South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene (Music in American Life) - Softcover

Ege, Samantha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252088336 ISBN 13: 9780252088339

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Samantha Ege is an award-winning researcher and musicologist, internationally recognized concert pianist, and popular public speaker.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252088336
• ISBN 13: 9780252088339
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304