Remembering George Polgreen Bridgetower in Performance: An Australian Case Study

In March 2021, Richard Tognetti, lead violinist and artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra wrote a piece, ‘Call Me By My Name’, for the Sydney Morning Herald about Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major Op. 47, a work commonly referred to as the Kreutzer Sonata.[1] Leveraging the ‘Say Their Names’ rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement that had galvanised in the United States around the violent deaths of Black Americans Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and George Floyd during the previous decade, Tognetti’s article sought to focus readers on how racial injustice in nineteenth-century Europe had erased the life of one particular Black artist from common memory – that of nineteenth-century violin virtuoso George Augustus Polgreen Bridegtower. As Tognetti explained to readers, the Kreutzer Sonata had been originally ‘composed for the African-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower, but Beethoven withdrew the dedication, instead dedicating it to French violinist Kreutzer, who never played it’.[2] Despite a long relationship with the work, Tognetti confessed to having learnt only recently of Bridgetower’s significant role in the sonata’s development, through an encounter with Pulitzer prize winning poet Rita Dove’s 2009 book Sonata Mulattica. For Tognetti, Dove’s poetic exploration of Bridgetower’s life and work with Beethoven was transformative: ‘Reading this came as a big shock, because we musicians know this violin sonata as Kreutzer’s Sonata. Yet it turns out it was originally the Bridgetower Sonata’.[3]

Tognetti’s article clearly aimed to raise awareness of a forgotten artist’s contributions to a significant piece of Western art music. Yet a more complex kind of remembering and forgetting can be seen to flow just below the surface of Tognetti’s account. That is, Tognetti’s twenty-first-century shock in learning about who Bridgetower was sits on top of more than a hundred years of discourse in Australia in which Bridegtower’s collaboration with Beethoven was frequently discussed in accounts of the Kreutzer Sonata’s origins.[4] Indeed, since the 1880s, performances of the sonata in Australia have been regularly framed by reviews and programme notes that remember Bridgetower’s virtuosity, his role in commissioning the work, his falling out with Beethoven, and Beethoven’s rededication of the sonata to French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer. Much of this discourse draws directly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century British accounts of Bridgetower and Beethoven’s relationship that value their historic encounter for the way it infused the premier performance of the violin sonata with collaborative improvisatory spirit. As we outline in this article, such accounts leveraged a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of race that, despite their evolving twists and turns, routinely managed to strip Bridgetower of his intellectual and artistic agency.

Of course, the Bridgetower remembered in this discourse is fundamentally different to the Bridgetower Tognetti encountered in Dove’s Sonata Mulattica. Rather than functioning as a facilitator of Beethoven’s musical practice, Dove’s Bridgetower is woven, through a range of poetic gestures and genres, into a complex network of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sound and power that includes Beethoven but also extends far beyond Beethoven’s world.[5] In other words, in grappling with who Bridgetower was and why his music mattered, Dove ponders what Bridgetower’s life might have been like, the power imbalances he negotiated, and the way these kinds of imbalances shaped the artistic practices of his place and time. This alternate version of the Bridgetower story would have indeed been new for Australian musicians and audiences who encountered Dove’s book in the twenty-first century, setting the stage for two important twenty-first-century musical questions: 1) Which Bridegtower do we seek to remember in musical performance; and 2) How do we manifest the Bridgetower we choose in our musical practice?

In this article, we explore some possible answers to these questions in the Australian context by first mapping out how colonial ideologies that sought to bind nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian musical practices to European musical practices fixed a narrow set of anecdotes about Bridgetower’s life and musical significance in public memory. We then discuss the method of memory activated in Dove’s Sonata Mulattica and the sonification of aspects of this method in a concert delivered by violinist Nicole Cherry at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2022. In parallel to Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, Cherry’s approach to concert programming across her long running Forge With George commissioning project positions Bridgetower within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic networks of power and music by juxtaposing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 in A Major against the sound of violin virtuosity in American folk music, the melodic gestures of African American spirituals, and Afrofuturist imaginings of violin practice. We argue that undertaking such an approach in Australia actively disrupted colonial memory of Bridgetower by incorporating the work with which Bridgetower is most commonly associated into a history and trajectory of Black musical achievement achieved in spite of, rather than as a result of, European colonial endeavour.

On Remembering George Bridgetower in Australia

The earliest accounts of the Kreutzer Sonata being performed in Australia are notable for the juxtaposition they raise between masterful delivery of the work and local anxiety around the current state of Australian musical culture. French pianist Edward Boulanger, a self-professed pupil of Chopin, and Italian violinist Augustino Robbio, a self-professed pupil of Paganini, delivered multiple performances of the work during an 1863 farewell tour in Sydney that garnered two telling press reports.[6] In one report, for the Sydney Morning Herald, a music reviewer lamented the wide culture gap between Australia and Europe: ‘We believe it is the first time that two instrumentalists of such high order in their profession have combined to give us an idea of classical music – the enjoyment of which has been confined to a European home and society’.[7] In another, for the Sydney paper Empire, attending an upcoming Boulanger and Robbio performance of the work was framed as a call to arms:

[M]any persons who profess an ardent admiration for the most elevating of all arts, are constantly deploring the depraved taste exhibited by artists who, in order to meet the expense attending concerts, please the popular ear by a display of the commonest styles of music, and utterly ignoring the classic school; all such severe and pure classicists must undoubtedly, if they have any regard for consistency, attend the concert this evening.[8]

