Witness to History: Renard Edwards and the Joy of Being at Home

Above: Renard Edwards; photo by Jessica Griffin

By Judith Kurnick 

Have you ever felt something completely unexpected that you knew in that moment was a kind of destiny? We’re lucky to experience one of these. Yet not one, but several such moments have brought Philadelphia Orchestra violist Renard Edwards to a life he could scarcely have imagined as a young boy. It all happened right here in Philadelphia.

The first occasion occurred when he was in middle school, watching television with his parents in West Philadelphia. “I saw an orchestra,” he recounts, “and a violinist. I had never heard classical music. But the piece was so beautiful, and I wanted to play it. I thought if I could just get a violin, I could do it.”

A few weeks later, after a Philadelphia Orchestra string quintet came to the school, there was an announcement that anyone who wanted to learn to play should come get an instrument. “I was just waiting until the end of the day so I could run to the music room to get a violin,” Edwards continues. “When I got there, the violins were all gone. But they had a viola. When I opened the case, it looked like a violin, so I said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

This was Edwards’s second transformative moment. “I got the viola, and the only thing that mattered to me was that I had a short period of time before I was going to graduate high school. And since I had somehow decided that I was going to try to make a career playing this music, I wanted to gain as much experience on the instrument as I could. Starting on viola helped me, because there was always a need for violists.”

After a year with a local teacher, the 13-year-old was told to go to Settlement Music School, in South Philadelphia, where he studied with Philadelphia Orchestra violist Leonard Mogill. One day the chamber music teacher told Mogill that a group of older musicians needed a replacement second violist to play the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s String Octet. Could young Renard manage the part? Mogill said yes, and Edwards was thrilled to be rehearsing with upperclassmen.

When he got to school—an hour early—on the morning of the performance, “I realized I had left my music at home,” Edwards recalls. “The principal called me into her office. I told her I could go home and get it. But that meant taking the trolley, and she knew I wouldn’t make it in time. She told me, ‘There are seven people who won’t get to play because of you. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the school.’”

Without thinking, Edwards made a split-second decision. “I said I could play it from memory. I had never memorized anything, but I just felt as if I could do it. When we went out on the stage, they all had a thin sheet of music, and I brought my etude book. I look back on it and think ‘What chutzpah!’ But I did it, no memory slip.”

With that incident, Edwards had both surprised and proven himself. His chamber music teacher said, “I’ve changed my opinion of you.” Edwards explains, “Back in the ’50s, seeing a Black kid playing chamber music people thought, ‘That’s nice, but really?’ He later learned that some Black friends who went to Central High School were told, “Orchestras like The Philadelphia Orchestra will never hire you. You should change your major.” They did. He notes, “I didn’t hear about that until we were all adults, and it shocked me.” At his own Overbrook High School, “while my music teacher wasn’t enthusiastic for me to become a classical musician, he didn’t tell me that. I kept doing the plus/minus percentages,” Edwards says, “weighing the social, economic, artistic reasons to go on. And it seemed like the pluses always won out, so I kept at it, no matter what the minuses.”

After graduation, Edwards had to give his instrument back to the school. To buy one of his own, he had to get a job. He spent a year sweeping up in a TV appliance store, a year of not playing viola. “I didn’t have any guidance,” he recalls.” I just had the will to keep trying.” Fortunately, his brother was able to pitch in with the rest of the funds. Mogill, Edwards’s teacher, took him to pick out a viola and bow. “I had to learn how to play again.”

Edwards auditioned for Indiana University, which has a very large music department with multiple orchestras. Academic institutions wanted to encourage young Black high school students to continue their studies, and he was offered a full scholarship. “But after I came home, I didn’t hear anything from them,” he remembers. “I thought maybe things had changed.”

