Michigan aims to diversify orchestra

DETROIT -- Aaron Dworkin loves classical music. He began playing violin at age 5 and hasn't stopped.\nBut while majoring in violin performance at the University of Michigan, he had a revelation. After being introduced to the music of black composer William Grant Still, Dworkin approached a professor with the idea of a competition exclusively for black and Hispanic string players.\n"I started thinking about why, in every musical situation I was in, I was the only minority, black or Latino, or maybe one of less than a handful," said Dworkin, 32, who is black. "And I started to think about kind of why and what I could do about it."\nSo Dworkin, with the university's support, launched the Sphinx Organization. The Dearborn-based group's showcase event, the sixth annual Sphinx Competition, started Feb. 11 and wraps up Wednesday.\nOrganizers hope it will ultimately increase the number of minority musicians in symphony orchestras. According to the American Symphony Orchestra League, blacks and Latinos made up between 3 percent and 4 percent of regular musicians in U.S. professional orchestras in 2001.\n"I think it's a question that all of the major orchestras have been struggling with for a number of years," said Emil Kang, president of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which has three blacks and one Hispanic among its 98 full-time positions.\n"It all boils down to the fact that there are few in the pool. There are fewer that actually audition."\nSanford Allen, a Sphinx jury panelist and one of the first black musicians to become a member of the New York Philharmonic, said that although large orchestras say they want to hire minorities, they aren't looking hard enough.\n"Clearly, the attention to recruiting could not in any way be described as aggressive, and in some cases, they could not be described as active," he said.\nThe Sphinx Competition gives minority musicians an opportunity to play with major orchestras. In its first year, it had only one orchestral partner, the National Symphony; this year, there are 28.\n"Now we have orchestras contacting us wanting to feature our winners, because they've heard about it and because our winners, our laureates, have developed a reputation," Dworkin said. "They know if they're getting a Sphinx laureate, they know the level, the caliber that musician will be at."\nSphinx also has created an orchestra composed of blacks and Hispanics that performs works by minority composers at an annual concert at Detroit's Orchestra Hall.\nAbout 60 musicians submitted audition tapes for this year's competition, and of those, 18 semifinalists were chosen to come to Ann Arbor. Nine junior division semifinalists (under 18) and nine senior division semifinalists (18-26) were whittled down to three laureates apiece.\nElena Urioste, a 16-year-old violinist from North Wales, Pa., won the junior division on Thursday. The senior division competes today at Orchestra Hall in Detroit, accompanied by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.\nThe jury includes Anthony Elliott, a music professor at the University of Michigan and a performing arts faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival; and Marcus Thompson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the viola faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music.\nThe senior division winner will appear as a soloist with orchestras in Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia, among others. Semifinalists and laureates also receive more than $100,000 in prizes and scholarships.\nDworkin emphasizes that the week is more than just competition: Semifinalists receive performance experience, the opportunity to meet other minority string players and the chance to receive individual instruction from top musicians.\nLast year's senior division winner, cellist Patrice Jackson, is performing with the Omaha Symphony later this month and the St. Louis Symphony in March. She is finishing up at Yale University and will go on to Juilliard.\nLast year's junior division winner, Gareth Johnson, has played with the Boston Pops and the Baltimore and Atlanta symphonies. The 17-year-old from Festus, Mo., was 10 when he decided to take up the violin after hearing Itzhak Perlman.\n"I saved up $80 and went to a pawn shop and got a cheap starter violin, and I started playing it and loved it," said Johnson, who studies at the Lynn Conservatory in Boca Raton, Fla.\nShelby Latin, a senior division semifinalist from Rockford, Ill., and a violin student at IU, views classical music "as an extension of myself."\n"Expression through music. It's something that not everybody enjoys. If more people were exposed to it, more people would enjoy it"