This program will be held in-person at the Newberry and livestreamed on Zoom. The online version of this event will be live captioned. Please register below.
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Join us as Samantha Ege shares stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making, illustrated with musical performances of some of their works.
In her new book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene, Dr. Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community.
Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.
South Side Impresarios will be available to purchase at the Newberry bookshop, and the author will sign copies after the program.
This program is generously supported by the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation.
Speaker
Samantha Ege is a leading scholar and interpreter of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Her work illuminates Price in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance and Black women's dynamic networks of advocacy, empowerment, and uplift therein. In 2019, she held a Newberry Short-Term Resident Fellowship, conducting research that contributed to her new book. As a concert pianist, with four critically acclaimed albums to date, she has performed across the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia.
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens March 1.
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