The yearning in both reports for a musical culture more closely aligned to the culture of European concert halls articulates a familiar theme in Australian music history research. Roger Covell’s landmark surveys of musical practice in Australia marshal forth a range of case studies – stemming from the earliest days of European arrival on the continent – in which works of Western art music, the arrival of European musical instruments, and tours of European art music musicians, were celebrated for solidifying cultural ties between Australia and Europe.[9] Accounts of twentieth-century government support of music making in Australia go further, tracing out the legacy of this colonial mindset on the kinds of musical projects held up on the international stage as representing Australian cultural achievement.[10] Scholarly interrogation of the impact of such pursuits demonstrates the ways a persistent fixation on European sound-worlds has actively hemmed in discussion of both the scope and complexity of musical practices in Australia.[11]

Bridgetower’s representation in the Australian press provides yet one more example of European oriented colonial thought winnowing away a more complicated story. Evidence of this critical bent is apparent from the first time Bridgetower’s name appears in print. In setting a January 1880 performance of ‘the famous Kreutzer Sonata’ in context, a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald introduced Bridgetower to Australian readers through three key anecdotes borrowed from George Grove’s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published for the first time in London in 1879–89.[12] The first anecdote recounted Bridgetower’s commissioning of the Kreutzer Sonata. In Grove’s account, ‘There was a curious bombastic half-caste English Violin player in Vienna at the time named Bridgetower. He had engaged Beethoven to write a sonata for their joint performance at his concert’.[13] The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer drew together near identical language in their introduction of the work: ‘This wonderful sonata, was, it is stated, composed to the order of a half-caste English violin player named Bridgetower, then resident in Vienna’.[14] The second borrowed anecdote referenced the improvisatory nature of the sonata’s first performance at the Vienna Augarten in 1803. In Grove:

The Finale was easily attainable, having been written the year before for the Sonata in A (op. 30, No. I), and the violin part of the first movement seems to have been ready a few days before the concert, though at the performance the pianoforte copy still remained almost a blank, with only an indication here and there. But the Variations were literally finished only at the last moment, and Bridgetower had to play them at sight from the blurred and blotted autograph of the composer. Beethoven’s rendering of the Andante was so noble, pure, and chaste, as to cause a universal demand for an encore.[15]

In the Sydney Morning Herald, a slightly truncated account is put forward:

On the day appointed the finale was ready, having been prepared for another sonata the year before; and the violin part of the first movement had been delivered to Bridgetower, the piano part had an occasional indication. But the variations were barely finished in time for the concert, and the violinist had to play them at sight. Beethoven’s rendering of the andante was so grand that an encore was universally demanded.[16]

Finally, both sources close their discussion of Bridgetower’s association with the work in the same way. In Grove, ‘A quarrel with Bridgetower caused the alteration of the dedication’ and in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘A quarrel with Bridgetower led to this work being dedicated to Kreutzer’.[17]

Grove’s account of the Bridgetower and Beethoven encounter redeployed in the Sydney Morning Herald fit neatly within European settler narratives of cultural achievement in two important ways. First, the racial difference Grove positions as ‘curious’ in his 1879 account is swept to the side by musical activity of such a high order that a European audience is moved to demand an encore. In other words, the sonic distance between Bridgetower and Beethoven coded in Grove’s use of the racially loaded phrase ‘curious bombastic half-caste’ is fundamentally accommodated in Grove’s story through successful collaborative musical activity. Second, it is not just any musical activity that gets the job done. Grove’s framing of the success of the premier as the leveraging of ‘bombastic’ otherness in the service of Beethoven’s high art fixes Western art music as a unifying field of cultural practice in the account – a target for global sonic unity that Jeffrey Richards has positioned as the imperial north star of both Grove’s work on the Dictionary and his leadership of the Royal College of Music in the 1880s.[18] In other words, Grove’s Bridgetower story activated a logic of musical practice broadly aligned with the goals and strategies of colonial endeavour that were well known and frequently rehearsed in Australian colonial discourse.[19]

Testament to the story’s fit within the Australian context can be seen in how quickly and widely it was disseminated by Australian music critics. The three-acts of Bridgetower and Beethoven’s relationship advanced by Grove were subsequently presented to readers of papers in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in connection with performances of the Kreutzer Sonata that took place in the years 1880, 1883, 1890, 1895 and 1905.[20] Layered onto these accounts were explanations of how successful performances of the work in Australia were gradually bolstering the strength of local culture. In the Sydney Morning Herald, an applauded performance of the sonata by touring violin virtuoso Camilla Urso in 1880 testified to the elevation of local tastes: ‘After the breathless attention with which this classic work was received, and the tumult of applause which followed its close, any charge of indifference to classical music on the part of the Sydney public would fall to the ground’.[21] In the Melbourne Age, a performance of the work staged by a local promoter, Mr Guenett, indicated momentum in the cause of bringing Australian and European musical cultures more closely together:

These concerts of classical music, instituted so quietly and unpretentiously by Mr. Guenett, are a natural outcome of the desire of a large portion of the community to become familiar with those great works which are household words among the artistically cultivated in Europe.[22]

In the Adelaide Chronicle, a performance of the work by Johann Kruse, an Australian born violinist recently returned from Europe, delivered musical understanding ‘won in the very centre of the musical world’ to a local audience.[23] Each of these performances was understood by Australian music critics as moving Australia and Europe into a shared sonic space.

