Conference Agenda

At their 1926 meeting, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs adopted the song, “Lifting as We Climb.” Composed by Wichita clubwoman Mollie Fines, the song drew on the organization’s motto in stressing education and racial uplift for African American women. Fines was appointed the NACWC’s music director by its president, Mary McLeod Bethune, and she had ambitious plans for its fifty thousand members. After her tenure, she remained an important musical force in African American communities in Kansas into the 1940s. Drawing on the Black press, NACWC publications and scholarship (Deborah Gray White, Darlene Clark Hine, and others), and archival materials from the Afro-American Clubwomen Project at Kansas’s Spencer Library, this paper explores the ways in which race, gender, and class intersected in shaping Fines’s musical activities and those of Black women’s organizations.

The NACWC’s early leadership was largely educated and upper class; yet like ca. 40% of African American women employed in the 1920s, Fines was a domestic worker. Her labor in a live-in position enabled cultural initiatives by her white employer, Fannie Hurd, who founded the Saturday Afternoon Musical Club that supported Wichita’s Symphony. In keeping with Black women’s segregation from white women’s clubs, Fines’s Harry T. Burleigh Music Club met in her garage apartment beside the Hurd mansion. Through her club and church affiliations, Fines promoted the music of African American composers, exhibiting sheet music, organizing state music contests, conducting choral performances, and directing pageants on racial and religious topics. Marilyn Dell Brady has contrasted the Kansas Federation’s artistic focus with the political agendas of the larger National Association. However, Fines’s musical events in Kansas frequently helped subsidize educational and social initiatives, such as funding scholarships and childcare facilities. Her larger aspirations for the NACWC, including establishing ongoing national contests, creating a music room in its Washington headquarters, and producing a history of the music division, were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, Fines’s engagement with the NACWC was personally transformative. Her activism reveals how Black women’s groups’ music making was deeply entwined with racial uplift and philanthropic efforts to meet the pressing needs of African American communities.

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16th, 2022, at the hands of Iran’s morality police, was the catalyst for ongoing global protest against the Islamic regime. As a result, the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement formed, and the first song regarding the movement, “Baraye” (meaning “For”), was released twelve days after Amini’s death. “Baraye” won the Grammy for Social Change, a Special Merit Award introduced in 2022. During my fieldwork in Washington, DC, in February 2023, Iranians sang it as their protest anthem in front of the White House and at the US Capitol to capture President Biden’s attention. My discussion considers women’s awareness about equal rights (Melucci 1989), cultural patterns of social movements (Manuel 2019), roles of protest music (Moufarrej 2018), and musical sounds as powerful social resources (Danaher 2018). Participating in protests in Iran and the US gives me the privilege and agency to elaborate on notions that were not discussed before. It is crucial to discuss the protest soundscape in a life/death situation of protesting in Iran compared to globalized forms of protests in the Capital. This paper illuminates the staging of protests in solidarity with Iran in the United States. How does the Iranian diaspora materialize the message of their protests through music to communicate with the host society? How does the social history of the United States lead the global protests? Why is protest music essential for the Iranian diaspora in staging protests in the United States?

This paper borrows its name from a publication in which Machado de Assis–likely the most significant Brazilian writer of all times and Club Beethoven’s librarian–describes female presence and involvement in concert environments in Rio. Club Beethoven was the most exclusive musical institution in 1880s Rio; women were not allowed in the premises, and De Assis describes them as “audience,” not as performers or decision makers. However, observers such as Italian violinist Vincenzo Cernicchiaro, Pinho and Renault cite female singers, pianists, and violinists working in Rio during the late 1800s, both as amateurs and professionals. The aim of this research is to investigate womens’ positionalities and participation in concert music in the second half of the nineteenth century in Rio.

The paper focuses on concert music, more specifically in music clubs and associations that produced concerts, soirées, benefits and balls, in which European concert music was the main repertory of choice. It dialogues with, and furthers works from Brazilian musicologists Cristina Magaldi and Avelino Romero Pereira, who studied spaces in which concert music was cultivated in Rio de Janeiro. The philosophies that oriented the functioning of these institutions were based on open imitation of European culture, and on adoption of colonial taxonomies that placed people in different stages of “evolution” regarding race, class and gender, even after the independence from Portugal. The aim is to examine the role of women in these spaces and events, and their participation (or lack of) as producers and performers, vis-a-vis patriarchal and colonial societal structures that may have placed them within the private sphere, even in semi-public spaces. The paper describes Rio’s concert scenario from the vantage point of actors that are not usually included in the “official” history: women as an “audience” that was fundamental for concerts to come about, but invisible to the public eye in their role of producers or performers, unveiling structures and ideas about gender roles in late nineteenth-century Rio’s society.