Bethune Elementary School in Hollywood, Florida, through Turnaround Arts, which integrates the arts into struggling schools as a way to boost academic achievement and student engagement.
As part of this, the duo is devoted to arts education, providing grants through their Black Violin Foundation to help young people pursue innovative musical paths regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, and mentoring students at Mary M. In the process, they’re attracting young people-particularly young people of color-to classical music, a field where fewer than 5 percent of professional musicians are black or Latino, and where audiences are increasingly graying. With the release of their third record, Take the Stairs, last year, Black Violin continues to stretch their hybrid form in new directions, creating music that smashes boundaries and defies expectations. Through the magical alchemy of creativity and friendship, the teens began experimenting with marrying these musical genres together, eventually formalizing the sound as the duo Black Violin, which has been supported indirectly by numerous Arts Endowment grants.
And yet there they were, learning classical music technique in class while listening to hip-hop together after school. Baptiste had wanted to play saxophone instead of viola, and Sylvester’s mother had thought the violin would help dissuade him from hanging out with the neighborhood’s rougher crowd. Wilner Baptiste met Kevin Sylvester in high school orchestra, a place that initially, neither of them particularly wanted to be.
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