January 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011 - 8:00 p.m.
Natalie Davis Rooke Recital Hall
Guest Recital: Amanda Robie '03, mezzo-soprano, & Rachel Crane-Sitomer '03, soprano
with Ashlee Mack '03, piano
A concert featuring three Bucknell graduates of the class of 2003, performing three of Schumann's Spanisches Liederspiel, as well as excerpts from Jake Heggie's Songs to the Moon, Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.
Sunday, January 23, 2011 - 4:30 p.m.
Natalie Davis Rooke Recital Hall
Senior Recital: Caitlin Edwards, soprano
Please note change in date:
Friday, January 28, 2011 - 7:30 p.m.
Weis Center for the Performing Arts
Faculty Recital: Barry Hannigan, piano
Featuring premiere performances of William Andrew Burnson's ('07) Bike Ride and Fixations, along with Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Corelli, Godowsky's The Gardens at Buitenzorg, and two Chopin Valses.
Sunday, January 30, 2011 - 4:00 p.m.
Natalie Davis Rooke Recital Hall
Guest Lecture-Recital: Kathleen Sasnett, soprano on The Verdi, Puccini, and Wagnerian Soprano
Dr. Kathleen Sasnett is Assistant Professor of Voice and Opera at Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College, where she directs Opera Workshop, Sunderman Opera Studio, and teaches Applied Voice. A former Miss Washington, and a top ten finalist in the Miss America Pageant, Kathleen has performed leading operatic, oratorio, and musical theater roles throughout America and in Europe.
Monday, January 31, 2011 - 7:00 p.m.
Bucknell Hall
Williams' Colloquium on Jazz & Culture**
Lecture & Performance: Guthrie Ramsey, Ph.D., Kahn Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania
Guthrie P. Ramsey is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely published writer, he is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 2003. He has also written In Walked Bop: Earl "Bud" Powell and the Modern Jazz Experiment (forthcoming) and Who Hears Here? Essays on Black Music, History, and Society (forthcoming).
A Chicago native, Ramsey earned his doctorate in Musicology at the University of Michigan. He was a Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow at Dartmouth College, a DuBois Institute Fellow at Harvard University, and a recipient of the Lowens Award from the Society of American Music for best article on an American music topic. Among his recent work is a commission (with Pres. Obama's inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander) for an anthem commemorating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP. He co-curated the 2010 exhibition Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. Ramsey was creative consultant and librettist for Ramsey Lewis' A Proclamation of Hope: A Symphonic Poem, which premiered in 2009 and was performed at the Kennedy Center in November 2010.
"Jazz as Social Contract"
The ideology and reality of race has shaped the dynamic reception history of all music labeled "African-American." Beyond this quality of their social histories, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, blues, and hip-hop share strong "familial" relationships in the sonic realm that scholars speak about as audible traces of a nonlinear historical African cultural legacy. In addition to these commonalities, these genres have distinguished themselves with social, historical, geographical, and commercial commonalities.
Generic names like "jazz" guide listeners into proper responses that are dictated by a social contract established by the label. They frame the communication of meaning, the contexts for interpretation, and provide a starting point for discerning changes or innovations. To be sure, positioning a musical practice in this or that category carries important consequences: it connects the music and musicians to commercial institutions, genre-specific interpretations, and to "traditional" audience bases. Thus, when music is assigned a genre designation, it speaks to both purely sonic issues and to larger social orders.
*Bucknell University acknowledges with gratitude generous funding from the Weis family which makes possible the Janet Weis Cabaret Jazz Series.
**made possible by a gift from Ellen Williams '19, the University Lectureship Committee, and the Griot Institute.
