The IU Musicology Department and Graduate Musicology Association are pleased to welcome Mark Burford, R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College. His talk, “‘A Good Musical Education’: Mahalia Jackson and the Legibility of Black Women’s Voices,” is the second in the Peter Burkholder Lecture series, established in 2019 in honor of Distinguished Professor Emeritus J. Peter Burkholder and in celebration of his retirement. The lecture will take place on Friday, February 17, 2023, at 12:30 pm in Ford-Crawford Hall, located on the second floor of the Simon Music Center.
As a music historian, Dr. Burford’s scholarship and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American music and long-nineteenth-century European concert music. His published writing for both academic and general audiences includes articles on Johannes Brahms, Alvin Ailey, gospel music, and opera, and his article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music. He is the editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader and author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, which in 2019 received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award for the outstanding book in musicology by a senior scholar. In 2022, he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association for outstanding contribution to the field of musicology. His current research project is a book on W. E. B. Du Bois and music, focusing on coverage of music in the NAACP magazine The Crisis during Du Bois’s twenty-three-year editorship.
This event is co-sponsored by the Jacobs School of Music Diversity & Equity Committee and the Peter Burkholder Lecture Fund.
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