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Twice a year, in spring and fall, Rochester becomes the nation’s center for Black professional classical musicians when the Eastman School of Music hosts the Gateways Music Festival.
This year marks the 31st anniversary of Gateways and next weekend brings the fall 2026 Gateways lineup, featuring not only classical compositions, but many other areas of the African-American musical experience.
Clarinetist Alex Laing remembers his first experience of the Gateways Music Festival in 2001, when it was a few years old, and he was a new member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
“Gateways was still a grassroots organization based on lots of volunteering. Getting off the plane and living in Rochester for a week was completely different from touring with the Detroit Symphony,” he says, laughing. (That week concurred with the Sept. 11 attacks; Rochesterians opened their homes to the more than 100 musicians until they could travel again.)
“I played the clarinet pretty well, and I knew that playing in an orchestra was like jumping gracefully and precisely on a moving train,” Liang says. “But when I first found myself making music on that Eastman stage full of beautiful Black talent, I just broke down. It was such a powerful, affirming thing.”
Twenty-five years later, the Gateways Music Festival is still powerful, still affirming, and still in Rochester. And after a long professional career including principal clarinet of the Phoenix Symphony, Laing is now Gateways president and artistic director, a position he has held since 2024, after several years as a board member.
The Gateways Festival got its start in Winston-Salem, N.C., founded in 1993 by classical pianist Armenta Hummings Dumisani to provide additional “gateways”—performing and networking opportunities—for Black classical musicians. In 1995, Dumisani and her festival were invited to the Eastman School of Music by then-director Robert Freeman, and both of them stayed: Dumisani as a professor, and Gateways as an important and thriving festival. She retired in 2009, but Gateways has expanded beyond Rochester to include additional performances in New York City.
Some recent highlights of Gateways’ history include:
■ the creation in 2018 of Gateways’ signature ensemble, the Gateways Brass Collective, the only all-Black professional brass quintet in the country;
■ the founding of Gateways Young Musicians Institute in 2019;
■ Carnegie Hall concerts by the Gateways Festival Orchestra, including a world premiere work by Jon Batiste in 2022 and the first performance there in 90 years of the “Negro Folk Symphony” by the African-American composer William Levi Dawson, in 2025;
■ the creation in 2023 of Gateways Chamber Players, who have performed at Carnegie Recital Hall and the Kennedy Center; and
■ The Gateways Radio Network, also founded in 2023 (heard in Rochester on WXXI-FM), and an upcoming series of free digital programs, beginning with the opening concert of this year’s festival featuring Eastman violist George Taylor.
The Gateways Music Festival’s programming has always included Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Dvořák, but also makes ample room for classical music by such composers of African descent as Joseph Boulogne, Florence Price, and William Grant Still, and African-American contributions to jazz, rock, pop, and sacred music.
One of next weekend’s Gateways concerts is “ChamberSoul” with Shana Tucker, who describes herself as “a classical musician who went rogue.”
ChamberSoul is “jazz-infused, cello-infused, influenced by chamber music but interfacing with soulfulness,” Tucker says. She’s backed by a rhythm section, but is otherwise the whole show: cellist, singer, and composer of many of the songs she performs (others are classics by such writers as Roberta Flack and Stevie Wonder).
“I want to take a classical setting and shake it up,” Tucker says, “taking an audience on a journey. I like to create an intimacy and a lack of formality—feel feel to unwrap your candy during the performance.”
She recalls her student days as “the only cello player I saw who looked like me,” so she is excited about taking part in Gateways’ Young Musicians Institute the morning after her “ChamberSoul” concert.
Tucker will lead what she calls “a pretend recording session,” a milieu she knows well after playing on many other artists’ albums and making several of her own. Students will play as a background string section for a song, then be encouraged to improvise solos based on the song’s harmonies.
“I love working with young string players, tapping into what I know in my heart and mind,” Tucker says. “They may be students, but I’m encouraging them to come in as professionals and to use their sensitivities—their phrasing, their bowing technique—to be able to create music in the moment.”
Laing’s Gateways presidency requires securing institutional and foundation support for the festival, but he also remembers the description of the Gateways by his conductor in 2001, the late Michael Moore: “It’s like a family reunion with instruments.” And after more than three decades, Gateways “graduates” often reunite, returning to mentor younger musicians.
Laing describes Gateways’ mission as “creating a space where Black musicians can affirm who they are in the world. Rochester has been fertile ground for that vision.
“We’re building on 30 years of growth, optimism, and mission,” Laing adds. “Gateways built a piece of missing infrastructure in the music world, and we need to grow that to complete the journey.
“I say that Gateways is not a critique. It’s a completion.”
The Gateways Music Festival takes place from October 9-12 at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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