INFEMNITY™ Arts and Culture News

On Saturday March 19th, Chadra Pittman, founder and executive director of The Sankofa Projects , and Michelle Brown, founder and host of the weekly podcast Collections by Michelle Brown , presented a Zoom Event called "A Conversation with World Renowned Pianist, Filmmaker and Conductor NINA KENNEDY as she launches her 2nd book and talks about the women who shaped her life." People from all over the country joined the Zoom meeting, during which Nina read from her two books Practicing for Love  and Practice What You Preach . After a screening of the video of Nina's performance of Schumann's "Widmung,"  the discussion opened with an homage to Ella Sheppard, matriarch of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers founded in 1871. The Singers toured to raise money for the fledgling Fisk Free Colored School, known today as Fisk University. Nina's parents met when they were students at Fisk, and she stated that she probably would not be here today had it not been for Fi...

I finally got the chance to sit down and watch the Oscar-winning film Green Book , on the life of African American concert pianist Don Shirley . As I had written in an earlier blog ( "Ebony and Ivory: A Dissonant Truth" ), I had visited with Dr. Shirley in his apartment above Carnegie Hall when my parents were in New York with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The film gave a very accurate depiction of his home and the extravagant, ostentatious décor. The Real Don Shirley in his home Don Shirley was praised early in his life as a genius, a wunderkind whose forte was the traditional classical repertoire. Composer Igor Stravinsky said of him: "His virtuosity is worthy of Gods." But his record label forced him to play jazz, and sent him on tour with a jazz trio. In an interview, Shirley said that his record label wanted him to appear in overalls with a red bandana around his neck on the album cover. He refused. In my own book I have written about facing racism as an African Am...

As you may have read last month (in my blog  "Juilliard Covers Its Ass" ), I was very upset to learn of an auditory exercise conducted by the Juilliard Drama Division depicting scenes from slavery. Several students complained about this exercise, and posted some of the actual audio on Facebook and Instagram. The person who presented this workshop claimed that the intent of the exercise was to explore the origins of Negro Spirituals. The Fisk Jubilee Singers Anyone who knows me knows that my father directed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who have been called the originators of the Negro Spiritual. In my  Lammy-nominated memoir ,  Practicing for Love , I wrote extensively about the history of the Jubilee Singers, and how their music had been utilized by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák in his Symphony from the New World. When I wrote the first blog, Juilliard had expressed no interest whatsoever in my book. Well, about a week after I sent an email of complaint to the Director ...

On April 23rd, I received an email from the Juilliard Alumni Association director. In it was an email from the president of the school addressing an issue concerning a workshop conducted by the Drama Division. Evidently, the Drama Division invited a guest lecturer who conducted a workshop on the African American experience during slavery. In the words of President Woetzel to students, faculty, and staff:       "I write to you to address a September 2020 Drama Division workshop that has impacted our school community. While I am s haring a message below that was sent to the drama community by Evan Yionoulis, dean and director of the Drama Division, I believe it is important for our school community to hear directly from me.      To live our values requires an acknowledgment of mistakes we have made. To that end, I want to state unequivocally that this workshop was ill-conceived and should not have occurred in the manner that it did. I extend a heartfelt ...

  Susan Seltzer in her office at Met Life On this day in 1990 at 2:13 am., Susan Seltzer passed away. She was thirty-three years old. Two and-a-half years earlier, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. After six weeks of radiation therapy, and then six months of chemo therapy, she lost her battle with cancer, and took her last breath while holding my hand.     Susan Seltzer was born in Yonkers, New York to Evelyn and Herman Seltzer. The family soon moved to New City, New York, where she went to high school. Susan attended Union College in upstate New York, and then transferred her credits at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where her classes were conducted in Hebrew, in which she was fluent. Her father was a V.P. at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and enabled her to have her first job as a Systems Programmer. Herman Seltzer was quite successful in his own right as an originator of the first IBM Mainframe computer, which is on display at the Smithsonian...

Love, Like Music A joint review by Dean and Petra Aldrich of Practicing for Love , Nina Kennedy’s richly detailed and frank memoir. “For those in the world of classical music, Kennedy’s book is a winner. Her musical talent and technical achievements are obvious to anyone familiar with the works in her repertoire. Moreover, her descriptions of the challenges she faced as a Black woman in classical music provide essential, timely, and pointed critiques of the field. Musicians, composers, conductors – take note!” - Dean Aldrich, father, trained concert pianist, teacher of music and history, and graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in piano performance and music education (Bachelor and Master degrees). “Kennedy’s memoir provides fascinating and essential insights into lesbian history and the experiences of lesbians in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Truly, the value of this opportunity to see such a pivotal period in LGBTQ+ history through Black and lesbian...

“Concert pianist Nina Kennedy’s memoir, Practicing for Love , is a tour de force of wokeness.  Nina Kennedy, an African American concert pianist who has lived and performed abroad, shares her unique challenges to success and survival in a matter-of-fact style that is at times provocative, informative—even shocking—to the uninitiated. She seems to have had a front row seat to history, meeting and mingling, being influenced and inspired by a veritable Who’s Who in the zeitgeist of the 20th and 21st centuries. From Bernstein to Beyoncé, Nina’s Practicing for Love: A Memoir recounts her influential sources, chance encounters, and sixth degree connections with some of our artistic trendsetters in a way that almost channels Forrest Gump’s ‘in the right place at the right time’ phenomenon. You owe it to yourself to escape from the current pandemic to the vicarious exploits of a contemporary, unblinking connoisseur of our culture.”  - Carol Elligan Martin , former ...

After months of anticipation, Nina Kennedy's first book of memoirs titled Practicing for Love is finally here and available for purchase. You may order the book on Amazon  here , or order directly from the publisher RoseDog Books  here . Or, last but not least, order from our own website at  www.infemnity.com/shop . The book offers a black woman's perspective on the music industry in general, and the classical music industry in particular. Nina includes much information on the history of Fisk University, where her parents served on the faculty. There are tales of bullying resulting from a segregated, dysfunctional public school system. This country's racism practically destroys Nina's mother, who turns to alcohol for comfort. This is the environment in which Nina's sexuality buds and eventually blossoms. When she came to New York to study at Juilliard, Nina worked as a live-in babysitter and was faced with unreasonable expectations placed upon her by ...

In the wake of the widely publicized sexual-abuse claims brought by violinist Lara St. John  against the late Jascha Brodsky, her violin teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music (read the article here ), I decided that it was time to share my own story of abuse that took place when I was a student there.  Nina Kennedy at age 9 The kinds of abuse I endured there were verbal and emotional. The perpetrator was clearly a racist, but I did not have the skills at the time to handle such abuse. It was devastating when it became clear to me that my teacher was not going to help me pursue a career, because a concert career was all I had ever imagined for myself. It had been my parents’ dream for me, and their mothers’ dreams of both of them. Little did I know that this one racist, elderly white woman set out to crush their dreams, and to destroy me in the process. The year I auditioned to enter the Curtis Institute of Music there were three openings in the ...