Conference Agenda

Session
"She Proclaimed a Chicago Renaissance": Mapping Black Women's Classical World-Making (AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture)
Time:
Saturday, 16/Nov/2024:
10:45am - 12:15pm

Session Chair: Christi Jay Wells, Arizona State University
 Location: Red Lacquer Ballroom

4th floor, Palmer House Hilton Hotel
Session Topics:
Daytime [90-minutes], Noontime [90-minutes], 1900–Present, African American / Black Studies, Gender / Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies

Presentations

"She Proclaimed a Chicago Renaissance": Mapping Black Women's Classical World-Making (AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture)

Chair(s): Christi Jay Wells (Arizona State University)

Discussant(s): Regina Harris Baioicchi (n/a), Artina McCain (University of Memphis), Medomfo Owusu (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary)

Presenter(s): Samantha Ege (University of Southampton)

Organized by the Committee on Women and Gender.

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.