Second Fiddle to None

Detroit leader encourages black and Hispanic youths to become top-notch classical musicians

Aaron P. Dworkin remembers how miserable he felt when, as one of the few black members of the Harrisburg

Youth Symphony, in Pennsylvania, he rose with his violin to tune the orchestra and his peers refused to be quiet.

“You have earned that position through an audition, and instead of honor, I felt utter dread,” he says. “Because I was black, they were purposefully ignoring me.”

Experiences such as that one, at age 13, shaped Mr. Dworkin’s future career. Now 35, he runs the Sphinx Organization, a charity he founded nine years ago to pave the way for more minority classical musicians to be heard.

Sphinx seeks to increase the pool of professional black and Latino string players by providing training, scholarships, high-quality instruments, and opportunities to perform as soloists with the country’s top orchestras. In addition, the group aims to expand minority audiences for classical music through music-education programs in schools, as well as to introduce more works by black and Latino composers to audiences in general.

Mr. Dworkin says he chose to focus on blacks and Hispanics because those two groups combined represent less than 4 percent of professional orchestra members, even though they make up 25 percent of America’s population. The group’s name stands for several things, including the high level of excellence achieved by civilization and the ancient origin of many minority groups, he says.

For his efforts, Mr. Dworkin received one of the 25 MacArthur fellowships awarded this year. Commonly known as the “genius” award, each comes with a gift of $500,000 over five years.

“Our symphony orchestras in the United States have been talking about becoming more diverse for many decades, and we have not realized that for a whole variety of reasons,” says Lillian Bauder, a corporate-giving officer in Detroit who wrote a letter recommending him to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “This one person is making it happen.”

Raised by Neuroscientists

Born to a white mother and a black father, Mr. Dworkin was adopted when he was two weeks old by a white couple, Susan and Barry Dworkin, both neuroscientists. He grew up in New York City and moved to Hershey, Pa., when he was 10.

He credits his mother, an amateur violinist who died last year, with introducing him to the instrument when he was 5, and his father with instilling in him the discipline to practice hours each day.

Mr. Dworkin attended the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts, in Michigan, during part of high school, and says he assumed he would become a professional musician. But before he graduated, he decided music would lose its joy for him if he made it his career, and so he enrolled as a business major at Pennsylvania State University.

He wound up dropping out for financial reasons and moved to Michigan, where he worked at a nonprofit and a for-profit organization, and attempted to start his first charity — all experiences that prepared him to found and lead the Sphinx Organization.

Mr. Dworkin gained confidence in fund raising by pounding the pavement asking for support for the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, an environmental charity with headquarters in Lansing.

“When you spend five hours every day knocking on the doors of people who are total strangers and within five minutes sharing the mission of what you are doing, convincing them to feel comfortable about you, that you are not just a crazy person,” he says, “you can do anything.”

He later worked his way up to regional manager at Super Sales of America, a now-defunct marketing company, where he learned how to create and manage databases, a tool Sphinx uses to evaluate its programs.

The corporate world also taught Mr. Dworkin that he didn’t like the rigidity of a 9-to-5 workday. As a result, he made sure Sphinx employees could set their own hours by making it easy for them to gain access to their work files from any computer.

In addition, Mr. Dworkin incorporated into Sphinx’s structure lessons that he learned during a failed attempt to begin Jumpstart, a charity that sought to provide temporary housing to people on the brink of homelessness. The Ann Arbor, Mich., charity faltered mainly because he did not have the knowledge to line up board members and other donors who could support the idea financially and give it credibility with a wider audience, he says.

As a result, when Mr. Dworkin began Sphinx, he immediately recruited such donors, including the University of Michigan — where he had returned to college — which gave Sphinx $40,000 during its first year. Mr. Dworkin has also been careful not to expand programs or add staff members beyond what he can pay for, and the group has never run a deficit.

World Bank Connection

Two gifts in particular helped seal Sphinx’s success so far, he says. The group’s first gift, $10,000 donated in 1996 by James D. Wolfensohn, who was then president of the World Bank, gave the organization credibility. A family friend told Mr. Dworkin that Mr. Wolfensohn loved classical music, and he sent a letter to his office, hoping it would be opened.

Then in 2000, a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Texaco Foundation gave Sphinx the long-term financial footing to plan for its future and helped double the number of staff members, to four, says Mr. Dworkin.

This year Sphinx hired its sixth staff member and is now housed in a modest office paid for by the General Motors Corporation on the 21st floor of its gleaming headquarters in downtown Detroit.

The group’s next step, says Mr. Dworkin, is to diversify the sources of its revenue, which currently comes mostly from corporate and foundation gifts.

In 2003 Sphinx received a $150,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., to study its future fund raising and growth.

The resulting plan calls for increasing the budget, from its current $1.1-million to $3-million, hiring at least two additional staff members, including an executive director to run the group’s daily operations, seeking national board members who could assist with seeking big gifts, and starting a $20-million endowment campaign.

So far the group has raised just $100,000, in part, Mr. Dworkin says, because he doesn’t have time to build relationships with donors, something he hopes will change if the group can hire an executive director.

