Friday, 15 November 2024
2:15pm CST
Honore Ballroom

South Side Impresarios: Sonic Legacies and Lineages features Samantha Ege and offers a mix of performance and conversation that attends to the sound worlds and resonant afterlives of Chicago’s early twentieth-century Black women composers, performers, and patrons. The South Side impresarios were, as Ege demonstrates in her book South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene (University of Illinois Press), highly educated, musically trained, race proud, and gender conscious—i.e., race women. Artistry and activism entwined as they navigated the racial segregation of their locale and the discriminatory strictures of the classical world. Through their efforts, a rich climate of Black classical music-making bloomed from their South Side base, with a complex of infrastructures, institutions, and ideologies undergirding their sponsorship and support of Black classical talent. This was the environment in which Florence Price found a sense of belonging, in which Marian Anderson gained her earliest champions, and in which Margaret Bonds absorbed the Black Chicago Renaissance energies of the practitioners around her.

In this session, Ege opens with Price’s Sonata in E minor (1932). Price wrote this piece amid a period of financial difficulty and personal woe; yet it was also during this time that she found great support among a South Side sisterhood that comprised the Bonds family, patron and soprano Maude Roberts George, and the structures of what Imani Perry calls “Black associational life” found in the National Association of Negro Musicians and its local chapter, the Chicago Music Association. The sonata thus animates this dynamic network.

Following the sonata is Regina Harris Baiocchi’s Azuretta (2000). The late musicologist and pianist Helen Walker-Hill locates Baiocchi along the lineage of Price’s South Side sisterhood. Ege, too, makes the connection as someone who has performed Baiocchi’s music at the Chicago Cultural Center (which was the former Chicago Public Library and a space frequented by this sisterhood) and at the National Association of Negro Musicians’s centenary celebrations. She therefore revisits Azuretta here to evince the stylistic and cultural continuities and divergences across Price’s and Baiocchi’s generations.

Ege ends with Bravura (2023), composed by the Afro-Cuban composer Camila Cortina Bello and commissioned for South Side Impresarios. Writing that book impelled Ege to consider how she, as a concert pianist, could realize more of her own impresarial potential. As a result, she asked Bello for a piece titled Bravura, upon which she mapped the thesis “some of us are brave” from the landmark Black feminist text All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982). She then requested that Bello construct a “Florence Price” theme from Price’s Fantasie Nègre no. 1 in E minor (1929) and a “Margaret Bonds” theme from Bonds’s “Troubled Water” (1967)—both of which she will demonstrate as part of the concert. Intertwining these themes with one another and with nineteenth-century Romanticism, jazz, and Afro-Cuban influences, Bravura contributes new perspectives on the legacies and lineages of the South Side impresarios.

Performer

Samantha Ege is a musicologist, concert pianist, and research fellow at the University of Southampton. She is the author of South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price. Her work on women composers in Chicago has been recognized by the Society for American Music’s 2023 Irving Lowens Article Award and American Musicological Society’s 2021 Noah Greenberg Award. She has recorded several albums that highlight piano music from the Black Chicago Renaissance; her next albums feature piano concertos by Julia Perry, Doreen Carwithen, and Avril Coleridge-Taylor.