Saturday, 16 November 2024
10:45am CST
2024 AMS CWG Endowed Lecture
Red Lacquer Ballroom

This 2024 AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture will by delivered by Samantha Ege.

Event Description

On November 27, 1917, Roland Hayes gave an evening recital at the South Park Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. A young Margaret Bonds watched alongside her mother, Estella, enthralled by the tenor’s programming of Negro Spirituals. The city’s appetite for Black concert culture so deeply moved Nora Holt, music critic for the Chicago Defender, that she immediately proclaimed a “Chicago Renaissance.” Holt subsequently took decisive charge in further shaping Black classical Chicago and situated her work in a community of Black women world-makers.

This talk explores the ways in which Samantha Ege maps these histories in her new book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene. Therein she writes, “I am drawn to narratives where the scenes and sites of Black women’s artistry and intellectuality matter as much as the sounds.” A mix of presentation and conversation, featuring Chicago composer Regina Harris Baiocchi, this talk delves into the genealogies and geographies of Black women’s classical music enterprise.

Presenter

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.