"AIDA'S SISTERS" IN CONCERT IN BERLIN 2006

Poster of Aida's Sisters in Concert in Berlin/Germany 2006

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Classic in Black Group has presented "In The United States of Africa in Music" with Del Fionn Sykes singing accompanied by Tobias Ling on Piano. Abdourahman A. Waveri was reading his new Roman "In The United States of Africa" coming soon in German.

In the framework of Black History Month 2007, Classic in Black Group, Manager Harry Louiserre, in association with the Afrikahaus Berlin, was celebrating this annual recognition of the black culture worldwide with a presentation "In The United States of Africa in Music", a literary and musical evening. The book, "In The United States of Africa ", is a fictional romance written by Abdourahman A. Waberi from Erythrea. In his book the world is reversed, Africa is the most powerful continent in the world, called The United States of Africa and the western countries represent the third world.
During this evening, Waberi has related to us this story accompanied by African-American Soprano Del Fionn Sykes, who has shared with us musically concepts of oppression, despair and hope.

Date: Saturday 3.02.007 at 7. pm

Afrikahaus Berlin
Bochumerstrasse 25
Reservation Table and Ticket at: Tel: 030 392 20 10 or look at the Website also:

Afrikahaus Berlin

or contact Classic in Black Office: Tel./Fax: 0049 30 4508 3743/44

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Classic in Black Group has participated to the Prize Award granted by the french "Mairie de Paris" to Ms Eda-Pierre (french Soprano from Martinique) to add this event to the documentary film about Ms Eda-Pierre, that will be present at the end of 2007.

Date: 21.02.2007
Time: 18:30-23:00
Venue: Mairie de Paris (Salle des Arcades)



Eda Pierre Studied in Paris Conservatoire. Début in Nice 1958 (Leila in Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles). She sang Pamina at Aix-en-Provence 1959, Lakmé at Paris Opéra-Comique 1961, and Fatima in Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Paris Opéra 1962, later singing Lucia di Lammermoor, Constanze, and Milhaud's Médée there. CG début 1966 (Teresa in Benvenuto Cellini).
Her american debut took place in NY Metropolitan 1976 with Paris Opéra (Countess in Le nozze di Figaro), then returning from 1980 as Constanze (Die Entführung), Gilda (Rigoletto), and Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann), at the same periode she sang for the firs time at Salzburg Festival (Les Contes d'Hoffmann).
She sang in Messiaen's St François d'Assise, musical work created for her specially at the Opera Garnier (Paris 1983). Ms Eda-Pierre was Professor of Singing at the Paris Conservatoire from 1977 untill the 80's. (The Oxford Dictionary of Music, © Oxford University Press 1994)

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Classic in Black group has presented "Letter to Johann Sebastian Bach" lectured by Njamy Sitson,
The griot of the african polyphony.

Please click on the foto to get more informations about the musical project:


A Musical Story with Njamy Sitson artist from Cameroun acting, singing and playing african instruments, that has lectured us the "Tale Story" of the letter sent by an african musician from Guinea in the XVIII century to Johann Sebastian Bach, the german master of The Fugues and Counterpoint;
with Gregor Dubuclet als Musical Director

PREMIERED in BERLIN: 6 and 7. April 2007
20:00
At Afrikahaus Berlin
Bochumerstrasse 25
Tel: 030 392 20 10 or look at the Website:

Afrikahaus Berlin

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"AFRICA IN AMERICA"

CIB Group has presented "Africa in America " an intercultural project planed within the annual Celebration of the end of slavery in France.
Program with Film, Music and Conference about this theme

Date: 14. Mai 2007
At 19:00
Place: France Ameriques 9 ave Franklin roosevelt 75008 Paris
For more information please click on this picture:

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Classic in Black Group has collaborated in 2007-08 with the filmmaker of "Homezone" Youssef Rabbaoui from Marroco based in Berlin.

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Classic in Black Group has presented during the Moabiter Kulturtage in Berlin the 28 and 29 June 2007, a historical overview from the time of the slavery comited by the german in Ghana untill now.
- 29 June at 20:00 at Afrikahaus Berlin: Cultural Evening with music (played by the accordeonist Alain Gauvrit) and lecture of books about this theme.

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"AIDA'S SISTERS" IN CONCERT IN PARIS MARS 2008

Poster of Aida's Sisters in Concert in Paris/France 2008

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Essai in English:

2. An Introduction about the Contribution of People of African Descent to the Western Classical Music

The term classical music has many varied and often vague meanings, but it most commonly refers to the European tradition of music performed in concert settings, with an emphasis on written composition rather than the oral and improvisational traditions of popular and folk music. If what is "classical" is often difficult to define, applying the term to works created by African Americans is particularly problematic.
These musicians, working largely outside the classical mainstream, have felt free to refer in their work to the heritage of nonclassical forms such as Spirituals, ragtime, jazz, gospel music, pop, and other idioms, African American musicians have transformed these popular and folk materials into the classical forms of art songs and symphonies, just as European composers seeking a national identity have often turned to the popular and folk music of their own regions.


I. HISTORICAL PERIODS

In the 19th century, African American composers and bandleaders often provided social music such as marches, dances, and salon pieces. Frank Johnson, a black composer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, performed his own compositions as well as the latest popular imports from Europe to great success in the 1830s and 1840s.
Later, Scott Joplin, whose compositions started a craze for the social music of ragtime at the end of the 19th century, turned to the concert form of the grand opera with his Treemonisha (1911). A second movement, which emerged by the end of the 19th century, anticipated the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance in its elevation of folk materials, particularly spirituals, to the status of art and concert music.
This phase was stimulated by Czech composer Antonín Dvorèák during his residency from 1892 to 1895 at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, and by Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor during his visits to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910. Dvorèák encouraged his students to study the spirituals, which had been introduced to the concert stages of the Northern states and Western Europe by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and to incorporate this oral repertoire in the written tradition as art songs.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as audiences became less demanding that black composers work in folk idioms, these composers turned toward the neoclassical style that emerged in European classical music in the 20th century.
In this style the ethnic and regional dialects of earlier, more romantic periods were subordinated to the structural goals of contemporary European composers who called for a return to the classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Many of these composers, fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany,had joined the faculties of the American universities and conservatories where black composers and performers were being trained. Finally, for the composers and performers from the 1960s to the present, the boundaries between classical music and other forms such as jazz and African music have been often consciously obliterated.
The era of bebop and free jazz, rhythm and blues, and the Civil Rights Movement provided more eclectic influences and wider opportunities for black artists.
By the end of the 20th century, younger artists were assimilating ideas from a wide range of musical styles, including those of popular culture as well as traditions from all over the world.


II. COMPOSERS  

The most significant of the earlier African American composers includes Harry Burleigh, who became friends with Dvorèák during Dvorèák's time in New York City. Burleigh's arrangements of spirituals have provided singers since the time of the Harlem Renaissance with many exceptional settings. The choral arrangements of folk songs and spirituals by John Work III and William Dawson, from the generation following Burleigh's, have been no less significant.
A contemporary of Work and Dawson, William Grant Still, based his first symphony, the Afro-American Symphony (1930), on the blues and his experience as a jazz arranger. This work, the culmination of the Harlem Renaissance ideal of making high art out of black folk material, has proved the most enduring of all classical works by African American musicians. Nearly as influential have been the works of R. Nathaniel Dett, particularly his piano suite In the Bottoms (1913) and his cantata The Ordering of Moses (1937).

Two primary figures from the neoclassical school were Ulysses Kay, who studied with German composer Paul Hindemith at Yale University and who featured few folk elements in his work despite being the nephew of jazz pioneer King Oliver; and Howard Swanson, a student in France of noted teacher Nadia Boulanger, as were many of these composers. Swanson first gained prominence when Marian Anderson performed his song setting of the Langston Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in 1949.
The composer and pianist George Walker received a similarly classical European training, also studying with Boulanger, but his carefully constructed works have emphasized traditionally black forms and themes. In 1996, late in his long career, he became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in music, for Lilacs, a piece for voice and orchestra. Walker's contemporaries T. J. Anderson, Hale Smith, and Olly Wilson have also achieved many major successes.

Another contemporary, David Baker, is a prolific figure who has performed and composed jazz as well as extended classical works that include concertos, song cycles, and liturgical music, much like the genre-crossing work of Coleridge Perkinson and Wendell Logan. Composers of the younger generation whose works have made a strong impression include Dorothy Rudd Moore, Adolphus Hailstork, Alvin Singleton, Robert L. Morris, Tania Leon, Donal Fox, and Michael Abels.
As audiences in the early 1970s became interested in neglected black composers and cultures during the Civil Rights Movement, commemorative concerts and conferences featuring black composers were organized and recorded anthologies of their work began to appear. This reclamation of black artists was aided by the publication of Eileen Southern's important survey The Music of Black Americans (1971), which revolutionized the perspective Americans had on their musical past.


III. PERFORMERS  

Most black singers who sought stage experience prior to the middle of the 20th century, including 19th-century performers such as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, M. Sissieretta Jones, and Nellie Brown Mitchell, had to form their own opera companies. None of these companies remained financially successful. During the Harlem Renaissance, concert singers such as Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and Dorothy Maynor emerged, demonstrating their artistry first in churches and subsequently in integrated concert halls.
A major milestone was the extraordinarily successful debut of soprano Leontyne Price with the Metropolitan Opera in 1961, six years after Anderson made a brief appearance there. Price immediately became a reigning diva of Italian opera and then expanded her repertoire to include works by German, French, and American composers. Joining her soon after on the stages of major opera houses were Mattiwilda Dobbs, Shirley Verrett, Martina Arroyo, Grace Bumbry, and Leona Mitchell, followed by Florence Quivar, Kathleen Battle, and especially Jessye Norman.

Despite the presence of artists such as William Warfield, George Shirley, Simon Estes, William Brown, Willard White, and Ben Holt, opportunities for male opera singers have been limited in the United States by a greater reluctance to include black men in mixed-race casting.Instrumentalists who have enjoyed significant careers include 20th-century pianists Natalie Hinderas and André Watts. As had been true with singers, for many years black instrumentalists who wished to participate in orchestral performance had to form their own ensembles, which were often underfunded.
Prior to the founding of the largely minority Chicago Sinfonietta in the 1980s, New York's Symphony of the New World (1965-1976) provided a significant outlet for black performers and composers. American orchestras can claim only a few black instrumentalists, but important African American conductors have achieved international careers, including Dean Dixon, Henry Lewis, Paul Freeman, James de Preist, Isaiah Jackson, Calvin Simmons, and Leslie Dunner.

Source: US Black Opera Website