![]() In one photo from 1943, she leans over her bicycle to take in the sea air at the Santa Monica Pacific Palisades. The MGM publicity snaps for the actress reveal a lean, sparrow-like beauty pert-nosed and grey-eyed. ![]() Pretty but no bombshell, she had a wholesomeness that allowed her to play a fifteen-year-old at twenty-two. In wartime parlance, Peters might be called an all-American girl. Try as she might to transcend it, the world was not quite ready to let her. But it was one chance shooting incident in 1945 that would come to define her. Not yet out of her twenties, she had been an actress, a trainee pilot, a medical student, and an Academy Award nominee. While de Lerma's initial work provided us with a valuable model, we knew that we would need to survey a broad range of resources to bring his initial work up to date.It was a gunshot that her husband claimed he would hear for the rest of his life.Įven before the incident, Susan Peters was the kind of woman who set out to achieve a great deal in a short space of time. But we are also aware that exciting new works for the harp are being created all the time without reference to written notation, and how we document that work remains open for discussion. The Journal is primarily still a print publication and a bibliography is, by nature, a collection of print sources. Since the earliest stages of this project, it was clear that we would be limited to including only those works represented in written scores. Our title's formulation ("composers of African descent") also follows CHAD's example, and emphasizes the international scope of the project. ![]() (2) This resource provided us with a core on which to build. (1) De Lerma's research formed the basis for a listing of concert works by Black composers that feature the harp that appeared in the Spring 1996 issue of the Intercultural Harp News (the newsletter of the Coalition for Harpists of African Descent, or CHAD). First, the present compilation builds on extensive bibliographic work done by musicologist Dominique-Rene de Lerma. Several very helpful resources are worth highlighting. This reflects our dependence on earlier bibliographic resources centered on racial diversity, most of which concentrate on music of Africa and the African diaspora rather than on composers from a given country. We also decided to focus not only on the music of Black Americans, but on composers of African descent worldwide. Moreover, since recent calls for racial justice in the United States have focused specifically on systemic racism wielded against Black Americans, it seemed relevant to focus on the work of Afrocentric composers and to document works of other underrepresented groups in later projects. ![]() Part of this was practical: anything larger would have made the document too long to be a published feature. While we discussed taking a very broad approach to highlight the classical music community's diversity, we decided to limit the works we covered to those by composers of African descent. As protests for racial justice in summer of 2020 sparked afresh long-standing conversations about diversity and equity in classical music, we heard many harpists reflecting on how few works by Black composers they had studied or taught. Harpists often teach the same pieces that they learn as students, perpetuating a cycle that limits paths for new works. For performers that already program some of the well-known figures on this list, we hope it helps highlight new voices. The bibliography is a practical tool to assist harpists who wish to diversify their repertoire, both in their teaching and in public programming. It includes works from across a range of scale, style, and musical accessibility the composers include established figures of the modern canon as well as young artists in the first stages of their careers. ![]() This bibliography highlights works for harp by composers of Africa and the African diaspora. ![]()
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