Full Description
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago's South Side into a wellspring of music making. Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene's audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.
A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Finding Their Place in the Sun
Part I "Colored Women Have a Genius for Leadership"
When and Where They Entered
She Proclaimed a Chicago Renaissance
The Black Classical Metropolis
Interlude I Race Woman's Guide to the Realm of Music
Interlude II Fantasie NÈgre
Part II "They Have Worked. They Are Now Working Harder than Ever"
Movements of a Symphonist
Seizing the World Stage
Conclusion In Honor of Mrs. Maude Roberts George
Notes
Bibliography
Index
