As Tahirah Whittington, the cellist of all-Black Chicago string quartet D-Composed, flew through a piece by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, her young audience stared in awe.
The performance was part of a webinar series in which D-Composed shares clips of its concerts and presentations on Black composers with local schools. Even on a virtual platform, the kids were mesmerized, recalled second-year Bienen master’s student Kyle Dickson, a violinist in the quartet.
“Their eyes lit up on Zoom, and people were commenting in the chat, freaking out,” Dickson said. “They had never seen somebody that looked like that playing cello like that… It was a great moment.”
Students had a similar reaction to a guest lecture by D-Composed’s artistic director and violist Yelley Taylor (Bienen M.M. ’19), Bienen Ph.D. candidate Taichi Fukumura said. Fukumura is also the director of orchestras at Merit School of Music, a local organization focused on removing barriers to high-quality music education.
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