From Spirituals to Hip Hop:
American Music of the African Diaspora
(MUS 113)
SUNY Broome Department of Music
and Theater Arts
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell

  • The Alliances that Led to WWI

    Europe in 1914. The multiple alliances that led to the European conflagration This sums it up:    

  • Is Absolute Music Possible?

    Or does music always have an invisible program? Consider Johannes Brahms, the ostensible champion of absolute music. Brahms as an old man, the way he’s most often pictured. Brahms in 1853, the year he met the Schumanns. The night of their first meeting, Robert Schumann wrote in his diary: “Visit from Brahms (a genius).” Soon…

  • Going Home

    The second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony no. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”). What is the instrument that plays the poignant solo? It was thought that Dvorak took this melody from an African-American spiritual that his student and assistant, the composer Harry T. Burleigh, sang for him.  (For more on Harry T. Burleigh…

  • Wagner is Metal

    Wagner’s music and aesthetics have been extremely influential on various modern subcultures and fandoms. As one fan wrote about the opera Die Walküre:  “Black Metal Is Wagner.” The metal band Apocalyptica reimagines Wagner’s life: As Sir Christopher Lee noted, “Metal is a direct evolution of the sounds Wagner imagined.” Just to make worlds collide even harder: J.R.R.…

  • The Problem with Wagner

    As you will recall, Robert Schumann founded and edited the influential music magazine Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.  In 1850, the Neue Zeitschrift published an essay by a pseudonymous author called “Das Judentum in der Music” (Jewishness in Music), which alleged that Jews, being not only culturally and religiously different, but also biologically — that is, racially — different from gentile Germans,…

  • Rheingold

    Not this Rheingold. Das Rheingold (1869) is the first of the four operas in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The plot of the Ring Cycle, which takes about 20 hours to perform, explained in two minutes: The Prelude (Vorspiel), or overture, of Das Rheingold, the first opera in the Ring Cycle, is astonishing, even heard 150 years later. The…

  • Romanticism in Italy

    Italia and Germania (Friedrich Overbeck, 1828): allegorical figures of the two countries — neither of which was at that time a unified nation — meet in friendship. The German-speaking lands were fertile ground for Romanticism, in part because of cultural resistance to all things French in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. To speak of “German…

  • Classical Music Can Save Your Life

    It saved this violist’s life during the Great Depression. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen told the great African-American mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad in the 1970s that her singing might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience. Miss Conrad was one of the students who broke the color barrier at the University of…

  • Program Music

    Faust and Gretchen talk together in a garden as Mephistopheles, the devil’s emissary, looks on. The origins of the Faust legend. Music inspired by the Faust legend. Here is Movement 1 of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, entitled “Faust.” Movement 2, “Gretchen.” Movement 3, “Mephistopheles.” The “program” for Schumann’s Carnaval. The entire piece performed by Boris Giltburg.

  • Can You Dance to It?

    A Polish folk dance, the polonaise. A Chopin version of a polonaise. The mazurka. A Chopin version of a mazurka. The waltz. A Chopin version of a waltz. Incidentally, the waltz was considered the “dirty dancing” of its day. The Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, warned Catholics to avoid it at all costs: Never engage…

Get In Touch