Saturday, October 6, 2012

Maine Business: 'In Partnership with The Longfellow Chorus, Maine Historical Society Hosts Symposium on Black Composer'

American ragtime composer J. Rosamond Johnson (left), and his brother, James Weldon Johnson (right), one of the founding leaders of the NAACP, pose with English classical music composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (center) in 1905 outside his home in Croydon, England.

Charles Kaufmann of The Longfellow Chorus of Portland, Maine sends this link:

Maine Business
October 5, 2012
Some say that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's single claim to fame rests on his opera-like setting of Longfellow's epic poem, Song of Hiawatha, which was performed numerous times during the composer's lifetime. But 100 years after his death on September 1, 1912, Afro-English composer Coleridge-Taylor’s larger impact and influence on American culture remains largely unsung. The list of his musical works includes over 100 compositions written in the classical style of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods—nearly two dozen are settings of Longfellow's poetry.

Join Longfellow Chorus Artistic Director Charles Kaufmann, moderator, at 7:00 PM, Tuesday, October 16, at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, 489 Congress Street, as seven noted historians and scholars gather in a roundtable discussion to answer this question: "Who was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?" The event will be filmed as a scene for "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) and His Music in America, 1900–1912," a documentary being produced by The Longfellow Chorus for premiere in Nickelodeon Cinema in Portland during the March 16 & 17, 2013, Longfellow Choral Festival.

Roundtable participants include Jeffrey Green, English historian and author of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life (2011); Ann Havemeyer, PhD, historian of the Norfolk (CT) Historical Society; Thelma Jacobs, historian of the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, D.C.; Charles I. Nero, PhD, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and in the Programs of African American and American Cultural Studies at Bates College in Lewiston; Karen Shaffer, president of the Maud Powell Society; Wayne Shirley, former music specialist at the Library of Congress; and William Tortolano, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Saint Michael's College in Vermont.

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