In the twentieth century, discussion of Bridgetower would take on a different hue, but settler reasoning around why performances of the Kreutzer Sonata mattered within the framework of the colonial project remained static. Mirroring the influence of Grove’s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians on nineteenth-century discussions of the work, twentieth-century discussion of Bridgetower drew inspiration from another British publication, The Musical Times, which circulated a detailed overview of Bridgetower’s life in 1908.[24] Focussed on mapping out Bridgetower’s parentage and the reception of his performances in both England and across Europe in which he was referred to as either an ‘African Prince’ or the ‘son of an African Prince’, author F.G.E. presented an overview of Bridgetower’s work in music that drew close attention to Bridgetower’s race and how Bridgetower’s race was foregrounded in contemporaneous accounts of his performances.[25] Such an investigation helped F.G.E. unravel what they viewed as the central ‘element of mystery’ surrounding the ‘violinist so intimately associated with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata’ – how a person of colour was able to navigate racial difference and rise to the very top of European musical circles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[26]

Shifting the focus from Bridgetower as a facilitator of Beethoven’s musical vision to Bridgetower as an independent artist was accommodated in Australia by embracing a rhetoric of rediscovery. A revealing juxtaposition can be seen in two articles about the Kreutzer Sonata published in 1908, one in which the author holds ‘Every one [sic] knows the story of its first performance in the Augarten at Vienna by the negro violinist, Bridgetower, and the composer himself’ and the other in which the author asks ‘Who was George Polgreen Bridgetower?’ before proceeding to direct readers to F.G.E.’s Musical Times article for a full account.[27] F.G.E.’s argument that much of Bridgetower’s life in music had in fact been forgotten was subsequently adopted as a common opening device in the Australian press. One 1915 essay on the history of the Kreutzer Sonata written by C. de Cairos-Rego for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph positioned Bridgetower as ‘a violinist now totally forgotten’.[28] Similar language appears in the Adelaide Register the following year: ‘It [the sonata] was originally written for a young talented player at that time, who is today entirely forgotten’.[29] Gradually, a paradoxical kind of forgetting would emerge in Australia in which the rhetoric of rediscovery inspired by F.G.E.’s broad discussion of Bridgetower’s life would begin to infiltrate accounts of Bridgetower’s work on the Kreutzer Sonata itself. Variations of this elision appear throughout the early decades of the twentieth century: ‘It is not generally known that Beethoven wrote the “Kreutzer Sonata” (op. 47), the greatest of all his violin-piano works, for George P. Bridgetower, a mulatto violinist’; ‘Beethoven, by the way, did not write the sonata for the French violinist, Rudolph Kreutzer, to whom it was dedicated, but for a violinist now totally forgotten. This was Bridgetower, a mulatto son of an African father and a European mother’.[30] The irony of accounts that claimed to rediscover Bridgetower’s connection to the Kreutzer Sonata lies in the fact that no published discussion of the Sonata in Australia since 1880 had in fact failed to mention Bridgetower and his substantive contributions to the work.

What is plain across the critical turn toward the ‘totally forgotten’ violinist trope in Australia is that the idea of getting to the bottom of who Bridgetower was never fully gained traction. In other words, the dimensions of Bridgetower’s life, apart from his encounter with Beethoven, do not need to be remembered fully in the rediscovery discourse – i.e. they are allowed to remain ‘curious’ and vague – because the primary cultural project enacted through masterful performances of the Kreutzer Sonata remains the same: the binding of Australian and European cultural worlds together through the cultivation of shared repertoire. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, discussions of Bridgetower and the Kreutzer Sonata in Australia remained fully contained within these kinds of discussions – discussions about the work’s aesthetic achievements, its technical difficulty, and of how mastering the work provided evidence of local cultural achievement.[31]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, a colour-blind approach to writing about Bridgetower would arise in Australia, confining the dimensions of Bridgetower’s life even more fully to his collaboration with Beethoven. Programme notes produced for public performances of the Kreutzer Sonata provide substantial evidence of this approach. While Bridgetower remained raced in Australian programme notes produced in the 1970s and early 1980s, from the mid-1980s conservatorium students in Sydney began a practice of removing references to race in discussions of Bridgetower, while retaining the overall narrative structure of the Bridgetower and Beethoven encounter advanced by Grove in 1879.[32] A student concert delivered by Richard Tognetti in 1984 provides one of the first pieces of evidence of this turn in its description of Bridgetower as an ‘English violinist’.[33] Another key example can be found in a programme for a student recital delivered by Dimitry Hall in 1985 that introduced Bridgetower as ‘the violinist who gave the first performance [of the sonata]’.[34] Colour-blind writing in professional contexts quickly followed. A concert delivered by violinst Ronald Woodcock at Maquarie University in Sydney’s north in 1987 referred to Bridgetower simply as ‘another violinst [i.e. not Kreutzer]’, promotional material for a concert delivered by Russian violinist Valery Klimov at the Verbrugghen Hall in Sydney in 1988 used the phrasing ‘the violinst, Bridgetower’, and a concert delivered by violinist Charmain Gadd in the Joseph Post Auditorium in 1989 referred to Bridgetower simply as a ‘virtuoso violinst’.[35]

