Institute for Studies in American Music

 

Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College


In collaboration with the Conservatory of Music, the Department of Africana Studies, the American Studies Program, and the Office of the Provost at Brooklyn College present:

 

Spring 2008

Music in Polycultural America

 

 

“I was Praying in my Playing”: Black Women, Jazz and Spirituality

Tammy Kernodle is Associate Professor of Musicology at Miami University and has served as the Scholar-in-Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.  She has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still and the religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.  She is the author of the biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Northeastern University Press, 2004) which chronicles the life and music of one of the leading female figures in modern jazz.  Kernodle’s work has also appeared in Musical Quarterly, American Music Research Journal, and in an anthology addressing the contributions of women to music entitled Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds (Northeastern University Press).

 

Wednesday, 19 March, 5 pm, Gold Room, Brooklyn College Student Center

The Songs of Libby Larsen

The first woman resident composer with a major symphony orchestra, Libby Larsen is the author of over 220 compositions, from chamber works, to orchestral pieces, to opera. This event honors Larsen’s unique achievements in the world of art song, and includes “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning),  “My Àntonia” (based on the novel by Willa Cather), and “Try Me, Good King” (texts drawn from “the final letters and gallows speeches of Katherine Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Katherine Howard”). Soprano Ann Tedards is Associate Professor of Voice, Associate Dean, and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Music, University of Oregon. Pianist Marva Duerksen is Assistant Professor of Music at Willamette University.

 

Wednesday, 2 April, 4 pm, Levenson Recital Hall

Populuxe: Paul Whiteman and the Birth of Glorified Pop

John Howland is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Rutgers University, where he specializes in the study of the arranging traditions of popular music, big band jazz, jazz-related dance bands, musical theater, and the media of film and radio. His forthcoming book, “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press) traces African American contributions to the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s through 1940s. He is also working on a second book project, With Strings: Orchestral Pop and Glorified Entertainment. Howland is co-founder and co-editor of Jazz Perspectives, an interdisciplinary jazz studies journal that recently won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal of 2007.

 

Thursday, 17 April, 12:15 pm, Maroon Room, Brooklyn College Student Center

The Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium Presents

The 9th Annual Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival: “Brooklyn - In the JAZZ Tradition”

Concert and Jam Session with The New Cookers

 

$10, free for students with valid ID

 

The Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium is an amalgam of jazz musicians, venue owners, churches, community-based organizations, and music patrons. Over the past nine years, they have presented an annual spring festival (of which this concert is one of the final events), established a Brooklyn Jazz Hall of Fame, and produced yearly programs of events and activities that feature local jazz musical talents. The New Cookers (named after a famous recording by Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan, “The Night of the Cookers,” recorded live in Brooklyn in 1965) is a group of rising stars in Brooklyn’s jazz community that includes trumpeter Kenyatta Beasley and pianist Anthony Wonsey. The ensemble references the hard bop and free jazz of the 1950s and 1960s, while transforming its rhythm and energy into an exhilarating new sound. The concert will be preceded by a presentation on Brooklyn’s significance to jazz history by Jeffrey Taylor, I.S.A.M. Director, and followed by an informal discussion and jam session with members of The New Cookers.

Thursday, 1 May, 5 pm, Levenson Recital Hall

 

 

The Brooklyn College Student Center is located on Campus Road and East 27th Street.

For more information, please call ISAM at (718) 951-5655

 

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