And then he encountered another of those transformative moments. A friend told him about the New School of Music and its professional training orchestra. The school was founded by Max Aronoff, the violist of the Curtis String Quartet, and the faculty included the members of the quartet and members of The Philadelphia Orchestra. “When I found out the teachers were the same teachers who taught at Curtis, and it was right here in Philadelphia, I thought ‘I’m a Philadelphian. It would be beneficial for me to stay and be in the music atmosphere at home, rather than the campus of a large university. I’d be crazy to go to Indiana.’” Edwards studied for four years with Aronoff on a full scholarship. He soon put together a string quartet that played concerts in the Delaware Valley and beyond. “I was living the life I’d dreamed of.”

But lightning struck, yet again. Aronoff told Edwards there was a viola opening in The Philadelphia Orchestra and that he should take the audition. Thanks to the Orchestra’s Friday afternoon free ticket program for high school students and his membership in the Columbia Record Club, Edwards was very familiar with the Orchestra’s style and sound. “I just did it. It was music I had heard so many times. After the audition, I packed up my viola and walked the few blocks home from the Academy of Music. Ten minutes later I got a phone call from the Orchestra’s personnel manager, Mason Jones. He said, ‘Why aren’t you here? Come back, you’re in the second round.’ So, I went back and played again. We were all asked to wait in the Green Room. Mason came out and told me, ‘You’ve been accepted.’ I just blinked and said, ‘You mean in the Orchestra?’ He said, ‘Yes, you are now going to be a member of The Philadelphia Orchestra.’ And … I was home.”

The announcement of Edwards’s hiring spread to newspapers across the United States and as far as Europe. After getting over his initial shock, he remembers being surprised that it was such a big deal. “It’s like a young tennis player winning his first big tournament and thinking, I just hit forehand and backhand, and I won,” he says. But this was 1970, and Edwards was the first Black member in the Orchestra’s history, one of very few Black musicians in major American orchestras.

Did he face racism? Edwards found the Orchestra members “very kind, on the whole.” There have been small issues from time to time, he notes, but nothing overt. “It’s difficult to have overt negativity and then walk out and play Brahms or Mozart,” he says.

And today, after more than five decades in the Orchestra, Edwards notes, “When I look out and see people who love this music sitting there by the thousands, it’s a vindication of anything that could be negative socially. We play music by composers—men and women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. It is the manifestation of the creativity of humanity. We have so many examples of that all over the world. And we can celebrate it.”

Edwards is one of the last remaining Orchestra members who went on the historic 1973 Tour of China, the first by an American orchestra (“I remember I was sick there, and the Chinese gave me some kind of potion that tasted like Ovaltine. It seemed to work.”) He is also one of the few members who can say they have played for every music director except the first two. Wait, how is that possible? Ormandy already was music director then and Stokowski, the third music director, did not return after 1969, one year before Edwards became a member.

“My last year in high school, I was rehearsing in the All City Orchestra,” recalls Edwards. “Our music director said that Stokowski was going to show up. Right, we thought. Then a door at the back of the auditorium opened, and who should come down the aisle but the man we all saw shake Mickey Mouse’s hand? We were speechless. We revered this man. We had all seen Fantasia and dreamed of playing that music one day. When he asked for an A [to tune the orchestra], it was the most beautiful A I ever heard. He was a very old man with a wizened look and beautiful hands. He had a presence that seemed to embody the music.”

Over his time in the Orchestra, Edwards has appreciated how each music director kept the beauty of the sound while shaping the music according to their interpretations. Some of his fondest memories are of accompanying great singers, like Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, George Shirley, and Shirley Verrett. But he singles out one experience during a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, when the Christ figure sings, “My God, why has Thou created me?” “I was reading a book called The Murder of Christ,” Edwards recalls, “and suddenly I was overwhelmed, crying, and I couldn’t control it. My stand partner, Irving Segall, said, ‘Don’t be embarrassed. That’s what this is all about.’”

“I’ve been moved many times in performances, sitting among the sound of this orchestra,” Edwards muses. “And I’m at home. I’m still at home.”

Judith Kurnick has written about music for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and media outlets in Europe. She was The Philadelphia Orchestra’s vice president for communications from 1983 to 1989 and 2000 to 2005 and held the same role at the League of American Orchestras from 2008 to 2013.