It seems more than likely that removing references to Bridgetower’s race in discussions of his work with Beethoven was intended to set Bridgetower and Beethoven on equal footing in the programme notes students and professionals produced during the 1980s. In other words, the authors of these texts leaned into what Amy Ansell has identified as a globally salient post-war strategy of deliberately avoiding discussion of race in order to strive toward a ‘non-racial society wherein skin color is of no consequence for individual life chances’.[36] Yet a major consequence of the colour-blind approach, as several critical race theorists have identified, is that colour-blind discussion hides from view both persistent systemic inequalities that continue to place people of different races on unequal footing and a history of inequality that has fundamentally shaped our contemporary moment.[37] In relation to remembering Bridgetower in Australia, colour-blind discussion of his role in the development of the Kreutzer Sonata dissolved the difference that had made his journey through nineteenth-century European musical circles – as F.G.E. pointed out in 1908 – so unique. That is, Bridgetower’s achievements and Beethoven’s achievements are positioned as unfolding on even ground. The reality of course is that they did not.

The colour-blind turn in 1980s Bridgetower discourse signalled a high-water mark in locking the importance of Bridgetower’s life exclusively to the moment of his collaboration with Beethoven. And while this critical turn did not persist through the 1990s and early 2000s – musicians and writers of programme notes did eventually return to earlier practices of referencing Bridgetower’s race – an interest in exploring Bridgetower’s life beyond his collaboration with Beethoven would not emerge until the 2009 publication of Dove’s Sonata Mulattica. In the following sections, we discuss the Australian reception of Dove’s book, its method of memory that invited readers to think through the broader scope and complex dimensions of Bridgetower’s life, and the strategies for sonifying this story delivered by Nicole Cherry in a 2022 Forge With George programme delivered at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. We then close by discussing how Cherry’s Forge With George programme intervened in the traditions of thought that have kept the Bridgetower story in Australia so narrow for so long by uncoupling Bridgetower from Beethoven’s legacy and positioning him instead within a much wider field of musical practice.[38]

Methodologies of Remembering in Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica

Australian discussion of Dove’s Sonata Mulattica following its release in 2009 largely revolved around a 2010 Australian Chamber Orchestra programme Kreutzer vs Kreutzer. Led by Richard Tognetti, the 2010 programme included Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, reimagined passages of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella titled The Kreutzer Sonata developed by London based playwright Laura Wade, and Leo Janaček’s String quartet No. 1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, a work inspired by Tolstoy’s novella.[39] While the ACO did not foreground Dove’s work on stage, Sonata Mulattica’s fundamental reframing of the history of the Kreutzer Sonata coloured the critical reception of the ACO programme in the press. In setting the ACO programme in context for readers of the Melbourne Age, Michael Shmith focused almost exclusively on the story of the sonata’s rededication to Kreutzer and the historical impact of such erasure, closing with key lines selected from the opening poem of Sonata Mulattica – ‘The Bridgetower’ – in which Dove imagines ‘rafts of black kids scratching out scales on their matchbox violins so that someday they might play the impossible: Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op.47, also known as the “Bridgetower”’.[40] Ashleigh Wilson would draw on the same poem in her piece for The Australian, using it to orient readers to the way Dove ‘wonders what would have happened if … the original dedication had remained’.[41] In both pieces, Dove’s work underpins a pondering of the Kreutzer Sonata’s legacy that brings into the mix questions of uneven power and the contemporary resonance of historic inequities.

Dove is able to seed this kind of imagining in Sonata Mullatica by guiding readers through the networks of power and sound Bridgetower encountered during his life. One key encounter unfolds in Dove’s poem ‘What Doesn’t Happen’ in which Dove explores a Bridgetower performance attended by Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1789 and, as Dove imagines it, Sally Hemmings, a woman enslaved by Jefferson in America who found herself temporarily free while travelling with Jefferson in France.[42] As Hemmings and Bridgetower make eye contact during the performance, Dove writes from Hemmings point of view, drawing Bridgetower into a transatlantic story of inequitable racial experience in diaspora: ‘you are what I am, what I yearn to be – so that he plays only for her and not her keepers’.[43] Another key encounter is presented in Dove’s poem ‘Black Billy Waters at His Pitch’, in which Dove imagines a chance meeting between Bridgetower and William Waters, a violinist born in the United States who had joined the British Navy, travelled to London, and found himself later in life supplementing his naval pension by performing sea shanties outside the Adelphi Theatre.[44] As Bridgetower walks into Waters view, Waters insults Bridgetower’s performance costume, calling him a ‘Turkish cracker jack’ before warning him of his ambition: ‘To this bright brown upstart hack among Kings, one piece of advice, don’t unpack’.[45] The encounter in ‘Black Billy Waters at His Pitch’ imagines both a sonic and situational intersection of eighteenth-century Black experience – two violinists working in different genres intersect in their opposing approaches to navigating the restrictive set of expectations placed on Black performers. As Dove guides readers in other poems through Waters’ performances inside the Adelphi, Bridgetower’s memories of ‘the drums from the islands in his father’s tales’ and later, Bridgetower’s various performances across Europe, she manifests an expansive tapestry of sound woven in various threads of Black colonial experience.[46] This is the frame against which Bridgetower’s performance of the Kreutzer Sonata at the Vienna Augarten is remembered in Sonata Mulattica and the key method Dove deploys in decoupling Bridgetower from his narrow positioning as facilitator of Beethoven’s musical legacy.

