This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "Juneteenth LP: Reviving Classical Music for Everyone" (published 2025-06-07). The excerpt is a monologue/promo segment in which a speaker describes the mission of Juneteenth LP: to de‑elitimize classical music, make concert spaces welcoming to Black and brown audiences, and grow the classical audience by programming across genres and the African diaspora (e.g., Stevie Wonder, Lizzo, Burleigh, Courtney Bryan, Nkere Okoye). The speaker emphasizes accessibility, historical context for Black classical composers, and the need for radical change to prevent classical music audiences from shrinking. The excerpt closes with a call to follow/subscribe to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.
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and then also playing all kinds of genres so that the space is welcoming to anybody who happens to come in and they aren't intimidated by a classical space. Like, I don't know what this music is and I feel intimidated and I don't know when to clap, none of that. So if you feel moved to clap, that's fine. If you don't know when to clap and you clap at the wrong place, that's fine. And we acknowledge that, you know, if you're moved and you clap in the middle of, you know, in between a movement, and that's not the right place to— the right time and place to clap, that, you know, we let— we acknowledge that, and we express appreciation, and we put people at ease, you know, that whole— the classical elitism is something that we try to dispel, and we try to make Black and brown people feel as welcome as possible. And so our mission is to grow the classical music audience by meeting people where they are. So if you did not grow up hearing classical music, you can come to one of our concerts and hear music by Stevie Wonder and hear music by Lizzo and hear music by musicians that you're probably hearing on Spotify or whoever's, you know, on your playlist rotation, as well as music that your grandmother's listening to or music that I might be listening to. But then we're also going to introduce you to music by Burleigh, and we're going to introduce you to music by Courtney Bryan, and we're going to introduce you to music by Nkere Okoye, and you're going to start to hear a through line of like what Black classical composers are writing and their influences that are very much the same as, you know, your influences and what you're listening to, and we're trying to put everything into a historical context so that you understand that all of this music actually belongs to you. And that there's none of the— you know, that classical music has always been popular music. And just because we rarefied it and put it in spaces that feel intimidating to you, that we don't believe that that actually is real. We think that that's a construct. And so that's the mission of Juneteenth LP, to play music of all of the African diaspora regardless of genre, and in doing so grow the classical music audience. Because the fact of the music— the fact of the matter is that classical music classical music's audience is shrinking. And if we don't do something radically different, we're going to sort of, you know, elite ourselves out of jobs and an existence. And it doesn't have to be that way at all. Follow and subscribe to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song. Where tradition meets innovation in classical piano.
