Shirley Graham
(Carl Van Vechten)
Thursday, April 4, 2019, 8pm
National Sawdust, 80 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY
https://runningamoc.org/calendar/tomtom19
On June 30, 1932, ten thousand people entered a lakefront stadium in Cleveland to hear a world premiere: Tom-Tom,
an opera by a young African American woman named Shirley Graham. An
epic narrative of Afrodiasporic life, the opera follows a set of
archetypal characters from a premodern West African village to a
plantation in the U.S. South to a 1920s Harlem cabaret. Its
kaleidoscopically varied music reflects Graham’s interest in traditions
including Liberian folk music, African American spirituals, and early
jazz. Brought to life by a star-studded cast and a chorus of hundreds,
on a grand set that featured both a waterfall and an elephant, Tom-Tom elicited
an outpouring of enthusiasm. One critic called it a “revolutionary
project”; another proclaimed that it was “new opera. Something different
from what has preceded it in history.” Yet despite the success of its
first production, Tom-Tom disappeared from the stage, never to be performed again.
Tonight’s event lacks waterfalls and elephants, but it offers the rare opportunity to hear music from Tom-Tom. Following
a musical introduction of excerpts from the piece, scholars Fredara
Hadley and Lucy Caplan will join artists Davóne Tines and Kyle Walker to
delve into Graham’s opera and consider her remarkable life and legacy.
We invite you to join the conversation as we explore an opera that
remains new to our ears more than 80 years after its premiere, still
unfamiliar and perhaps still revolutionary.
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