INFEMNITY™ Arts and Culture News

In 1871, Verdi’s groundbreaking opera Aida had its world premiere in Cairo. October 6th of that same year, a group of formerly enslaved African Americans set out on their first fundraising tour to save the Free Fisk Colored School in Nashville, which had been established by the American Missionary Association in the aftermath of the Civil War. Within three years, this group primarily made up of teenagers would find themselves singing in the royal courts of Europe, eventually singing before Queen Victoria who reportedly stated, “These young people sing so beautifully they must be from the Music City of the United States.” This group of singers became internationally known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The Fisk Jubilee Singers Queen Victoria commissioned a larger-than-life-sized painting of the group that hangs in Jubilee Hall today. Built from the proceeds from those first concert tours, Jubilee Hall was the first permanent structure built in the United States specifically for the purpo...

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 ...

Harry T. Burleigh As some of you already know, I have recently signed a contract with a publisher for the release of my first book of memoirs. Also, as I wrote in my last blog, I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion presented by the Harry T. Burleigh Society  during its conference titled "More Than the Promise of the American Myth: Rethinking Burleigh & (Ella) Sheppard in the Second Gilded Age." Other participants on the panel included the descendants of composers Harry Burleigh , Ella Sheppard , W.C. Handy , J. Rosamond Johnson , and Bob Cole . The Fisk Jubilee Singers  - whose concert the Burleigh Society presented the night before at Carnegie Hall - had included my father's arrangement of the spiritual "Steal Away" on their program. So it seemed fitting to include me in a conversation on the handling of copyrights and the preservation of historic recordings, as I had produced a documentary film  on my father's life along with i...

Lowri Marie on set for The Choir Loft show Sopranos Lowri Marie and Kasey Porter shared the spotlight with Nina Kennedy at the MNN Studios in New York for a special taping of The Choir Loft , produced by Rhonda McClelland on February 24 th . The topic for this show was the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. The show opened with Lowri Marie performing the Spiritual Bye and Bye , and the tour de force Climb Ev‘ry Mountain by Richard Rodgers. She was then interviewed by Rhonda, reminiscing on her career as a singer and her work with the Fisk Jubilee Singers.