“An Unlikely Pairing”?: Black Violin and the Race of Musical Instruments¹

Despite the long history of the violin in Black American music and the many Black American violinists who shaped the instrument, the violin has overwhelmingly been constructed as an instrument associated with Whiteness. Enter Black Violin, a classical/hip hop duo comprising two classically trained musicians, violinist Kevin Sylvester (Kev Marcus) and viola player Wilner Baptiste (Wil B.), who self-describe as “two Black dudes playing violin.” In this article, I draw on television, radio, and social media commentary, interviews with Black Violin members, music videos and recordings of live performances, and my own practice as a violinist to demonstrate how Black Violin resignifies an instrument associated with Whiteness via the racial and gendered framework of hip-hop. I explore how the violin acts on Black Violin members through the meanings that stick to it. I aim to contribute to the study of critical organology by considering the violin within the specific context of American discourses on race, as well as to augment scholarship on the racialization of sound that has focused almost exclusively on the voice. In the process, I make audible a long genealogy of genre-bending Black violinists and call attention to the central place of the violin in the development of Black musical traditions. Perhaps most centrally, however, I show how a musical instrument can be both a potent vehicle of White supremacist racial epistemology and—in the hands of Black musicians—its reimagining.