Errollyn Wallen was born in Belize and moved to London with her family at the age of two.
She trained as a dancer at the Maureen Lyons School of Dancing and the Urdang Academy before taking dance classes at the Dance Theater of Harlem and went on to study music and composition at the universities of London and Cambridge.
According to Grove Music Online, “Wallen draws inspiration from a great diversity of sources in her music. It is above all characterized by a deeply expressive lyricism … and a delight in vibrant dance rhythms …” Her work is also influenced by avant-garde classical music as well as popular songwriting and includes operas, chamber music, and choral music as well as orchestral music.
Haitian-American composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (aka DBR) was born in Skokie, Illinois. His family moved to Fort Lauderdale Florida subsequently. As a first-generation American, DBR’s family home was filled with Haitian folk music and his family encouraged him to listen to a variety of classical and contemporary music.
He discovered the violin at age 5. In junior high school, he formed his own rock / hip-hop band playing guitar and synthesizer.
He majored in music composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music and continued his studies at the University of Michigan where he earned both his masters and doctoral degrees.
DBR is an innovative composer, performer, activist and educator. His works blend hip-hop, funk, rock and classical music into genre defying, energetic and experimental forms. He has collaborated with many orchestras and chamber ensembles around the world. His eclectic musical interests are reflected in the fact that he has collaborated with all manner of artists like Philip Glass, Lady Gaga, Bill T. Jones, DJ Spooky, and Cassandra Wilson.
DBR taking an unconventional approach to violin playing in a 2012 workshop .
Here’s a quote from Roumain’s website that gives a nice overview of the width and breadth of his work to date:
“Known for his signature violin sounds infused with myriad electronic, urban, and African-American music influences, DBR takes his genre-bending music beyond the proscenium. He is a composer of chamber, orchestral, and operatic works; has won an Emmy for Outstanding Musical Composition for his collaborations with ESPN; featured as keynote performer at technology conferences; and created large scale, site-specific musical events for public spaces.”
Editor’s note:In conjunction with the current “Black Composers Matter” display at the Music Library, I – your friendly neighborhood Music Library Associate – had a great time researching for it and I thought it might be nice to showcase the Black Composers highlighted therein. Things that are linked will take you to additional relevant information or to OneSearch for library-owned materials.
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Zenobia Powell Perry
(October 3, 1908 – January 17, 2004)
Perry was born in Boley, Oklahoma into a well-educated, middle class family. Her grandfather, who had been enslaved, sang her traditional spirituals as a child, which later influenced her work.
When she was about 7 years old, she met Booker T. Washington and sang for him at his appearance in Boley on August 22, 1915. She won a piano competition in 1919, and also learned to play violin.
Perry went on to study music at Berryman Conservatory in Nebraska and the Hampton Institute in Virginia. In 1935, she started at the Tuskegee Institute where she studied with composer William L. Dawson, who encouraged her to compose original work. She graduated from Tuskegee in 1938.
After Tuskegee, Perry became part of a Black teacher training program which was headed by Eleanor Roosevelt (who helped to fund Perry’s graduate studies).
Perry (left) with music students and teachers in 1949.
Perry worked as a professor at several historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including Central State University in Ohio.
She did not seriously begin composing until she was in her 40s. Her music is classical with some jazz and folk influence. She wrote an opera Tawana House (first performed in 1987 and revived in 2014), as well as works for voice, orchestra, band and a mass.
If you’d like to learn more about her, here are some items about Perry from the Music Library’s collection:
Welcome to our second installment of Parsons Playlists. Our second playlist is from Music Library Associate, Melanie Armstrong and is a tribute to songwriter Adam Schlesinger, whose career was cut short on April 1st, 2020 due to complications from Covid-19.
Melanie says: “I first became aware of Adam Schlesinger’s work when I discovered the band Fountains of Wayne in the early 2000s. But come to find out, I had already heard his amazing pop sensibility thanks to the title song of the 1996 movie That Thing You Do!. He wrote music for many other TV, Broadway and film projects and also for the musical TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which happens to be one of my very favorite recent TV shows. I also threw in a couple of TV Christmas songs since I blog about holiday programs with my husband. So please enjoy this sampling of his amazing and alas too short career! This music will definitely make you smile though, and that’s quite a legacy to leave behind.”
Although we are all socially distant at the moment, we thought it might be fun and encouraging to share playlists as a way to connect (with a tip of the hat to our friends at the Modlin Center for the Arts who started sharing playlists a couple of weeks ago).
