Music of the Unsung America

Winter Finale and Fundraiser
2021-12-11 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, 6161 NW 22nd Ave, Miami, FL, 33142, United States
Join the The New Canon Chamber Collective as we finish our inaugural “Music of The Unsung America” season with a concert under the stars featuring the music of Margaret Bonds and South Florida Black composer, Michael Dudley.
Advance tickets are $20 online and $25 at the door
This performance is made possible with funding from the John S. and James L Knight Foundation and ACF| Connect
And partnership with the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, Seating is limited.

From Renaissance to Resistance
2021-06-18 19:00 - 21:30 | Hampton House
A new series featuring Black artists of history and today, Music of the Unsung America’s season continues its live and virtual series with a concert featuring a classical and jazz fusion program of repertoire with the feature piece being, Tre. The first part of the performance will have music by Duke Ellington: Sacred Concert, Come Sunday, as well as a string arrangement of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.
Reserve your ticket here

One Night, Two Premieres
2021-04-24 19:00 - 21:00 | Historic Saint Agnes Episcopal Church, 1750 Northwest 3rd Avenue, Miami,Fl, 33136, United States
A new series featuring Black artists of history, Music of the Unsung America, season continues its live and virtual series with a concert featuring the premieres of Joseph Jones’ Symphony for String Orchestra, Op. 47a, No. 2, and Margaret bonds’ cantata, Simon Bore The Cross, revealing and exploring the deep roots and extraordinary range of music created by descendants of Africa. Founded by Portia Dunkley, Music of the Unsung features a wide spectrum of Black artists in a series of performances and events for and from the South Florida community, including works by Joseph Jones and Dwight Banks. Working with the American Composers Forum (ACF) – as part of their ACF I connect program and support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – Music of the Unsung launched a call for scores to identify Jones and Banks for this opportunity.
Reserve your ticket here

Sacred Fire
2021-02-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Sandrell Rivers Theater
Join us at the Sandrell Rivers Theater on February 13 at 7pm for a night that explores a range of Western classical music by composers of African descent by merging engaging visual elements and sound. Sacred Fire is a chronological musical journey from Afro-British to Afro-Brazilian music, narrated with poetic prose and accompanied with elements of movement (ballet) and visual art. The program will culminate in an audience talk-back with the artists and Fantasy Theater Factory CEO/Executive Artistic Director Larry Fields.

A Music Moment with William Grant Still
2020-10-04 18:00 | The Theater, United States
William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. Known as the “Dean of African-American Composers,” he began to study the violin at age 14 and taught himself to play a number of other instruments, including the cello and oboe. In 1911, Still entered Wilberforce University in Ohio. There, he gained valuable experience conducting the University band and producing his first attempts at composition and orchestration. Inspired by the career of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Still decided to become a composer of concert music and opera. He left Wilberforce University in 1915 and began working as a freelance performer and arranger for many of the top bands in the Ohio region, eventually developing an association with W.C. Handy for whom Still made his first published arrangement.
Still’s education continued off and on throughout the 1920s briefly studying theory and counterpoint Oberlin College. He also spent some time studying composition with George Chadwick at New England Conservatory and privately with experimental composer Edgard Varèse, who became Still’s most influential teacher and advocate for programming his compositions on concerts of the International Composers’ Guild, an organization which he helped found in 1921.
William Grant Still’s had many “firsts” in his career. He was the first African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a professional orchestra in the U.S., the Symphony no. 1 “Afro-American” (1930). It was premiered by Howard Hanson and the Rochester Philharmonic. The piece’s New York premiere was given by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1935. He also became the first African-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States when he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1936. In the world of opera, his Troubled Island was the first by an African-American to be performed by a major opera company (New York City Opera, 1949) and that same opera was the first by an African-American to be nationally televised.
Although William Grant Still did not write a large quantity of works for solo voice and piano, Still set many of the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen to his music. His most ambitious work for voice and piano is the song cycle “Songs of Separation” which sets poetry by Dunbar, Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Haitian poet Philipps Thoby-Marcelin (in French). In the cycle, Still sets five poems of diverse authorship with a common literary theme and constructs a unified musical framework around the poems. Still wrote over 150 compositions (well over 200 if his lost early works could be counted), including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes, especially Negro spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works

Concert-Lecture #1 “A Music Moment with William Grant Still”
Date: Sunday, October 4, 2020
Location: Salvaged by Love
Time: For upcoming concert time and dates, follow Music of the Unsung America on facebook
