s principal bass, noted the “richness in sonority and color” in her scores.“You have the feeling she wrote the music in an afternoon,” he said, “because it has the honesty of improvisation.”Works like “Source Code,” “Sergeant McCauley” and the recently premiered “Five Freedom Songs,” written for the soprano Julia Bullock, reflect the fact that Montgomery is “a multiracial person living and breathing and telling stories that are quintessentially American,” Dworkin said.“Banner,” she added, is a “shining” example. “There is music in there that borrows from the Mexican anthem, Puerto Rico, blues and jazz idioms galore. That’s American music, and American history.”But trying to capture the soul of a country in music is a level of pressure that Montgomery tries to avoid when considering a new commission. She said she doesn’t see her works as particularly political.“I think people sometimes consider Blackness or a projection of Blackness as a political statement, that to be Black is to in yourself embody politics and culture,” she said. “And that’s a burden, actually.”A burden that’s been especially acute during the past year. “I’ve been talking with my colleagues of Black descent, and we’re all feeling that sort of thing of being put on,” she said. “I’ve been realizing that there’s this shared desire to just be able to create without that kind of pressure or expectation that you’re going to be the spokesperson for the race or for classical music being better or more diverse or whatever.”She would like to see programmers not just hiring Black artists, but doing so in a thoughtful, flexible way. “A commission that addresses the injustices on Black people, as a way for the institution to admit or confront their own compliance in the atrocities against Black people, doesn’t allow that composer to express total joy, for example,” she said. “It boils down to the simple fact that Black people — any people, probably — want to own our own narrative, and not necessarily be put on to be responsible for undoing institutional crimes.”In her own music-making, Montgomery is more interested in supporting her peers through her actions — whether as a curator, performer or pedagogue — rather than public statements.“I think the work shows what you want to show,” she said. “And that’s what’s important. The work comes first, and then the declarations come later.” More