Music and Liberation Book Club
with Minnesota Opera & Black Garnet Bookstore
Does opera make enough space for people of color? What makes music “Black?” If jazz is Black American music, then why is every university jazz department run by white people? What difference can music make in the face of state violence? Does the sound of my voice matter and what do I sound like to others? In this book club we explore these questions and the history, politics, and liberatory legacies of Black music. Challenging the sonic color line that often defines genre, this event explores the power of music to either reproduce or destabilize violent categories of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and class. Hosted by Black Garnet Bookstore and led by Minnesota Opera’s Dr. Allison Lewis, together we will engage both fiction, non-fiction, and sound as we ask questions about the role music plays in liberation and how our own musical practices define our own identities.
DETAILS
Led by:
Allison Michele Lewis
Where:
Black Garnet Bookstore
1319 University Ave W
St Paul, MN 55104
When:
June – September | Third Sunday of the Month
June 21 | July 19 | August 16 | September 20
Time:
1:30pm – 3:30pm
Contact:
[email protected]
Summer Session
June 21
Jazz by Toni Morrison
July 19
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis
August 16
Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Naomi Andre
September 20
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman
Additional/Future Readings
Loving Music Till It Hurts by William Cheng
On Music Theory: Making Music More Welcoming by Phillip Ewell
Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Amiri Baraka
Southside Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Musical Scene by Samantha Ege
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern by Jayna Brown
The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks
Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York by Fiona I. B. Ngô
Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music by David Brackett
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Benjamin Barson
The Music of Black Americans: A History by Eileen Southern
Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen by Sherrie Tucker
Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson by Shana L. Redmond
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose
Dreaming in Ensemble by Lucy Caplan
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music by Nina Sun Eidsheim
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States by Matthew D. Morrison
The Black Aesthetic by Addison Gayle Jr.
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten
Opera and the Culture of Fascism by Jeremy Tambling
Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera by Naomi André
Blackness in Opera edited by Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor
Sights, Sounds, and Soul: Twin Cities Through the Lens of Charles Chamblis by Charles Chamblis and Davu Seru
Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.