Classical music may be European in origin, but its lineage is diverse. "Black people wrote classical music but couldn't get it recorded or performed," says William Zick, who runs the website AfriClassical.com. Although Zick was reared on classical music, he didn't hear works by Afro-European or African-American composers until he was in his 30s. "I was really angry. And I felt cheated," he says, citing Afro-French composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-99), the "black Mozart," and Afro-Polish violinist George Bridgetower (1778-1860), to whom Beethoven originally dedicated his famous Kreutzer sonata.

For African-Americans, the meaning of this tradition has varied over time. "Between 1880 and 1950, in black households, (classical music) was a gateway. You were trying to learn something about the dominant culture. You were trying to prove yourself," says Terrance McKnight, a host at the New York City classical radio station WQXR.

"African-Americans aspired to be cultured, but in a very narrow way," says Ronald Crutcher, cellist and president of Wheaton College. "I can still remember people differentiating between jazz and what they felt to be 'good' music." Classical works by Florence Price and William Grant Still were influenced by jazz, but embodied the "racial uplift" of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement. Later, during the civil-rights era, the equation changed. Thanks to prodigious innovators like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, jazz gained acceptance as a "high art." And anti-colonial movements drew attention to "world music," triggering re-examination of classical — "white music."

Bassist Richard Davis, now 83 and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, has lived through these shifts. As a teenager, he became the principal bass player and sole African-American in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, then the farm team for the Chicago Symphony. While other musicians were "recruited right off the stage," Davis was ignored. In 1954, he left for New York, hoping to find a more receptive environment. He played under legendary maestros Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein and George Szell, and with Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Andrew Hill, Elvin Jones, Ahmad Jamal and Sun Ra. Jazz brought lasting fame to Davis, but he sometimes bristles at the designation. "I do resent it when people think I'm just a jazz player. I'm a musician. A lot of people think, 'You're black; you must play jazz.' But jazz and classical are one and the same. I don't separate the two."

In 1947, Bernstein penned a "New York Times" op-ed bemoaning the many barriers faced by "The Negro in Music." He observed that "not a single Negro Musician" was employed by a major symphony at the time, and that the African-American musician tended to opt for jazz, "the milieu in which he feels he can belong — i.e., be accepted." A year later, conductor Everett Lee of the interracial Cosmopolitan Little Symphony wrote a follow-up piece explaining that black classical musicians "had come to believe that there was 'no future' in achieving high standards of proficiency." Twenty years later, Bernstein's New York Philharmonic employed one African-American member, violinist Sanford Allen, and was sued for race discrimination by bassist Arthur Davis. In 1970, the orchestra instituted "blind auditions," but employs no full-time black players today.