“My biggest challenge is I do not get the opportunity enough to get in front of key big funders,” says Mr. Dworkin. “I am hoping the MacArthur might help in the process of being able to actually contact and sit down with some.”

Outlining a Plan

Mr. Dworkin came up with the idea for Sphinx at the University of Michigan School of Music.

During a session with his violin professor, he asked if they could talk instead of play, then spent the time outlining his plan to start a national competition for black and Latino string players that would highlight talented musicians, give them the opportunity to get to know their peers, and provide cash prizes to assist with future studies.

“I shot a bunch of holes in the idea and said it would never work,” recalls Stephen B. Shipps, the violin professor who now also serves as the university’s associate dean for academic affairs. “He came back the next day with a whole plan on paper, and I was stunned with how quickly and methodically he had thought through the logistical problems.”

Nine years later, the group appears to be thriving, as its budget and programs continue to expand.

The Sphinx Competition — which has more than doubled its number of applicants from its first year, to more than 80 — remains the most visible of its efforts.

Unlike many other competitions, where the main focus is on the medals, the 18 Sphinx Competition finalists, ages 13 to 26, room together, attend panel discussions about writing résumés, and learn about summer music-training programs around the country. They also practice how they will perform during an audition, perform chamber music with established black and Latino musicians who play during the week as the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra, and participate in question-and-answer sessions about their careers. Parents are encouraged to attend as well.

“It’s not about who is the best,” says Mr. Dworkin. “What we want to do is impact this field. I want to see all 18 of them either in a professional orchestra, teaching at a college, or playing in a chamber group.”

Symphony Jobs

This year Sphinx passed an important milestone toward this goal: The first three Sphinx Competition participants landed jobs in professional orchestras. The average age of contestants is only 23, so Mr. Dworkin says he expects more success as students complete their training.

A key component of the program has been giving the two winners the opportunity to play as paid soloists with about 15 major orchestras, an unusual spotlight for a young musician, as well as a way for orchestras to attract new audiences by promoting diversity.

“Sphinx is unique because Aaron has imagined a kind of introductory process, and, if you will, a feeder system for those who are talented from the African-American and Latino community to get to know the orchestra business and be successful in it,” says Allison Vulgamore, president of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which has featured many Sphinx competition winners in its programs.

Even so, Mr. Dworkin says it might take decades to further diversify the nation’s orchestras because of slow turnover rates.

In the meantime, Mr. Dworkin continues to look for additional ways his organization can help, including scholarships to music schools and performance opportunities.

Last December, for example, he received grant money to produce a concert at Carnegie Hall, in New York, showcasing past competition winners. “The performances were first-rate in every way,” wrote Allan Kozinn, a critic for The New York Times. “This student ensemble produced a more beautiful, precise, and carefully shaped sound than some fully professional orchestras that come through Carnegie Hall.”

The group also developed a music curriculum for teachers that reaches about 5,000 students in several states, and Sphinx requires its competition winners to visit schools to demonstrate and discuss classical music.

And Sphinx offers a Saturday program for about 70 youngsters at a time, in partnership with Wayne State University, in Detroit, that includes instrument lessons, as well as sessions on music history, with an emphasis on black and Latino composers.

“So many children in Detroit don’t have the opportunity to play an instrument,” says Carol Goss, president of the Skillman Foundation, in Detroit, which has given $283,000 for the program. “Young people who are involved in culture and arts programs, in the actual making of art, avoid all kinds of poor outcomes like early pregnancy, dropping out of school, and substance abuse. We see this as a strategy that helps young people develop into healthy adults.”

$500,000 to Spend

With the $500,000 from the MacArthur fellowship, Mr. Dworkin, who makes $123,264 annually at Sphinx, is considering becoming a grant maker himself, possibly giving money to projects that revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods and help the homeless.

However, he is certain the MacArthur money won’t change his low-key way of life, or even prod him to take a rare vacation with his new wife, Afa Sadykhly, Sphinx’s longtime vice president of programming, whom he has known since his days at the University of Michigan.

Mr. Dworkin says he plans to stay at the helm of Sphinx until its mission is fully realized, however long that takes.

Such single-minded focus helped him deal with Sphinx’s early naysayers. “One of the biggest things I heard in the inaugural year was, ‘Are you sure you want to do this, because you are just going to bring attention to the fact that the talent isn’t out there,’” says Mr. Dworkin. “My thoughts were, I’m not so bad and I know I’m not the only one.”

He adds: “Now I never hear ‘the talent isn’t out there.’”

ABOUT AARON P. DWORKIN, PRESIDENT, THE SPHINX ORGANIZATION

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1997, and a master’s degree in music from the same university in 1998.

Current job: Oversees the Sphinx Organization, in Detroit, which he founded in 1996 to increase the participation of blacks and Latinos in professional orchestras, music schools, and audiences for classical-music performances. The charity’s annual budget is $1.1-million, with 90 percent coming from foundation and corporate grants.

Hobbies: Writing autobiography and poetry (he has self-published one book, They Said I Wasn’t Really Black), and setting his poetry to classical music.

What he’s been reading: The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman.