“To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” So begins a recently discovered letter written by composer Florence Price in 1943. “She plainly saw these factors as obstacles to her career,” writes Alex Ross in the New Yorker. “Indeed, she had a difficult time making headway in a culture that defined composers as white, male, and dead.”
Though she “is widely cited as the first African-American classical composer to win national attention,” continues Ross, but for Chicago Symphony music director Frederick Stock, most of her contemporaries ignored her. “Only in the last couple of decades have Price’s major works begun to receive recordings and performances, and these are still infrequent. … Listening to her, I have the uncanny sense of hearing the symphonies and operas that women and African-Americans were all but barred from writing during the Romantic heyday, when the busts on the piano were being carved.” In classical music, as in life, Ross reflects, we “stick with the known in order to avoid the hard work of exploring the unknown.”
Until this month, prophets, seers, and revelators in the LDS Church were seen as white and American. They are still seen as male. What are we missing when “we stick with the known in order to avoid the hard work of exploring the unknown,” the unprecedented, the unfamiliar? Why, when the core Mormon doctrine of continuing revelation seems so hospitable to change, are we often hostile to it, particularly with regard to diversity and gender equity?
As a church, we have to do the hard work of wrestling with both.