Spring 2002 Volume XXXI, No. 2

Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies by Salim Washington Reminiscing on Ruth by Bess Lomax Hawes New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja An Amy Beach Discography by Adrienne Fried Block ISAM Matters Reviews Celebrating Jelly Roll by Jeff Taylor Listening to Beach by Liane Curtis Transcribing the Folk by David Evans Our Singing Children by Jane Palmquist ISAM Home

ISAM Matters After the tragic events of 11 September 2001, our conference Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music took place as planned on 26-27 October 2001 at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Over 500 people attended the conference, traveling from California, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Canada, France, and elsewhere; the chamber music concert and the Seeger family tribute concert were sold out. We thank those who came to New York to celebrate Crawford Seeger’s centennial and gratefully acknowledge the conference’s funders: the New York Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Edward T. Cone Foundation, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Baisley Powell Elebash Endowment, the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the Brooklyn College Provost’s Office, Essential Music, Lucille Field Goodman, and Patsy Rogers. For those who could not attend, the conference booklet is available on our website. In recognition of Crawford Seeger’s centennial, we are pleased to publish in this issue of the Newsletter Bess Lomax Hawes’s “Reminiscing on Ruth,” a condensed version of her conference paper (p. 4); David Evans’s review of Crawford Seeger’s long-awaited The Music of American Folk Song (p. 9); and Jane Palmquist’s review of Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger’s CDs of children’s folk songs transcribed and arranged by their mother (p. 11). We had the pleasure of hosting Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University, for a week in March as the Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College for 2001-2002. During his residency, Professor Kelley gave ten thought-provoking talks on topics ranging from Thelonious Monk and the artist Ellen Gallagher to academia and social responsibility, race and the American labor movement, and black feminism. High points of Professor Kelley’s residency were his lecture “Jazz and Freedom Go Hand in Hand” and his performance of Monk’s “Pannonica” and “Misterioso” with the Salim Washington Ensemble. His most recent book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002), analyzes jazz, hip-hop, black liberation struggles, working class radicalism, and U.S. and African American history. We look forward to reading his forthcoming book Misterioso: The Art of Thelonious Monk, to be published by The Free Press. ISAM’s Spring 2002 colloquium series, American Music at the Millennium, featured Jason Kao Hwang, who presented excerpts from his recent opera The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown; Ned Rorem, who talked about his own music and contemporary culture; and Salim Washington, who gave a paper on John Coltrane. Professor Washington’s article “Meditations on Coltrane’s Legacies” appears in this issue. As always, we are grateful to the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities for sponsoring the series. Congratulations to current and former CUNY faculty members who have garnered awards and grants this year: Tania León received a honorary doctorate from Oberlin College in May. Carol J. Oja won the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music for Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, and she was elected President of the Society for American Music. Former ISAM Research Associate R. Allen Lott received the H. Earle Johnson Print Subvention from SAM for his forthcoming book Grand Tours: Five European Piano Virtuosos in the New World, and was elected Vice President of SAM. John Graziano won the Lowens Article Award for “The Early Life and Career of the ‘Black Patti’: The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Adrienne Fried Block received a second year of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her project Music in Gotham: The New York Scene, 1863-1875. Ray Allen and George Cunningham received a PSC-CUNY grant for their ongoing research project, Porgy and Bess: A Critical Reader. News from the Conservatory: We extend a warm welcome to Amnon Wolman, who will join the composition faculty this fall as the new Director of the Center for Computer Music. Professor Wolman has taught at Northwestern University since 1989, and has composed music for theater, radio, film, and dance, electroacoustic music, orchestral and chamber works, and music for solo instruments with tape or live electronics. His compositions have been premiered by Heinz Holliger, Charles Neidich, Ursula Oppens, and the California EAR Unit, and his recent song cycle Thomas and Beulah, with text by Rita Dove, has been recorded on Innova. Jeffrey Biegel premiered Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Millennium Fantasy for piano and orchestra with the Cincinnati Symphony, and will premiere Charles Strouse’s Concerto America with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Orchestra on 30 June and 2 July 2002. We invite you to join us for a conference on the legendary folklorist and world music scholar Alan Lomax, to be held in April 2003 at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. The conference is supported by a grant from the Baisley Powell Elebash Endowment. For more information on this and other upcoming ISAM events, please call our office or visit our website. * * * This will be my last ISAM Matters column until Fall 2003. I received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities to work on a book about popular music and the politics of race. Ray Allen will serve as acting director and Newsletter editor during my leave. See you next year! —Ellie M. Hisama