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
If you know me, you know I listen almost exclusively to music from the 70’s and 80’s (see my posts about Steely Dan and A Chorus Line, the musical). That’s not to say that I don’t love music being produced today—I do–but my heart lies in my parents’ music. And a band my parents absolutely loved is America.
America has been making music for decades — really. They have 16 albums, not including special anniversary editions, re-releases, or any other specialty disc. They published their first album, America, in 1971, and their most recent album, Back Pages, is from 2011. That might sound like a lot of music, and it is, but we luckily have a Greatest Hits CD, which encompasses almost all of my favorite songs. “Daisy Jane” is one of the sweetest love songs I know (and it’s not just because 7 year-old me liked that my name was in the title).
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19104741
If you’re a beginner at guitar, start with their arguably most famous song — “A Horse With No Name”. It’s literally two chords going back and forth throughout the entire song. When recently asked, I said that “Ventura Highway” is the song that best represents me. “Tin Man” (based on The Wizard of Oz), “Sister Golden Hair”, “You Can Do Magic”, and “I Need You” are some of my other favorites.
America’s music feels home-y. You can tell they’re really playing their instruments, and it’s so clear through their music that they simply love what they do. Their songs fall under the genre of folk rock, and a lot of them are about the experiences they’ve had in California, which I love listening to if I’m ever feeling homesick about being away from LA.
I actually watched America in concert a few years ago. My mom, my sister and I went together, and we couldn’t believe that after 40 years, they still sounded like their records from the 70s. If you’re looking for good, laid-back, driving with the windows down kind of music, I’d check them out.
(And just a hint: if you like this kind of music, go to the library search website, click on the “Subjects” tab, and type in “Rock music—1971-1980.” You can thank me later)
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
You’re watching a film. It’s a sports movie about a chippy group of underdogs defying all odds and barreling towards impossible success. Or it’s a coming-of-age story about teenagers coping with the incredible, ineffable weight of being. Or it’s a true story of human struggle in the face of calamity–a military operation gone wrong; an oil rig exploding. What music is playing? If the film was made in the past two decades, there’s a very good chance it’s post-rock.
The term ‘post-rock’ was coined by music journalist Simon Reynolds in 1994. It is used, broadly, in reference to any music that uses rock instrumentation but doesn’t adhere to rock song convention. Post-rock songs are most often long instrumental pieces that focus on musical texture and build to all-out climaxes, a subgenre affectionately dubbed ‘crescendocore.’
In 2003, Texas-based post-rock band Explosions in the Sky released their third studio album, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. This album is widely regarded as their greatest work, and is considered one of the essential works of the genre. Explosions’ brand of post-rock — layers of reverb and delay-laden guitars punctuated by the ever-marching cadence of a snare drum — came to define the genre in the early 21st century, due in no small part to the 2004 film Friday Night Lights.
After Explosions released The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, they were approached by Brian Reitzell, a Hollywood composer, producer, and film music supervisor, about soundtracking the upcoming big-budget sports film Friday Night Lights. At this point, having a relatively unknown post-rock outfit soundtrack a major Hollywood release, let alone a sports movie, was unheard of. Rocky III’s “Eye of the Tiger“, this was not.
After Reitzell demoed the group’s music to studio executives, permission was granted to bring the band on board. Musically, the soundtrack to Friday Night Lights retains much of the aesthetic of The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. The band even adapted the song “Your Hand in Mine” from the album for the film.
Friday Night Lights went on to be both a critical and commercial success, though its greatest influence on the film industry was arguably its Explosions-crafted soundtrack. The film ushered post-rock into the mainstream, and the band’s music quickly found use as ‘temp-music’ — music used by directors when editing their films to give an idea to their composer of how they want a piece to sound (for an in-depth account of what temp music is and how it affects a film’s production, check out this video from Every Frame a Painting). James Rettig of Stereogum even went as far as to call the band’s signature sound to “a cheat code for music supervisors seeking to convey emotional turmoil and the triumph of the human spirit.”
If the Friday Night Lights soundtrack is the sound that launched a thousand imitators, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place is the band’s full-length expression of that sound, uncompromised by the necessities of scoring a film. Though their music has inescapable cinematographic connotation, Explosions in the Sky’s albums remain an intensely intimate listening experience. The lack of lyrics in fact enhances the music’s narrative potential: It invites you to construct a mental movie theater for one. You sit down in your seat and gaze up at the silver screen as your own memories are projected in front of you. Scenes from your life play out like a film, a melodramatic filter laid over it all. You conjure some memories that aren’t your own — games never played, starry night skies above fields never lain in, chances never taken — but the feelings are yours. When you open this album, you are greeted by the explanation to its title: “The Earth is not a cold dead place because you are breathing, because you are listening.”
