Music by Black Composers: Joseph Bologne - Volume 1

MBC’s Complete Keyboard Works by Joseph Bologne is a groundbreaking publication that makes available for the first time the exemplary Classical-era solo piano repertoire by this composer of African descent. The project is a collaboration with piano peda-gogues and editors, Eden Esters Brown and Douglas Jurs, following their discovery of the manuscript scores in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

Bologne was an 18th-century composer who was born in 1745 on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to an enslaved woman of Senegalese descent and a French sugar cane plantation owner. His father brought him to France when he was seven years old, and he grew up to be—among other things—one of the greatest fencers in the world, as well as a leading violinist, conductor, and composer in the Paris music scene.