LANSKY SOUND

I do a lot of audio/video recording in the orchestral world -- chamber music, pianos, choirs, orchestras of 50+ instrumentalists on stage. People playing Mozart, Bach Beethoven, Vivaldi & whatnot. Beautiful music we've preserved for centuries.

My first orchestra I worked with didn't have a single dark-skinned person in there. Not in management, not back stage, not on the stage. I never crossed paths with a black human in the seven years I worked with that orchestra. There were certainly people of different nationalities, but everyone was light-skinned & still are.

I've recorded a lot of piano students who represent the next generations of brilliance on the keys. Truly amazing young people between 7 & 20-something years old. No black students, ever.

I've worked with choirs, large & small, with as many as 60+ voices in multiple states. Men's choirs, women's choirs, co-ed choirs, children's choirs. I've never seen a person of dark skin in those groups over the years. All white folks.

The vast majority of this music we're taught to cherish & respect was written by white men & commissioned by rich white people. The entire canon of classical music -- as far as I know -- is essentially rich white people jams. In some cases, i.e., Wagner, the music is composed by a genius who is outright publicly anti-Semitic, yet it is still held in equally high regard.

While there's a lot of truly wonderful classical music, the fact of the matter is that THE FOUNDATION ITSELF IS RACIST, SEXIST, & CLASSIST. If the orchestral world wants to exist with any grace in the 21st century, the music has to change & incorporate new ideas from minds that see color & acknowledge those disparities in our world. The level of outreach to underprivileged communities & equity in the workplace has to change. How funding is distributed needs to change -- starting with defunding the Military-Industrial complex, including police.

Rather than acting as the amplifier for only the white upper-class, we need to include ideas from different cultures than our own. The crowd that once longed to fall asleep in the concert hall listening to sweet nothings composed by Brahms is disappearing & new badass s**t needs to go down on stage if the orchestra is going to survive.

A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.

Black Lives Matter