The Music Plays On — Dean Dixon
Charles Dean Dixon was born in Harlem in 1915 to immigrant parents from the West Indies. At an early age his parents exposed him to classical music, and his mother began teaching him violin as well as other instruments. By the age of nine, he was considered a prodigy and was performing on radio stations, and at the age of seventeen was admitted to the Juilliard School as a violin major. He decided to switch his studies and graduated with a music pedagogy degree in 1936. He then pursued a Master’s degree in music pedagogy, graduating from Columbia University in 1936.
While at Juilliard, however, Dixon discovered conducting and when he graduated in 1936 formed the Dean Dixon Symphony Orchestra, which was the first fully integrated orchestra in New York City. Four years later, he conducted the New York City Symphony. In 1941, he conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra and became the first black conductor to ever lead the New York Philharmonic. During the forties, he also received two prestigious awards, Julius Rosenwald Fellowship and the Alice M. Ditson Award.
Despite all of these accolades, it became clear to Dixon that a career in conducting for a black man in the United States was not going to…