Remembering George Bridgetower in Nicole Cherry’s Programming Practice

Nicole Cherry’s Forge With George programmes work toward similar ends by positioning the Kreutzer Sonata within a web of associations that, like Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, invite listeners to travel the networks of sound and experience that structured Bridgetower’s world. At its core, such an approach strives to interrogate the colonial thought structures mapped out in the first half of this article by illuminating cross-connections that frustrate simplistic Eurocentric narratives of musical practice. In Cherry’s words:

Forge with George is both an imaginative leap and a research-driven endeavour. The project engages with Bridgetower’s legacy not as a fixed historical artefact but as a living, performative inquiry. This aligns with Georgina Born’s argument that performance can function as a means of engaging the social in music without abstracting it from its context.[47] Bridgetower’s historical marginalization, his transnational identity, and his intersections with multiple musical traditions make him an apt figure for such a relational and practice-based approach.

The concept of ‘forging’ also implies a process of making – of shaping something that is at once rooted in historical material yet reinterpreted through present-day performance. This resonates with the notion of hearing music anew, of reconstructing and re-imagining historical sonic practices to create a meaningful contemporary dialogue. The commissioning project, then, is not merely an act of historical recovery but an exploration of how musical identity, improvisation, and cross-genre practice can generate new forms of expression while acknowledging historical entanglements.

The commissioning process itself is performative, inviting composers and performers to engage with Bridgetower’s legacy not as static history but as a catalyst for contemporary expression. This approach acknowledges the ‘enduring relationships’ between music, place and identity while simultaneously challenging the hierarchies and historical omissions embedded within Western art music traditions.

Thus, the project embodies a dual process: it holds space for the historical Bridgetower while forging new sonic possibilities that resonate with present-day questions of cultural identity, improvisation, and musical community. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, Forge with George operates as an open, dialogic framework – holding the past in creative tension with the future.

The Forge With George programme Cherry delivered at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on 25 November 2022 juxtaposed three commissioned musical works: Yvette Jackson’s Remembering 1619 (2019), David Wallace’s The Bridgetower (2017), and Jessie Cox’s The Fiddle is for Diggin’ (2020). Positioning these works alongside each other expanded the scope of their independent resonances, ultimately positioning Bridgetower, as a sonic character, alongside enslaved American fiddler Solomon Northrop, enslaved Africans traversing the middle-passage, and African fiddlers past, present and future. In the discussion that follows, we map out how these compositions and their ordering constructed in Sydney a new context for understanding the significance of Bridgetower’s work in music.

In recalling the context of commissioning Remembering 1619, Cherry draws attention to how purposely designed musical juxtapositions work to interweave historic commonalities and inequities. As Cherry explains:

1619 marks the year Africans were brought into slavery in America. 2019 when the piece was written, marked the 400th anniversary of that beginning. I approached Yvette Jackson, about composing a piece for me after hearing one of her signature ‘Radio Operas’ at the Banff Center. I intended to draw a connection between the American Negro Spiritual, the development of nineteenth-century European Classical Music, and the cross-cultural contradiction that is posed. One comparison I made with Yvette draws a connection and uncanniness between the Negro Spiritual – particularly the slave song Go Down Moses, and Niccolò Paganini’s (1782–1840) Moses Fantasia based on a theme from Rossini’s opera ‘Moses in Egypt’. The goal was to correlate the socio-cultural cognitive dissonance they pose to have them have a conversation with each other. Both of these works tell the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus – these two pieces, composed in the same time period manifested from completely different existences.

The dialogical aspects of Jackson’s work span temporal, geographical and cultural arenas. Composed as a response to Paganini’s pondering of exodus from slavery in Egypt, Jackson’s Remembering 1619 makes audible the conditions of being delivered into slavery in the United States by juxtaposing a tape recording that sounds a rocking ship traversing the middle passage against a solo violin part that calls out to the melodic features of African American spirituals and fiddling practices – musical practices that served as tools for survival in and around the trauma of enslavement and for plotting exodus a new. Exodus is thus cast as a future condition in Remembering 1619 and the violin functions as both foreshadowing voice and contemporary bulwark against the oppression sonified in the tapes’ conjuring of a rocking ship’s hull. In turn, the juxtaposition of acoustic and electronic elements in Remembering 1619 yields an immersive sonic environment that invites listeners to encounter history in a non-linear, spatially dynamic manner, that follows the violin in the hands of Black heritage makers across oceans and time spans.

David Wallace’s The Bridgetower (2017), the second work presented on Cherry’s programme, is similarly laden with juxtapositions. Excerpts from the Kreutzer Sonata are folded into an American sonic and cultural context of folk fiddling practice while the performer is asked to personify Bridgetower on stage through spoken text borrowed from Dove’s poem ‘The Bridgetower’. Cherry relays the following commissioning context:

I had been perplexed by the cognitive dissonance related to the nineteenth-century Black person in Europe and America … [and was drawn to] pairing George Bridgetower with the American enslaved fiddler Solomon Northrup, who called his violin ‘his companion the friend of my bosom’. Literally with contrasting restraints, both were enslaved and I wanted to interact with those ideas through fiddle sound.

