Ayatey Shabazz
C.L. Barnhouse Company
Ayatey Shabazz, a native of Biloxi, MS is an accomplished composer,
arranger, educator, and clinician. He received his formal training from
the University of Southern Mississippi. He studied composition and
arranging under Dr. Albert Gower, who inspired him to make composing his
life work. Mr. Shabazz is very active as an arranger/ composer for
many high school and college programs as well as other idioms of music
such as drum corps, jazz, film and television projects. He also travels
extensively conducting clinics, adjudicating concert festivals and
marching band contests, and is a Pro-Mark educator endorser. Shabazz
has taught beginning through high school band.
Mr. Shabazz holds membership in American Society of Composers Authors
and Publishers, The Recording Academy, National Federation of High
Schools, the National Music Educators Conference, AFM Local 47, the
Universal Code council, the Mississippi Bandmasters Association, and
Texas Music Educators Association.
Solvejg Wastvedt
· Spring Lake Park
·
Student musicians at Spring Lake Park High School are shaking up the
band canon this year with pieces by a broader range of composers.
High school band music is usually dominated by white, male composers,
but Spring Lake Park's directors have pledged to include at least one
piece by a female composer and one by a composer of color in each
concert for each band.
They've also pledged to only buy music from composers of color this year.
"There's a kind of like ideological segregation of who can and cannot be
in band based on who the composers are, and what music is like, and
what the experiences of those composers are like," said junior clarinet
player Kia Muleta, who is black. Muleta said she's noticed that most of
her fellow student musicians are white.
But the challenge doesn't mean that white men are the only ones
composing band music, said Yolanda Williams, a professor of
African-American studies at the University of Minnesota.
"There's a canon for every instrumentation that has been developed over
years, and very few women get into that canon, very few composers of
color get into that canon," Williams said, adding that work by composers
of color is often not well-publicized.
Williams said there are long-standing stereotypes, too — if an
African-American composer is included in a concert, she said, the piece
is more often than not a spiritual, gospel or jazz.
"They're not being forced to write music that sounds like their own
culture or their own history, they're able to just use that culture and
that history as a lens to interpret the way that art is going," he said
of composers like Viet Cuong, a Vietnamese-American who wrote the piece
"Diamond Tide," inspired by the scientific process of melting a diamond.
"I've learned that when you look at the composer and then you don't know
the piece of music, you can't judge what you think the piece of music
is going to sound like or what you think it should sound like until you
actually play it through," said sophomore bassoon player Alannah Easter.
Tycast's students are playing "Of Honor and Valor Eternal," a tribute to
the Tuskegee Airmen African-American military pilots by Ayatey Shabazz,
a black composer from Mississippi. Shabazz said his grandfather knew
one of the airmen, and stories he heard as a child inspired the
composition.
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