Michael Morgan was probably the first conductor I ever saw live, at a BSO 'tiny tots' concert for kids aged 4-6 when he was an assistant either in Baltimore or Washington - I forget which. To this day I remember him very well. But all the sudden, he was gone. Georg Solti seemed to call him up the big time and he became assistant conductor at the Chicago Symphony for seven years. It was the highest profile job he was ever to have.
He did not become a celebrity musician, but he became a kind of legend in the Bay Area, conducing the Oakland Symphony for thirty-five years and doing all the things conductors should be doing - community outreach, conducting the youth orchestra as well as the professional, and the Gateway Music Festival, sitting on boards of other musical orgaizations, featuring a full symphony orchestra comprised entirely of professional black musicians.
Like any field, the best musicians don't think of themselves. They think of the community and how they can assist, and perhaps I'm a sentimentalist in this regard but I think the decency comes out in their music making.
Morgan was finally being taken with sufficient seriousness and going to make his subscription debut at the San Francisco Symphony this year. It's nothing short of a tragedy that at the moment African-American musicians are finally given a real profile, the highest profile African-American classical musician of the mature generation dies, completely unexpectedly.
Here's him performing the Negro Folk Symphony of William Dawson, a masterpiece of American music already featured here and much beloved of me. Let him be remembered as the pioneer he shouldn't have had to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxHfHT9TFpE&fbclid=IwAR3YVJNSGXVE2wR3FhJwftoCHH4SPDNdbp44FkrgIG3jdyd86XI8vWmgEe4
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