IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Black Anthology (Eastman School of Music)  is a landmark recording project that brings to light one of the richest and most overlooked traditions in American classical music: the art songs of Black American composers. For more than a century, these composers have contributed profoundly to the canon, creating works of extraordinary depth, sophistication, and emotional range. Their songs were published, performed, and admired, yet too often they remained at the margins of standard recital programming and musical study. This album seeks to change that narrative by placing this repertoire where it has always belonged: at the center of our shared musical and cultural consciousness.

Conceived as both an artistic statement and an act of reclamation, IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Black Anthology gathers a wide-ranging collection of art songs from the Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers that illuminate the breadth, individuality, and brilliance of Black compositional voices across generations. These works reveal an astonishing diversity of style and expression, from lyrical intimacy and spiritual reflection to political urgency, poetic grandeur, and striking modernist innovation. Together, they form a body of work that tells a fuller, more truthful story of American art song.

At its heart, this recording is about visibility. The title IN PLAIN SIGHT speaks to the paradox that these songs have always been here, preserved in libraries, anthologies, recital archives, and private studios, yet they have too often been unseen, unheard, or excluded from the broader canon. This project invites listeners to encounter these works not as historical curiosities or supplementary repertoire, but as essential masterworks deserving sustained performance, study, and celebration.

Created at the Eastman School of Music, this anthology is also a testament to the artistry, dedication, and collaborative spirit of more than 40 student and faculty performers who embraced the challenge of engaging deeply with this repertoire. Their preparation, curiosity, and extraordinary musicianship breathe life into these songs with conviction and care. They approached this work not only as performers, but as stewards of a vital artistic legacy, helping to uncover and amplify voices whose contributions deserve enduring recognition.

The repertoire featured on IN PLAIN SIGHT spans generations of composers whose work shaped and expanded the possibilities of American vocal music, offering a sweeping portrait of Black artistic innovation across the twentieth century and shaped the canon in the twenty-first century. Among these are settings of towering literary voices such as Langston Hughes, whose poetry inspired transformative musical responses including Howard Swanson’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers, the work that helped launch Swanson’s career following its historic performance by Marian Anderson in 1949. The album also honors the indispensable contributions of Black women composers whose artistry helped define and elevate the art song tradition. Florence Price brought a profound lyricism and structural elegance to her vocal writing, blending European classical forms with the melodic and spiritual sensibilities of Black musical traditions. Margaret Bonds, one of the twentieth century’s most important musical voices, forged an extraordinary partnership with Hughes, creating songs of remarkable emotional immediacy, rhythmic vitality, and cultural resonance that remain among the most powerful settings in the American song repertoire. Undine Smith Moore, often called the “Dean of Black Women Composers,” brought intellectual depth, harmonic richness, and a deeply personal expressive language to her work, crafting songs that explore memory, identity, spirituality, and human dignity with exceptional sophistication. Throughout the album, these composers stand in powerful dialogue with their contemporaries, revealing a lineage of artistic excellence in which poetry and music converge to illuminate both cultural specificity and universal human experience. Together, their works affirm the central role Black composers, particularly Black women, have played in shaping the American vocal canon.

More than a recording, IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Black Anthology is an invitation to performers, educators, students, and audiences to listen more deeply, program more intentionally, and engage more fully with a repertoire that has too often been overlooked despite its undeniable significance. It is a celebration of discovery, a challenge to inherited assumptions about the canon, and a declaration that these songs are not peripheral to the story of classical music. They are central to it.

This album stands as both tribute and catalyst: honoring the composers who created these extraordinary works and inspiring a future in which their music is no longer hidden in plain sight, but fully heard, fully valued, and fully woven into the living fabric of American musical life.