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

  • Butterfly Resources, part II

    The opera in a nutshell. Maestro Antonio Pappano and the cast of the Royal Opera production discuss the rehearsal process. English National Opera presented Butterfly two years ago with a puppet as Trouble, Butterfly’s son. Do you think it works? A short animated film to Butterfly’s Act II aria “Un bel dì vedremo.” Glyndebourne Opera updated the…

  • Butterfly Resources, part I

    Read the complete libretto in English translation here. Orientalism: “La Japonaise (Mme. Monet in Kimono” (Claude Monet, 1875). Photo from Operation Babylift, Saigon, 1975: a U.S. Naval officer about to take a Vietnamese orphan, one of thousands, onboard a plane to be adopted in America. For more on Operation Babylift, go here: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/museum/exhibits/babylift/# A French…

  • What is Hip?

    A playlist/watchlist/reading list to accompany your reading by Scott Saul from his book Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Oscar Brown, Jr.: “But I Was Cool” Lenny Bruce: Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” published in Dissent in 1957. One of the “jazz” excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road: Boom, kick,…

  • The Evolution of Bebop

    (Bird on Money, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s tribute to Charlie Parker.) The song “Cherokee,” a fox-trot by the English dance-band leader Ray Noble: Charlie Parker’s version: Parker said that, when playing “Cherokee,” he realized that the 12 semitones in any scale could take a piece of music from one key into any other, a realization that Arnold…

  • Beneath the Underdog

    Trigger/content warning: disturbing video imagery, offensive language. When I was working on my doctorate and teaching a writing class for music majors, I wanted to assign my students a passage from the great jazz bass player, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus’s 1971 memoir, Beneath the Underdog. The fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central…

  • Ossian in Italy

    How did the poetry of Ossian (really, James MacPherson) influence Italian opera in the nineteenth century? Why was Ossian — later acknowledged to be a fraud — so important to the Romantic generation in Italy? Could it be because these supposedly ancient poems spoke to the longing for a unified culture and community, one based…

  • Mood Indigo

    In addition to blues tonality, improvisation, virtuosity, freedom in melodic phrasing, propulsive rhythm, and harmonic complexity, one of the defining characteristic of jazz is the way the standard jazz ensembles — the particular mix of instruments — sound together. This sound is called timbre. The distinctive timbre of early jazz comes from the use of brass…

  • The Spread of Jazz

    Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. Armstrong’s wife, pianist Lil Hardin, is at far right, next to Armstrong. The rise of recording and broadcasting technologies led to the spread of jazz from New Orleans to the urban centers of the North in the 1920s. Panel 1 of The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), showing…

  • Origins of Jazz

    Content/Trigger warning: Racist imagery and lyrics. Among the origins of jazz are several overlapping musical genres that were popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Black musical theater, which, around the turn of the twentieth century, crossed color lines to become popular with white as well as black audiences. Marti Newland singing “Swing Along,”…

  • Classically Black, part IV: Postmodernism

    When we talk about postmodernism in music, we’re generally referring to the period after World War II. Some of the hallmarks of postmodernism are an experimental approach to form, structure, and instrumental/vocal techniques, a distrust of historically-informed musical styles, and an aesthetic that borrows from and refers to popular music styles. Postmodernist music has taken…

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