Wallace’s melodies toggle between folk fiddling styles and melodic lines drawn from or based on melodic lines from the Kreutzer Sonata. Bridgetower and Northrup as sonic characters are thus co-located on stage and frequently collaborate on the delivery of melodic statements during the work. The contemporary focus of Dove’s poem – its questioning of what might be different in the present if Beethoven had not rededicated his sonata to Kreutzer in the past – sharpens the Bridgetower and Northrup collaboration by naming the stakes of their oppression: what we imagine for ourselves in our current moment is fundamentally shaped by what we have, and have not seen, accomplished in the past. Crucially, pairing The Bridgetower with Remembering 1619 extends Dove’s timeline of erasure. Through this juxtaposition, Bridgetower’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century struggle becomes part of a larger, more global story of anti-Black violence and control.

The final work presented on Cherry’s programme, The Violin is for Diggin (2022) by Jessie Cox, takes up Dove’s provocation of imagining alternate timelines of violin practice. As Cherry notes, the work imagines a ‘future in the hands of Black fiddlers’ while ‘ponder[ing] what the evolution [of violin practice] is and could have been’. Through a score that leverages both a wide range of extended techniques (multiphonics, overpressure, bow on bridge), improvisation, and a microtonal pallette, Cox’s work expands the sonic boundaries of Cherry’s programme while introducing another kind of juxtaposition into the mix – both sides of the what ‘is and could have been’. As Cox writes in the programme notes for the work:

In this piece Nicole is listening to the fiddle, to all the ancestors talking to us through this information storation technology – i.e. she’ traveling through time and space … This is an act of uncovering noise, or hearing information in its cyborg state – information is always noisy, it is never 100% accurate. This noise in information allows for the space, and freedom if you will, to re-define the future, past and present. This is a creole situation, a place where we have to improvise, or negotiate, or constantly redefine what something means and what it doesn’t, where we have to deal with each other, with the world in its complexity (created through endless entanglements/relationalities), and this is the sound of music.[48]

Ending with The Violin is for Diggin emphasizes the possibilities that are unlocked when trajectories of practice are mined for their complexities. Like Remembering 1619 and The Bridgetower, it is a piece of music that begs listeners to re-scope their conceptions of violin practice, to imagine multiple histories of practice colliding at once, and to grapple with the legacy of ‘all the ancestors’ who have used the instrument to negotiate ‘endless entanglements/relationalities’.[49] In short, performance serves as a mode of historical inquiry in The Violin is for Diggin, interrogating, through sound, a range of socio-cultural hierarchies and entrenched archival silences.

Viewed collectively, the artistic practices of Rita Dove, David Wallace, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Jessie Cox serve as incisive interventions into the colonial archive, using creative re-engagement to disentangle George Bridgetower from long-established canonical narratives. Dove’s treatment of Bridgetower’s legacy, in particular, foregrounds the intertwined nature of racial identity and musical virtuosity. By interrogating the conditions that have historically rendered Bridgetower’s contributions invisible, her narrative not only reclaims his place in the musical canon but also names the roots of hurdles contemporary Black musicians face across a range of musical contexts. Together, the works of Dove, Wallace, Jackson, and Cox exemplify how practice-informed musical inquiry can serve as a potent site for resistance and renewal. By challenging the constraints of the colonial archive and reimagining the figure of Bridgetower through multiple disciplinary lenses, these artists contribute to a broader rearticulation of musical history – one that is as much about reclaiming the past as it is about reconfiguring the future of musical practice.

Cherry’s 2022 Forge With George programme was, of course, not the only innovative approach to reframing Bridgetower’s legacy in Australia to unfold following the publication of Dove’s Sonata Mulattica. Motivated to correct the erasure Tognetti wrote about in his ‘Say Their Names’ piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, the ACO delivered a programme titled ‘Beethoven and Bridgetower’ in 2021 that, like the ACO’s 2010 programme, paired arrangements of Janécek’s ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ with an arrangement of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A major, op. 47 (this time named ‘Bridgetower’ on the programme).[50] Crucially, the 2021 ACO production used a new dramatic script to bind these works together – one developed in collaboration between Anna Goldsworthy and Rita Dove. Drawing heavily on the poetry in Sonata Mulattica, the 2021 ACO script located Bridgetower and his complex life story at the root of the Kreutzer Sonata’s sonic legacy, infusing Grove’s frequently rehearsed account of Bridgetower and Beethoven’s collaboration with the colour of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European power dynamics that continue to cast twenty-first-century shadows.

