Jennifer Jolley is a West Texas-based
composer of vocal, orchestral, wind ensemble, chamber, and
electronic works. She is also Assistant Professor of Composition
at the Texas Tech University’s School of Music.
Jennifer’s work draws toward subjects that are political and
even provocative. Her collaboration with librettist Kendall
A, Prisoner of Conscience has been described as “the
ideal soundtrack and perhaps balm for our current ‘toxic’ . . .
times” by Frank J. Oteri of NewMusicBox. Her
piece Blue Glacier Decoy, written as a musical
response to the Olympic National Park, depicts the melting
glaciers of the Pacific Northwest. Her partnership with
writer Scott Woods, You Are Not Alone,
evokes the fallout of the #MeToo Movement.
Jennifer’s works have been performed by ensembles worldwide,
including the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Wind Symphony,
Dulciana (Dublin, Ireland), Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra
(New York, NY), and the SOLI Chamber Ensemble (Alba, Italy
residency). She has received commissions from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary
Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Vermont Symphony
Orchestra, University of Texas Wind Ensemble, the Quince
Ensemble, and many others.
Jennifer deeply values the relationship that is created between
composers and the communities with whom they collaborate. She has
been composer-in-residence at Brevard College, University of
Toledo, the Vermont Symphony, the Central Michigan University
School of Music, and the Alba Music Festival in Italy. Most
recently she was the Composer-in-Residence of the Women
Composers Festival of Hartford in 2019. She promotes
composer advocacy and the performance of new works through her
opera company North American New Opera Workshop, her articles
for NewMusicBox, and her work on the Executive Council
of the Institute for Composer Diversity and the New Music USA
Program Council.
Örjan Sandred is a Swedish composer of
instrumental and computer music. After teaching electro-acoustic
composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm for seven
years, he moved to Canada in 2005 to take up the position as
Professor of Composition at the University of Manitoba.
With the financial support from the Canadian Foundation for
Innovation and the Manitoba Research and Innovation Fund, he
founded Studio FLAT, a studio for computer music research and
production at the University of Manitoba in 2009.
Sandred’s works span over a wide range of ensemble types. He has
composed music for symphony orchestra as well as chamber music.
Most notably, he has written a series of compositions with live
electronics, including solo parts for oboe, percussion,
saxophone, piano, violin, cello, voice, saxophone quartet and
pipe organ.
In this talk I outline some of the larger frameworks from my
book Black
Opera: History, Power, Engagement (2018) and take them
further to include a quick mention of Beyoncé’s Homecoming
(2018), and three operas on Black topics that debuted the
summer of 2019 (Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons, ”Fire Shut
Up in My Bones,” Opera Theater of St. Louis; Anthony Davis and
Richard Wesley, ”The Central Park Five,” Long Beach Opera;
and Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson, ”Blue,”
Glimmerglass Festival). I quickly place ”Fire Shut Up in My
Bones” and ”The Central Park Five” and then spend the most
time with ”Blue.” I have been fortunate to see all three
operas and got to know Tesori and Thompson through several
panels in the Breaking Glass series (run by Glimmerglass Opera
Festival).
Naomi André is a Professor in Women’s
Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and
the Residential College Arts and Ideas in the Humanities program
at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in music from
Barnard College and MA and PhD in musicology from Harvard
University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding
gender, voice, and race. Her publications include topics on
Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in
prisons. Her books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti,
and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian
Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012,
edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the
mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race
and identity. She recently published Black
Opera: History, Power, Engagementwith University
of Illinois Press, a monograph on staging race and history
in opera today in the United States and South Africa. She has
served on the Graduate Alumni Council for Harvard University’s
Graduate School of Art and Sciences, the Executive Committee for
the Criminal Justice Program at the American Friends Service
Committee (Ann Arbor, MI), and has served as an evaluator for the
Fulbright Senior Specialist Program.
Felipe Lara, a Brazilian-American composer
praised by the New York Times and other
critics for his brilliant modern music, rates collaboration with
other musicians the most important aspect of his work.
Scott Linford is an Assistant
Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Cincinnati
College-Conservatory of Music. He has conducted musical fieldwork
in West Africa, Central America, and the United States around
themes of participation and musical experience, ethnicity,
gender, agriculture and the environment, musical geographies, and
colonial and post-colonial politics. Raised in the San Francisco
Bay Area, he holds an MA and PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA.
