The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Rendering Audible: Voice, Creative Practice, and 18th-century Airs about African Enslavement
Chair(s): Naomi André (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Discussant(s): Jasmine Henry (University of Pennsylvania)
Presenter(s): Awet Andemicael (Yale University), Rebecca Cypess (Yeshiva University), Berta Joncus (Guildhall School of Music and Drama), Julia Hamilton-Louey (Eastman School of Music), Maria Ryan (Florida State University)
In the 18th century, as Europe’s slave trade forcibly dispersed Africans across the lands bordering the Atlantic, dozens of polite British airs about Black enslavement were sung and published. Participants in this workshop will consider whether performance and critique can turn this music, composed and versified by empathetic whites, into a useful witness to African displacement and suffering. That there were also Black authors of 18th-century music will be vivified through a performance of works by Ignatius Sancho, Britain’s first published Black composer, who embedded subtle social critiques within music.
Inspired by Jasmine A. Henry’s recent work on reparative public musicology, the workshop will first consider whether Abolition-themed airs can genuinely impart any of the Black experience they appropriated. Second, it will explore how critical awareness of Sancho’s use of polite musical allusion to counter white social prejudice might be brought across in performance of his songs and keyboard works. Finally, attendees will be asked whether this workshop’s preparation and performance has made audible the antislavery intentions behind Abolition song, this hopefully opening out into a wider discussion about how to approach 18th-century music by or about Black people. The workshop team will agree on criteria for selecting Abolition airs that seem most sensitive to their subjects. In rehearsal, soprano Awet Andemicael and keyboardist Rebecca Cypess will work to reimagine the African lives Abolition songs referenced, and to recover Sancho’s practice. The team will consider additions to the program – such as post-1800 Black song, including Francis Johnson’s Abolitionist The Grave of the Slave – that can deepen audience experience of the earlier music.
The workshop will start with a 30-minute performance by Awet and Rebecca of materials downloadable in advance. Chair Naomi André will give an overview of the workshop’s preparation, after which each team member will speak for c10 minutes about their own approach to and learning from the workshop. Naomi will then invite and moderate input from attendees about how and even whether Abolition song should be performed, what performance can impart about Sancho’s musical rhetoric, and how embodiment might transcend the constraints of difficult musical texts.
