2023-2024 Tsou Scholar Samantha Ege
Thursday, February 22, 2024, 6 p.m.
LECTURE:
South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene
Combining a mix of lecture and piano performance, Dr Samantha Ege brings the story of the South Side impresarios to life. She delves into the ways that Chicago's early 20th-century Race women (i.e., Black women intellectuals and creatives committed to the entwined tasks of racial uplift and gendered progress) operated out of their South Side base and shaped a new vision for classical music that transformed the city and beyond.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege is the Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and recently completed a two-year term as Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York. Her research and repertoire tightly entwine, illuminating 20th-century composers of African descent and women in music. Dr. Ege's first book is called South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene (University of Illinois Press, 2024). As a concert pianist, Dr. Ege made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a “vivid, revelatory” (Michael Church, iNews) UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. In her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music she gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre set. In 2018, she delivered “A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance” at the Chicago Symphony Center. She has additionally presented her research and performed at a number of other venues in the UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
In-person event, with livestream available:
Photo by Jason Dodd