Cherry’s 2022 Forge With George programme at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music adopted an even wider gaze in the way it looked beyond Europe when locating Bridgetower within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century networks of power and sound. The Bridgetower remembered on Cherry’s programme is one voice within a transatlantic orchestra of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century violinists and fiddlers navigating racial injustices intrinsically bound to colonial logics. Geographically and culturally separate, the violinists and fiddlers Cherry calls up from the historical record in her performance are united in their pursuit of being heard above the din of colonial oppression. Remembering Bridgetower as a member of this metaphorical orchestra powerfully reshapes our understanding of the significance of his musical work by releasing it from the grip of a single collaboration and placing it within a network of Black colonial music making in which the violin was used to find voice amidst a range of hostile circumstances. That is, unlike Grove’s Bridgetower, Cherry’s Bridgetower embodies an expansive set of connections that present a fresh starting point for remembering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries again. Taking up the invitation to remember Bridgetower in this way draws listeners into what it is Beethoven actually erased in his rededication of his sonata to Kreutzer – not a person per se, but a masterful navigation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hierarchies undertaken against the odds.

Endnotes

[1] Nicole Cherry and Christopher Coady have collaborated on the primary text of this essay and have written this text in the third person. At times, Nicole Cherry’s personal reflections on her performances are put forwarded as evidence that is integrated into the article’s broader argument. These reflections are introduced by phrases such as ‘In Cherry’s words’; ‘As Cherry explains’; etc. and are typeset in italics; Richard Tognetti, ‘Call Me By My Name’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 2021, 4.

[2] Tognetti, ‘Call Me By My Name’.

[3] Tognetti, ‘Call Me By My Name’.

[4] In this article, we frequently use the nickname ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ to refer to Beethoven’s violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major for the following reason: Beethoven’s rededication of the sonata to Kreutzer speaks to a nineteenth-century power imbalance with twenty-first-century echoes that lies at the heart of why we need new ways of remembering Bridgetower. Referring to Sonata No. 9 in A Major as ‘The Bridgetower’ presents one powerful rhetorical manoeuvre capable of naming this historic injustice. Yet we believe that utilizing this renaming convention in this particular article may occlude the rhetorical structures at play in both Rita Dove’s and Nicole Cherry’s work, which we aim to show as powerful in their own right. In deference to Rita Dove and Nicole Cherry, we have thus kept the Kreutzer dedication front and centre in our discussion.

[5] Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).

[6] For claims of Boulanger’s association with Chopin, see ‘Music’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 1855, 4. For claims of Robbio’s association with Paganini, see ‘Royal Italian Opera’, London Evening Standard, 18 August 1854, 3.

[7] ‘Music’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1863, 7.

[8] ‘The Concert of Messrs. Boulanger and Robbio’, Empire, 10 February 1863, 8.

[9] Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967); Roger Covell, ‘European Musical Nationalism in a Colonial Context’, History of European Ideas, 16.4–6 (1993), 691–95; Roger Covell, Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society 2nd edn (Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2016).

[10] Amanda Harris, Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–1970 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Christopher Coady, ‘“Exiled from the Musical Activities of His Homeland”: Dean Dixon in the Australian and African American Press During the Era of Immigration Reform’, Musicology Australia, 43.1–2 (2021), 1–21.

[11] Clint Bracknell and Linda Barwick, ‘The Fringe or the Heart of Things? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Musics in Australian Music Institutions’, Musicology Australia, 42.2 (2020), 70–84.

[12] ‘The Music and Garden Palace’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January 1880, p. 2; George Grove ed, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (AD 1450–1880) by Eminent Writers English and Foreign (London: McMillan and Co., 1879).

[13] George Grove, ‘Beethoven, Ludwig van’, in Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 182.

[14] ‘The Music and Garden Palace’, 2.

[15] Grove, ‘Beethoven, Ludwig van’, 182.

[16] ‘The Music and Garden Palace’, 2.

[17] Grove, ‘Beethoven, Ludwig van’, 182; ‘The Music and Garden Palace’, 2.

[18] Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 12.

[19] Crucially, Grove’s description of racial difference accommodated through musical performance fitted seamlessly into orbiting Australian settler discourses about racial ‘uplift’. Anchored in what Anthony Moran terms ‘settler nationalism’, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian settler notions of a unified nation regularly imagined the adoption of shared cultural practices anchored in European ideals as the key to unlocking Indigenous ‘assimilation’. See Anthony Moran, ‘White Australia, Settler Nationalism and Aboriginal Assimilation’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 43.1 (2005), 168–93. The erasures and trauma caused by assimilation practices and thought has been the topic of much recent scholarly work – particularly in the field of music. See as examples: Harris, Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance; Laura Case, ‘The Adaptation of Violin Playing by Indigenous People in Early Twentieth-Century Western Australia and New South Wales’, Musicology Australia, 44.2 (2022), 107–26; Michael Webb and Christopher Coady, ‘The Spiritual in Australia: Practices, Discourse, and Transformations 1879–1950’, in Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, ed. Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 72–90.

[20] ‘The Urso Concerts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 1880, 5; ‘Melbourne Popular Concerts’, Age, 13 September 1883, 6; ‘The Halle-Neruda Concerts’, Age, 9 August 1890, 10; ‘The Kruse Concerts’, Chronicle, 12 October 1895, 32; ‘Music Concerts’, Australasian, 24 June 1905, 26.

[21] ‘The Urso Concerts’, p. 5.

[22] ‘Melbourne Popular Concerts’, 6.

[23] ‘The Kruse Concerts’, 32.

[24] F.G.E., ‘George P. Bridgetower and the Kreutzer Sonata’, The Musical Times, 49.783 (1908), 302–8.

[25] F.G.E., ‘George P. Bridgetower’, 303.

