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This is Our Body Politics.

I'm guest host Celeste Headlight, journalist and best-selling author, sitting in for Farai Chodea.

Black musicians have been a powerful and often unrecognized force in the classical music canon.

On our show, we're talking with some of today's leading artists about their work

and what it'll take for BIPOC musicians to finally be heard by everyone.

But first, what makes classical music classical? Is it a powerful crescendo or complicated scale structure? Or is it something else? We speak with Philip Ewell, professor of music theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and author of On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. Welcome to the show, Professor Ull.

Thanks for having me, Celeste. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation.

So can we start by asking what does classical mean? And I'm not trying to be snarky about this,

but genres, they seem to be a little bit tricky, right? I mean, there's

argument over what opera means. There's argument over what is jazz versus what is classical.

What is classical music? Yeah, that's a tough one, Celeste. It's, of course, different things and

different traditions. So in Iran, for instance, in India,

they have classical music traditions, and they use the word classical, I mean, at least in English

...