Musical Development: Classical Music and Gentrification in Louisville, KY

In 2020, the Louisville Orchestra offered a musical tribute to Breonna Taylor, whom Louisville police had murdered six months earlier. This “Concert for Healing” was celebrated for “doing something” about racism in the city. Around the same time, Taylor’s family filed a lawsuit connecting her death to the city’s ramped-up policing of poor and Black neighborhoods at the behest of real estate developers. Many of these developers also donate to the Orchestra at the highest levels and have representatives on the Orchestra’s board. In other words, some of the same people are responsible for shaping both Louisville’s racist urban development and the “anti-racist” projects the Orchestra undertakes to “heal” the community from the effects of that development. In this article, I construct an understanding of “classical music” that is very different from the liberal-idealistic one that dominates this musical culture in the US. I argue that classical music is much more than the notes and chords written down by composers: it is also its institutions, which is to say its buildings. Drawing on interventions from Black and Indigenous studies as well as my own archival research, I examine the material history of the Louisville Orchestra, demonstrating the role it and its performance venue have played (and continue to play) in the city’s ongoing project of racist class warfare. I argue that the contradiction between this material reality and the Orchestra’s widely celebrated anti-racist outreach projects constitutes a profound political problem that is omnipresent in social justice initiatives throughout the world of classical music.