Fall 2020
Poster for Jazz in Brooklyn: “Felt Not Heard”
Jazz in Brooklyn: “Felt Not Heard”
Victor Solano in conversation with Eric Lemon
Thursday, December 10, 2020
4 p.m.
Zoom Registration
Free and open to the public
Jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer Victor Solano will talk with bassist Eric Lemon about his career and The Brownstone, a jazz space in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The two will then move on to a larger conversation regarding the jazz scene in Bed-Stuy, not only about the clubs that existed, but also remembering the fish fries and the rent parties. Solano and Lemon will celebrate both known figures in jazz and undersung personnel, highlighting Bed-Stuy as a vibrant place where jazz is constantly evolving.
Victor Solano is a graduate of City College’s jazz conservatory, where he studied with tenor saxophonist Jason Rigby and jazz pianist Danny Dalillo. After graduating, Solano performed with Takuya Koroda and is currently a student at Brownstone Jazz, the celebrated Brooklyn jazz venue, where he performs with Eric Lemon, Patience Higgins, Stanley Banks, and many others. He currently leads a septet playing his original music and that of his bandmates. Solano is completing a M.A. in Global Jazz at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College.
Eric Lemon is a bassist from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. He studied jazz performance at Long Island University and went on to play with legends such as James Spaulding. He now lives in Bed-Stuy and with his wife runs Brownstone Jazz, a venue that keeps the history of live jazz and Friday night fish fries alive in Brooklyn. They hold events, jam sessions, and classes to educate the youth and up-and-coming jazz musicians in the community.
Poster for Lyrical without Lyrics: Where Poetry and Music Intersect
Lyrical Without Lyrics: Where Poetry and Music Intersect
Rosamond S. King in conversation with Malcolm Merriweather
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
12:30 p.m.
Zoom Registration
Free and open to the public
Rosamond S. King discusses how music influences and appears in her poetry, including in a recent collaboration with composer Daniel Sonenberg and opera singer Malinda Haslett.
Creative and critical writer and performer Rosamond S. King draws on reality to create non-literal, culturally, and politically engaged interpretations of African diaspora experiences. Poetry publications include the forthcoming All the Rage, the Lambda Award–winning collection Rock | Salt | Stone, and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies. Her performance art, including her distinctive Verse Cabaret style, has been curated into venues around the world. Her scholarly monograph Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination was named "Best Book" by the Caribbean Studies Association. She is director of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and an associate professor at Brooklyn College. King's goal for all of her work is to make people feel, wonder, and think, usually in that order.
Poster for How We Got Here, Where To Now? Coming to Terms with Academic Music’s Past
How We Got Here, Where to Now? Coming to Terms With Academic Music's Past
Phil Ewell in conversation with Ellen Bakulina and Joe Straus
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
12:30 p.m.
Zoom Registration
Free and open to the public | this event will not be recorded
The past is now under great scrutiny in music studies. How do we teach music to our students? How do we examine music in analysis, and how do we choose the music we consider worthy of attention? In this talk I consider our past so that we might chart a path for the future. Only through an exhaustive study of the past can we truly understand why the academic study of music is what it is today: an exclusionist field of study centered around whiteness and maleness. In coming to terms with our difficult past, we—white, black, and everyone in between—can create a new, rich, and inclusive academic study of music.
Philip Ewell is associate professor of music theory at Hunter College (CUNY). His specialties include Russian music and music theory, Russian opera, modal theory, and critical race studies. He received the 2019–20 Presidential Award for Excellence in Creative Work at Hunter College. He is the Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Virtual Scholar in Residence at the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music, both for this academic year. He is currently working on a monograph combining race and feminist studies with music and music theory.
Ellen Bakulina is assistant professor of music theory at the University of North Texas. She has degrees from CUNY, McGill University, and the College of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Bakulina's areas of interest include theories of form and meter in tonal music, Schenkerian analysis, the music of Rachmaninoff, and the Russian music-theoretical tradition. Her articles have appeared in Intersections, Music Theory Online, the Journal of Music Theory, Intégral, and Theoria, among others.
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in music since 1900. He has written technical music-theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and, most recently, a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. He has written textbooks that have become standard references. Many of his books and articles have received publication awards from the Society for Music Theory, of which he was president from 1997 to 1999.
Poster for Music: More Beautiful, More Terrible
Music: More Beautiful, More Terrible
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. in conversation with Jeffrey Taylor
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
2:15 p.m.
Zoom Registration
Free and open to the public
This conversation between Guthrie Ramsey and jazz historian Jeffrey Taylor will address the role of music in everyday life, which is often downplayed in its academic study. By thinking through music's power to chart pleasure and combat strife, we can offer our teaching relevance for today's revolutionary challenges.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a musicologist, pianist, composer, and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop, and African American Music: Grove Music Essentials. Ramsey is currently completing two new books, a collection of mid-career essays titled Who Hears Here? and a monograph history of African American music from the slave era to the present. As the leader of the band Dr. Guy's MusiQology, he has released four CDs: A Spiritual Vibe, Vol. 1; Y the Q; The Colored Waiting Room; and B Eclectic, and he has performed at venues such as Blue Note in New York and the Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Philadelphia.
