Booker Rowe, First Black Musician to Play in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dies

In 1968, Booker Rowe was freelancing in New York when the phone rang. On the line was Mason Jones, the Philadelphia Orchestra's personnel manager, calling on behalf of music director Eugene Ormandy. Rowe could hear the orchestra rehearsing behind him through the receiver. He took the gig as a substitute that season — the first time a Black musician had ever sat in the ensemble.

The orchestra announced his death this week in a short institutional statement, calling him "a well-loved member of the second violin section" for "almost 50 years" and extending sympathies to his family. It's the register organizations default to for a long-serving employee, and it undersells what his colleagues in the wider field had already recognized: months before his death, the Black Orchestral Network — a nonprofit built specifically around the experience of Black orchestral musicians — sat him down for their oral-history podcast, introducing him as a man who carried "triumphs and setbacks" and told his story "in the style of a true gentleman." That's the tribute that actually reads like it knew him.

The full-time chair took three more years to land after that 1968 substitute call, and even then Rowe wasn't quite first. A season with Washington's National Symphony came between the substitute gig and his return to Philadelphia in 1970; violist Renard Edwards beat him to full membership by a year. Rowe joined permanently in 1971, the orchestra's second Black player rather than its first — a distinction the institution's own retirement tribute skipped over too.

He'd grown up in North Philadelphia, started on violin as a boy through the public schools, and had exactly one place to watch Black musicians play classical repertoire in any number: the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra, the city's only community ensemble built around Black players, because the real one wouldn't have them. Temple for his bachelor's, Yale for a master's — a path built entirely on a public arts pipeline his wife, the soprano and music theorist Dr. Patsy Baxter Rowe, later pointed out no longer exists for kids growing up where he did.

Backstage at the Academy of Music, someone once scrawled a racial slur in the stairwell. It was gone by the next day; Rowe never learned who wrote it or who erased it, and he didn't leave. "I had an obligation to everybody not to leave," he said. He stayed fifty years, until 2020, when he retired at 79 into an orchestra that still had exactly three Black members. He said so himself, without dressing it up: "There should have been others. There are others out there who can play. It is disheartening."

In 1986 he stood as soloist with the Chestnut Brass Company to honor a cohort of early-nineteenth-century Black composers working in Philadelphia — musicians who'd made the same case Rowe spent his career making, a hundred and fifty years earlier, and lost.