music

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• SOURCE: Time
  4/19/19
  

  How the Black Colleges Beyoncé Honors in Homecoming Have Played a Vital Role in American History

  The feeling of unity expressed by Beyoncé’s loving tribute goes even deeper than viewers may know: throughout that history, HBCUs have contributed to every sphere of American life.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  2/24/19
  

  This Retired Howard Professor Wants "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to Inspire Americans

  Eugene Williams Sr., with support from his wife Mary Johnson, is trying to convince NBA teams and schools nationwide to play “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” at games or events during Black History Month. 

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• SOURCE: Oxford University Press Blog
  1/15/19
  

  Music in history: overcoming historians’ reluctance to tackle music as a source

  by Matt Karush

  What explains historians' aversion to using music as a source?

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• 12-13-15
  

  The Vietnam War We’ve Ignored

  by Craig Werner and Doug Bradley

  The role music played in the lives of the American soldiers.

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• 4-26-15
  

  There Is One More Thing We Need to Remember About the Civil War

  by Timothy Walch

  We owe a lot to the young men who wielded bugles, fifes and drums, as well to those who fired weapons and charged the ramparts.

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• SOURCE: Associated Press
  11-4-13
  

  Santana, other musicians join effort to jazz up NY home of John Coltrane, turn it into museum

  The cavalcade of musicians is trying to transform the Dix Hills, Long Island home.

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• Review of Mark Kurlansky's "Ready for a Brand New Beat"

  by Ron Briley

  A new musical history of the civil rights era will be familiar to scholars, but it still hits all the right notes.

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• 7-29-13
  

  Bruce: Every Historian's Favorite Rock Star

  by John Johnson

  Review of the documentary film Springsteen and I, directed by Baillie Walsh and produced by Ridley Scott.

• SOURCE: Detroit News
  7-16-13
  

  Smithsonian searches for Berry Gordy portrait

  Detroit— The Smithsonian Institution has been on a two-year hunt for a fabled oil painting of legendary Detroit business tycoon Berry Gordy Jr., founder of Motown Records. The portrait: Gordy dressed as Napoleon.The painting, created by a Detroit artist, is just as it sounds. Gordy, the brilliant, autocratic founder of one of the most iconic music labels ever, is depicted in early-19th-century military garb of the French emperor who tried to conquer the world.“Berry said, ‘Damn, I like that,’” the artist, DeVon Cunningham, recalled Gordy commenting when he first saw the portrait that had been commissioned by Gordy’s sister.That was in 1969 at Gordy’s former Boston-Edison home in Detroit. And that was the last time Cunningham saw the portrait....

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• Why MOOCs are Like the Music Industry

  by Alex Sayf Cummings

  Every year, I have students in my media history class break into two teams. One side has to argue that the media in America have become more homogenous and monopolized by a small handful of corporate interests -- the Viacoms and Murdochs of the world, and possibly the Koch brothers (if they can get their hands on the Los Angeles Times).The other team argues the counterpoint -- that despite the consolidation of radio stations, newspapers, and other traditional media by a few big corporations, the media have actually grown more open and diverse over the last thirty years, with the proliferation of cable, video, blogs, tweets and texts and so forth. Consumers have more options, not less.

• SOURCE: WSJ
  3-24-13
  

  One man's memoir of 9/11 becomes another's symphony

  Mohammed Fairouz has never been shy about using his musical platform to explore political and social issues. Nor is the young New York-based composer allergic to popular culture in its most colorful forms. So for his latest work, "Symphony No. 4, In the Shadow of No Towers," which will make its world premiere Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, he is grappling with the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by adapting the 2004 graphic novel "In the Shadow of No Towers" by Art Spiegelman.Mr. Fairouz, who is 27 and grew up in New York and London, said he was initially attracted both to the book's structure and to its contemplative treatment of the events. "Graphic novels have a kind of architecture that is musical," he said. "I thought the way that it dealt with the event and its aftermath wasn't overly sentimental, but at the same time was respectful."But when he pitched the "No Towers" idea to Mr. Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and illustrator of "Maus" was hesitant. A previous effort by another composer to create a multimedia production had yielded mixed results, so the artist's expectations were tempered. After hearing Mr. Fairouz's completed symphony, though, he was moved....