NOT QUITE DEAD WHITE MAN MUSIC to Open MusicaNova Orchestra Season
The performance will take place on October 17.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Sep. 17, 2025
MusicaNova Orchestra, led by Music Director and Founder Warren Cohen, will open its 2025–26 season with NOT QUITE DEAD WHITE MAN MUSIC on October 17 at 7:30 PM at the Musical Instrument Museum.
Featuring virtuoso harpsichordist Tigran Buniatyan, this bold and thought-provoking program reflects the series' goal: to move beyond “dead white man music” by amplifying diverse creators and affirming classical music as a living, evolving art.
At the heart of the program is Dead White Man Music, a modern harpsichord concerto by African American composer Evan Williams. The work boldly weaves together influences ranging from Bach and Dowland to Julius Eastman, Nina Simone, post-minimalism, and rock.
Says Williams, "Dead White Man Music reflects on a canon shaped almost exclusively by long-deceased white men, while I explore what models and inspirations a young Black composer might claim as his own.”
Rounding out the concert, Tania León's Permutation Seven and Valerie Coleman's Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes bring urgent, contemporary voices of women of color into dialogue with the European canon, expanding the story of who is heard in classical music.
Coleman's work honors the legacy of Native Americans and formerly enslaved Africans who endured the Trail of Tears, while Cuban-born Pulitzer Prize winner León infuses her composition with popular dance forms, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Placed alongside Paul Hindemith's groundbreaking Kammermusik No. 1—a work by an anti-establishment figure who challenged tradition and was later forced to flee the Nazis—the program demonstrates how innovation and cultural perspective continually reshape the art form.
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