Oberlin’s 2025 celebration of Black History Month focused on the theme of “Art, History, and Resistance,” wrapping up with a guest lecture by Assistant Professor of Violin at The University of Texas at San Antonio Dr. Nicole Cherry. A graduate of the Juilliard School and member of the award-winning Marian Anderson String Quartet, Cherry has enjoyed an impressive soloist career across the world and has collaborated with numerous prestigious ensembles and festivals.
On Tuesday, students, faculty, and Oberlin community members took seats in David H. Stull Recital Hall to listen to Cherry speak on the topic of 19th-century Afro-European violinist and composer George Bridgetower. Her talk, titled “How George Bridgetower Flourished: A Violinist’s Bridge Between Past and Future,” is a part of a project that seeks to build the gaps between composers, and challenge misconceptions. The talk explored Bridgetower’s history, his relationship with composer Ludwig van Beethoven, and aimed to uncover and share his compositional and musical works. Cherry intends to bring Bridgewater’s life and music to hundreds of schools across the world.
“[The ForgewithGeorge Commissioning Project] is a project started by Nicole Cherry in 2016 to commission a new body of repertoire for violin each year that reflects the contributions of George Bridgtower,” Cherry’s website reads. “This project is a compilation of performances, lectures, and recitals that seeks to restore the legacy of great artists of color that have been dismissed from our history books.”
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was born in Poland in 1778 to a Polish mother and father of African descent, making his London debut at 11 years old and impressing King George III and the Prince of Wales. Charlotte Papendiek, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, guided Bridgetower into the care of the Prince the following year after Bridgetower’s father was committed to an asylum and later exiled to Germany. It was then that Bridgetower started studying with some of London’s best musicians.
“Over the next decade, Bridgetower would play in nearly 50 public concerts with leading orchestras and musicians, including Haydn and the double-bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti,” an article in The New York Times reads. “He was the first violinist of the Prince of Wales’ band; the organist and composer Samuel Wesley wrote that Bridgetower was ‘justly ranked with the very first masters of the violin.’”
Cherry provided this context and mixed it with a contemporary touch. Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove put Bridgetower’s story into the spotlight with her 2009 collection of poems Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play. Cherry cites it as the origins of her desire to pursue this project sharing Bridgetower’s life. She additionally performed a commission by David Wallace titled “If Only” for spoken voice and violin, a three-movement piece that explores the possibility: What if Bridgetowers’ work had been preserved like his contemporaries?
Highlighting Bridgetower’s work confronts the misconception that his only achievement was his association with Beethoven. On May 24, 1803, Bridgetower debuted Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47, in Augarten Wien, Vienna alongside Beethoven himself. Following a sixteenth-note run on the piano, Bridgetower added a flourish that apparently astonished Beethoven, enough so that the piece was originally dedicated as The Bridgetower. However, the two had a falling out which resulted in Beethoven revoking the dedication, which is why, today, it is known as the Kreutzer Sonata after violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.
Her talk also brings history into focus with the present, where she spoke about the timeline of the completion of her doctoral degree the day prior to George Floyd’s death. Through this, she aims to decolonize history, emphasizing the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade. She performed Yvette Janine Jackson’s “Remembering 1619” for violin and tape, which remembers the sounds of the Middle Passage and is a part of the ForgewithGeorge Commissioning Project.
To date, only five of Bridgetower’s compositions have been identified, including his quintet Jubilee to celebrate King George III, which features a lot of improvisation. Cherry aims to have different schools she visits perform this piece as an ensemble to bring his music to life. She created the Jubilee Project to get insight about how music can impact people from day to day, from period to period, from culture to culture. At the conclusion of her talk, she performed Jubilee with an ensemble of about 18 violinists. The project will be recorded for Oberlin’s Digital Library, and Cherry will continue to travel across the world to shine a light on Bridgetower’s life and history.
