South Side Impresarios
Cloth: 11/12/2024
About the Book
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago's South Side into a wellspring of music making.Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene's audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.
A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
* Publication of this book was supported by grants from the H. Earle Johnson Subvention Fund of the Society for American Music; the Henry and Edna Binkele Classical Music Fund; and AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
About the Author
Samantha Ege is an award-winning researcher and musicologist, internationally recognized concert pianist, and popular public speaker.Reviews
“Readers interested in American classical music and Black history and culture will find much to celebrate in this outstanding book.” --Library Journal“Musicologist and pianist Samantha Ege has written this groundbreaking exploration of intersections of Chicago’s Black classical music scene and the work of Race women in building community and justice. Well-researched and lovingly written, this book sheds light on a formerly hidden history." --Ms. Magazine
“Samantha Ege’s South Side Impresarios reminds us that no woman is an island.” --Chicago Reader
"Samantha Ege’s South Side Impresarios is a deeply impressive work of scholarship that
depicts, in elaborate detail, the community of classical music making led and cultivated
by Black women in Chicago during the twentieth century’s inter-war period. . . . Ege’s writing is typified by rich, dense historical exposition that represents the most complete account of this history in a single volume to date." --Journal of Musicological Research
"Ege’s commitment to investigating and assembling portraits of the lives and art of lesser-known figures––and not shying away from openly addressing the obstacles these women faced––is the book’s greatest merit." --Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association
"Given her expertise as a performer, Ege's intimacy with the music shines through. . . . South Side Impresarios fuses collective biography with institutional and cultural history, yielding a hybrid genre in which connections in the South Side's community of classical musicians form overlapping histories during a complex yet inspiring period of time." --Times Literary Supplement
"A deeply researched academic book illuminating the rich cultural community of Chicago’s South Side, where upper and upper-middle class Black women composers, concert artists, pedagogues, scholars, critics and impresarios worked tirelessly in the realm of classical music. . . . Her focus on the collective achievements of Black sisterhood and solidarity . . . offer a powerful corrective to the ‘Great Man’ theory of history." --BBC Music Magazine
Blurbs
“Ege places Black women classical composers in their rightful intellectual and cultural context--the Chicago Renaissance, Black transnational modernism, and the rich musical communities which nourished and embraced their extraordinary creative genius.”--Barbara D. Savage, author of Merze Tate: the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
“This book is riveting and elegantly written. Ege meticulously depicts an intricate, close-knit network of women in South Side Chicago; a feeling of friendship and genuine affection for the women in this alliance; and a deep understanding of the sociocultural world that both hindered and supported these women’s work.”--Sandra Jean Graham, author of Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry
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