Abstract
While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twentieth-century-music/article/making-beethoven-black-the-new-negro-movement-black-internationalism-and-the-rewriting-of-music-history/EE7BEFD9FB9D795D76F6EB741C3E8566
Former Bravo star Jennifer Welch, during a discussion in November 2025, she stated, “Americans have no culture except for multiculturalism,” and in a separate comment, referred to “crusty” old white people as having “no culture”.