That's the way God planned it


Another much needed move towards equality in classical music comes with the appointment of African-American Thomas Wilkins (above) to the post of Youth and Family Concerts Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A few nights back we saw Genius Within: The Inner life of Glenn Gould, aka 'the Foss family movie'. Glenn Gould's "we could be looking at thousands of dollars" radio documentary about Petula Clark gets a mention in the movie but her groundbreaking pressing the flesh with Harry Belafonte on prime time American TV in 1968 does not, so here is the link.

Photo of Thomas Wilkins with San Diego Symphony at the Salk Institute credited to PeteOnline.net Thanks for heads up to Antoine Leboyer. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Ninox said…
This post immediately brought to mind Dean Dixon, a marvellous conductor who was musical director of the Sydney Symphony in the sixties. When I looked at the Wikipedia to check the dates (1964 - 1967 ), I found that the major source of the wiki article was... On An Overgrown Path.
10:08 pm
Pliable said…
Dean Dixon - http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/10/dean-dixon-i-owe-him-huge-debt.html

also Rudolph Dunbar -
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2007/04/berlin-philharmonics-first-black.html
8:22 am
Anonymous said…
Not to forget James DePreist.

redlymben.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_DePreist

Interesting trivia - he's the nephew of Marian Anderson.
3:22 pm
JMW said…
Thanks for recognizing Wilkins' achievement!
3:51 am
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