[26] F.G.E., ‘George P. Bridgetower’, 302.

[27] ‘Music Concerts’, Australasian, 21 November 1908, 28; ‘Players and Singers’, Daily Post, 14 August 1908, 3.

[28] C. de Cairos-Rego, ‘Musical Notes’, Daily Telegraph, 20 November 1915, 10.

[29] ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, Adelaide Register, 28 November 1916, 2.

[30] ‘Music’, Punch, 7 January 1909, 29; ‘The Realm of Music’, Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1922, 17.

[31] See as representative examples: ‘Menuhin Records the Kreutzer’, Sun, 26 May 1935, 23; ‘Beethoven’s Dedication’, ABC Weekly, 11 July 1942, 24; ‘Music Lovers Diary’, ABC Weekly, 30 June 1956, 27; ‘Music Seldom Played’, Canberra Times, 14 June 1968, 17.

[32] See Albert Preston (violin) and Gordon Watson (piano) Concert Program, 8 August 1975, Conservatorium 1975 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archives; Suzanne Cowling (violin) and David Miller (piano) Concert Program, 27 May 1982, Conservatorium 1982 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archives; Richard Tognetti (violin), Maciej Pawela (piano), and Guy Noble (piano) Concert Program, 9 November 1984, Conservatorium 1984 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archives; Dimity Hall (violin) and Jashua Tsai (piano) Concert Program, 5 November 1985, Conservatorium 1985 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archives; Ronald Woodcock (violin) and Colleen Rae-Gerrard (piano) Concert Program, 13 May 1987, Concert programs, 1984–1986: a collection of programmes issued at various concerts in Sydney, Australia and elsewhere with programme notes, compiled by Michael Edgeloe, State Library of NSW; Valery Klimov (violin) and Nikolai Evrov (piano) Concert Program, 21 April 1988, Conservatorium 1988 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archive; Charmain Gadd (violin) and Nikolai Evrov (piano) Concert Program, 10 October 1990, Conservatorium 1990 Programs Folder, University of Sydney Archives.

[33] Richard Tognetti (violin), Maciej Pawela (piano), and Guy Noble (piano) Concert Program, 9 November 1984, University of Sydney Archives.

[34] Dimity Hall (violin) and Jashua Tsai (piano) Concert Program, 5 November 1985, University of Sydney Archives.

[35] Ronald Woodcock (violin) and Colleen Rae-Gerrard (piano) Concert Program, 13 May 1987, State Library of NSW; Valery Klimov (violin) and Nikolai Evrov (piano) Concert Program, 21 April 1988, University of Sydney Archives; Charmain Gadd (violin) and Nikolai Evrov (piano) Concert Program, 10 October 1990, University of Sydney Archives.

[36] Amy Ansell, ‘Color Blindness’, in Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, ed. Richard Schaefer (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008), 320.

[37] Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 6th edn (Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield, 2022). The method of erasure outlined in these texts is around a sudden turn away from acknowledging race and the different experiences racial positionality has yielded in the twentieth century. It is an erasure that compounds the effect of the assimilationist imaginaries outlined in Russell McGregor’s Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

[38] In parallel to our work in this article that highlights the ways Bridgetower was perennially on the minds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian audiences who attended performances of the Kreutzer Sonata, Tamlyn Avery has mapped out how Beethoven routinely appears ‘as a key icon of double consciousness in debates over Black aesthetics’ in twentieth-century African American literature. See Tamlyn Avery, ‘“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature’, American Literature, 92.4 (2020), 623–652, at 649. The contrast between Beethoven as European paragon in Grove with Beethoven as an icon of double consciousness in DuBois (as Tamlyn argues) indicates just how much work there is left to do in decolonizing music history so that we might better understand music’s complex circulations and resonances.

[39] ‘Kreutzer vs. Kreutzer’ ACO Concert Program, November 2010, https://issuu.com/australianco/docs/aco-107_kreutzer_-_web-1, accessed 3 March 2025.

[40] Michael Shmith, ‘Three Part Resonance’, The Age, 13 November 2010, 16.

[41] Ashleigh Wilson, ‘Tale of Love and Spite Bears More Fruit’, The Australian, 11 November 2010, 17.

[42] Dove, Sonata Mulattica, 37–38; For more on Hemmings’ time in Paris and its impact on her relationship with Jefferson, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

[43] Dove, Sonata Mulattica, 38.

[44] Dove, Sonata Mulattica, 67–68; For a multi-faceted discussion of Waters’ life, see Mary L. Shannon, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Shannon discusses Waters’ repertoire on page 57.

[45] Dove, Sonata Mulattica, 67.

[46] Reference to ‘the drums from the islands’ is made in Dove’s poem ‘What Doesn’t Happen’. Other key sound worlds are conjured in the poems ‘The Performer’ and ‘Life in London Now Playing at the Adelphi’. See Dove, Sonata Mulattica, 37–38; 119–24; 174–75.

[47] Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135.2 (2010), 205–43.

[48] Jessie Cox, ‘Program Notes’, The Fiddle is for Diggin’ (for solo violin), July 2020.

[49] Cox, ‘Program Notes’.

[50] ‘Beethoven and Bridgetower’ ACO Concert Program, March 2021, www.aco.com.au/whats-on/2021/beethoven-and-bridgetower, accessed 3 March 2025.