by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Ohio Light Opera’s Cinderella
•This summer with Opus 216
•The passing of musicologist Richard Taruskin
•Oberlin music theory professor Brian Alegant on the Bulletproof Musician podcast
•Dorothy Rudd Moore’s setting of the famous Frederick Douglass speech What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
HAPPENING TODAY:
Ohio Light Opera puts on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella today at 2:00 pm at Freedlander Theatre in Wooster. Tickets here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Opus 216 has posted its schedule for the summer, and the July shows from that genre-fluid ensemble begin tomorrow at Rocky River Public Library at 5:00 pm. They’ll follow that up on Wednesday with a performance at the Tall Ships Festival (which returns to Cleveland for the first time since 2019).
Musicologist Richard Taruskin passed away on Friday at the age of 77. In The New York Times, fellow musicologist William Robin writes an obituary of this “commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history.”
INTERESTING LISTEN:
Oberlin music theory professor Brian Alegant (above, left) appeared on a recent episode of the Bulletproof Musician podcast for a conversation titled “On Putting Music Back Into MUSIC Theory.” The podcast’s host is someone who for a long time was not especially keen on music theory — Noa Kageyama (above, right), the performance psychology coach for the New World Symphony (and an Oberlin alum and Marysville native). Click here to listen or to read the transcript.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
At a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on this date in 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his speech What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? — considered by many to be the greatest piece of anti-slavery oratory in American history.
Composer Dorothy Rudd Moore turned to that prominent abolitionist as inspiration for her opera Frederick Douglass. One powerful moment that critic Tim Page noted in his review of the 1985 premiere is a musical setting of excerpts of that famous speech — “when Douglass contemplates the bitter irony of a pre-emancipation Fourth of July,” Page writes.
Watch a performance of the aria by baritone José Pietri-Coimbre and pianist Richard Liebowitz from 2019. You can also read about the speech here from the Library of Congress, read the full speech here from BlackPast, or listen to five descendants of Douglass reading and responding to excerpts of it here.