Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
Hide/Melt/Ghost: Writing the Early History of African-American Music
Thursday, February 22, 2018, 5:00 pm
Reception to Follow
Harold Prince Theatre, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
3680 Walnut Street
Free & Open to the Public
This lecture is drawn from Prof. Ramsey’s work-in-progress, Soundproof: Black Music, Magic and Racial Intimacies, is a history of African American music from the slave era to the present. It describes how the musical practices of the enslaved were deployed as a sign of humanity, as a melting pot for the diverse African cultural groups that would become African American people, and as a soundtrack for paranormal events like spirit possession. As we will learn, music is a powerful cultural transaction with allegorical potential. It doesn’t simply reflect community values, it “makes” communities and creates powerful social bonds.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop.
As the leader of the band Dr. Guy’s MusiQology, he has released three recording projects and has performed internationally at legendary venues such as The Blue Note in New York. Among his other musical works is “Someone Is Listening,” a commission written with poet Elizabeth Alexander, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP. His documentary film Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival in 2015. He co-curated the 2010 exhibition Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment for the National Museum of African American History and Culture and was a contributing scholar to the Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works.
Ramsey is the founder and editor of the popular blog Musiqology.com, which takes on musical issues of the day. He received a doctorate in musicology from the University of Michigan and taught at Tufts University before joining the Penn faculty in 1998. He was a Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow at Dartmouth College and a DuBois Institute Fellow at Harvard University. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and Harvard University.
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