Media Contact: Morris Phibbs, 312-344-7563 or Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383
For immediate release
September 2, 2004
Chicago, IL -- The Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College Chicago will present its New Black Music Repertory Ensemble in a celebratory performance titled Five Centuries of Music of the Black Diaspora. The evening will feature a wide variety of both popular and concert musics, including Cuban sacred chant, Brazilian samba, big band, gospel, and various forms and styles of compositions for string and full orchestra.
The concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 2 at the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago. Tickets are $15, $25, $30 and $35 and are available at the Harris Theater Box Office, 205 E. Randolph Drive, or by calling (312) 334-7777, or at www.madtchi.com. The box office is open 12 - 6 p.m., Monday through Friday and on the day of the performance. Group rates are available. Parking for the Harris Theater is in the Millennium Park Garage. The theater is fully accessible to all patrons. For program content information call 312-344-7559.
Drawing on the repertoire that has been presented by the Center's original Black Music Repertory Ensemble (BMRE), Ensemble Stop-Time and Ensemble Kalinda Chicago, the 50-member New BMRE is a large performance ensemble that presents a vast range of music styles, genres and periods.
Special guest ensemble Ars Musica Chicago will present what will likely be the first performance since the sixteenth century of a motet by the earliest-known published black composer, Vicente Lusitano, an African-Portuguese who worked in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Violinist Ashley Horne will be the soloist in a violin concerto by the nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban composer Jose White. Mezzo soprano Hilda Harris will be the soloist in "Songs of Separation," a song cycle by American composer William Grant Still.
Special recognition will be given to the late Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, who passed away in March 2004. Perkinson was a noted composer and conductor and was the Center's Artistic Director and principal conductor. In his honor, two of his compositions will be performed, including his "Sinfonietta No. 1" for string orchestra and the virtuosic work for solo violin, "Blue/s Forms," which will be performed by Sanford Allen, for whom the work was composed.
Popular music forms will include works from the Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin and African-American traditions, as well as jazz and gospel. A Brazilian samba and a Cuban chant will be among the repertoire of the former Ensemble Kalinda Chicago. T.S. Galloway, who was the conductor of Ensemble Stop-Time, will lead the jazz component of the New BMRE in the premiere of one of his own works, as well as Gil Evan's arrangement of Jelly Roll Morton's "King Porter Stomp" and two distinct styles of gospel, featuring vocalist Maggie Brown.
Conductor Kirk Edward Smith, who was one of the conductors of the original Black Music Repertory Ensemble, will lead the ensemble in the concert works as well as in the closing set of the program which will feature three of the monumental orchestrations, prepared by the late Luther Henderson, of works by Duke Ellington.
Five Centuries of Music of the Black Diaspora is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, and by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. American Airlines is the official carrier of the Center for Black Music Research and Columbia College Chicago. For more information about the Center for Black Music Research, visit www.cbmr.colum.edu.
Columbia College Chicago, an urban institution committed to open access, opportunity and excellence in higher education, provides innovative degree programs in the visual, performing, media and communication arts to nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Founded in 1890 as a communications school for women, Columbia College Chicago was revisioned in 1963 as a liberal arts college with a "hands-on minds-on" approach to arts and media education and a progressive social agenda. Under the current leadership of President Warrick L. Carter, Ph.D. Columbia is aggressively pursuing this mission. Through the diversity of its students and graduates, the school brings a rich vision and multiplicity of voices to American culture. For further information visit www.colum.edu.