Conference Agenda

In 2013, Arthur LaBrew published an article that compared how Black and White musicologists treated Black composers, focusing much of his attention on Edmond Dédé. He does not mention the former’s “grand opera” Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan (1887), despite its acquisition by the Houghton Library several years before this essay. That he was unaware of the Morgiane score confirms a longstanding historiographical problem: scholarship by Black authors tends to remain located in isolation. For example, LaBrew’s highly informative Black Music in a Slave State exists in a single archive and is not available digitally. Without knowing his interest in this area, how could archivists alert him to their recent procurement of Morgiane? And even if James Trotter’s Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878) can be readily found today, the fact that both Trotter and LaBrew had to tailor their enquiries specifically to Black musicians in books written almost 150 years apart bespeaks a persistent musicological neglect of this repertory.

Dédé experienced the same prejudices outlined above, almost always described for his dark skin in print. In this paper, I will argue that Dédé purposefully addressed the racial prejudice he experienced in Morgiane by removing the traditional Othering in French opera, where the Self is European, and replacing it with Arabs and Persians. In the final Act, where we (his French audience) become the Other, the composer challenges traditionally held beliefs of racial hierarchy (prevalent in scientific literature of the time). Significantly, he does not use musical cues to differentiate between the two races, a practice that reinforces his opposition to racial Othering in the minstrel shows that frequently played on the stages where he worked. With this opera, Dédé sought recognition of his worth as a composer without regard to his physiognomy—a direct challenge to the status quo.

This paper explores how three artists working in opera today present new voices and stories on the operatic stage: Denyce Graves, Nkeiru Okoye, and Sandra Seaton. With primary activities as a singer (Graves), composer (Okoye), and librettist (Seaton), each one is also engaged with administrative and pedagogical work through foundations, opera companies, universities, and community organizations. Inside and outside of the opera house, they all are shaping how culture can articulate and represent lived experiences. In this paper I investigate how these three women are providing a larger vision of the way shadow cultures in opera (those that have been hidden from the mainstream view) are moving from the periphery to the center. These three creatives bring to life experiences from the past that provide a deeper context for how we think about the present. In three chosen works—Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom (Okoye, music and libretto, 2013), Tales from the Briar Patch (Okoye music, Carman Moore libretto, 2017), and The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson (Carlos Simon music, Sandra Seaton text, premiered by Denyce Graves, 2021)—I present a cross-section of key themes featured in Black opera today regarding the trauma and triumphs of African American experience. Within the lives of two historical people (Harriet Tubman and singer-impresario Mary Cardwell Dawson) from the antebellum and Jim Crow South, I juxtapose the telling of the Br’er Rabbit story through Okoye’s anthropomorphized Fox, Rabbit, and three lady Birds (sisters Robin, Partridge, and Sparrow) as sites of play, instruction, and building community for children and adults today. Intertwining history and fiction, Okoye, Seaton, and Graves expand the genre of opera to include current lived experiences that animate histories from the past. These three Black women reveal pivotal narratives in how we shape culture today and how history, lived experience, and artistic vision infuse opera with a new relevance for the present.

The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson grew out of a number of related circumstances, all of which developed during the disruption of artistic life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The story of Mary Cardwell Dawson came to the foreground of 1940s operatic history and caught the attention of a number of people. The drive to save her Pittsburgh headquarters, which had been abandoned for decades, led to several benefit concerts. These concerts were heard by Denyce Graves, who in turn was working to keep artists active and moving forward with their careers. Simultaneously, Washington National Opera and Glimmerglass Artistic Director Francesca Zambello sought a new one-act play that would share a story of a woman, one that would dramatize the “unrecorded history” of African Americans in the arts. The resulting play, The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson, premiered at Glimmerglass in Summer, 2021, written by Sandra Seaton with music by composer Carlos Simon. Denyce Graves starred in the title role. The plot encompasses a 12-hour period epitomizing the struggles and achievements of one of the first Black female opera impresarios. Seaton builds her drama on W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness and devises a trope most clearly articulated in her lyrics for “Divided Soul,” Seaton took as inspiration the real-life crisis precipitated by multiple issues with labor unions, ticket holders, venue managers and inclement weather.

With Madame Dawson’s story serving as inspiration, Seaton builds a complex picture of an artist, an advocate, and a woman who, faced with seemingly impossible choices, determines not only her own course of action, but recognizes the implications for her students and future generations of performers.

In this paper I will explore Seaton’s treatment of Dawson’s “divided soul,” examining the tropes that define this one-act play. I will also discuss Seaton’s use of an historical figure to illuminate the broader arena of social justice and activism at the beginning of the long-term Civil Rights era and her impact on later generations of singers.