Orchestrating Blackness: Music of Irene Britton Smith and Julia Perry

Classical music has seen a recent surge of interest in performing works composed by Black women. The composers whose work has received the most attention in recent years (e.g., Margaret Bonds and Florence Price) compose music that often features Black folk and vernacular idioms: their most performed works are those that illustrate this trait. By contrast, composers Irene Britton Smith and Julia Perry composed music in a more modernist and even austere style and rarely cited Black vernacular material. Oakland Symphony Music Director and Conductor, Kedrick Armstrong will discuss how people today make choices about what music to perform, and how those choices combine knowledge of the past with preoccupations of the present day. Why have audiences and arts organizations gravitated towards the work of Bonds and Price, but given less attention to composers like Smith and Perry? In this presentation, Maestro Armstrong will introduce sonic and stylistic features of Smith’s and Perry’s music, driving the conversation to our 21st-century values: in an era preoccupied with identity, are we overlooking important music that does not carry obvious identity markers?

Tickets are available on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music website.

Maestro Armstrong will be making his debut as Music Director and Conductor at Oakland Symphony on Friday, 18 October. For more information about concert tickets, visit oaklandsymphony.org.