ONLINE: Quanda Johnson & Lawren Brianna Ware

Mead Witter School of Music livestream concert, via the YouTube page. Your support helps stream live events at the Hamel Music Center. If you can, please consider giving a gift at https://www.supportuw.org/giveto/schoolofmusic

media release: Verisimilitudes: A Journey through Art Song in Black, Brown, and Tan

Artist’s Statement: Within the content of this concert are seventeen art songs that depict the reality of the souls of a diasporic people. Most of the lyricists and all of the composers are of African descent. In large part they come from the U.S. but also extend to Great Britain, Guadeloupe by way of France, and Sierra Leone. They speak to the veracity of Black life and Black feeling. A diasporic African reality in a Classical mode that challenges while it embraces a Western European vernacular. It is using “culture” as an agent of resistance.

I refer to verisimilitude in the plural. While syntactically incorrect, as it relates to the multiple veils of reality Black people must negotiate, it is very correct. To be packaged in Blackness, or should I say “non-whiteness” is to ever live in a world of spiraling modalities and twirling realities. To paraphrase the great artist, Romare Bearden, in “calling and recalling” — we turn and return, then turn again to find the place that is our self.

I welcome you to…

Verisimilitudes: A Journey Through Art Song in Black, Brown, and Tan