5/18
Louisa Shepard
Senior News Officer
lshepard@upenn.edu
After decades of superstition and pushback, the first group of women stepped onto Franklin Field with the Penn Band 50 years ago.
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage announced 41 grants totaling $10.5 million in support of the Institute for Contemporary Art and Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and a Girard College project involving theater director Brooke O’Harra and music composer Tyshawn Sorey.
The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will stream, in real time, performances from its stage.
The professor of music, who won an award and released two new albums during the pandemic, discusses composition, text as music, and embracing electronic music in the absence of concert halls.
In an effort to amplify the messages of the recent protests against racist violence, Penn Arts & Sciences created a special series: What Happens to a Dream Deferred? 60-Second Lectures on Racial Injustice.
Penn Libraries has completed digitization of more than 2,500 items from its Marian Anderson collection, now available for public view on a new website.
Music Professor Guthrie Ramsey has released a new album of songs meant to pay homage to his many musical partnerships. The project was prompted by his cancer diagnosis and influenced by the global pandemic and uprising against racial injustice.
President Amy Gutmann says singing along to “The Red and Blue,” composed 125 years ago, is the “most cherished” and “best known” tradition in song at Penn. The official alma mater, “Hail, Pennsylvania!” was also written in 1895. (Video)
The Penn Flow Chinese-Western chamber music ensemble juxtaposes traditional Chinese instruments with Western instruments. Student members are featured playing the traditional Chinese erhu and guzheng at home in videos posted by the Music Department.
Often idealized through images of painstakingly restored Chryslers and romantic, backroom rumbas, Cuba has untold subcultures that one graduate student, Carmen Torre Pérez, is analyzing through a social history of Cuban punk.
Louisa Shepard
Senior News Officer
lshepard@upenn.edu
Tyshawn Sorey of the School of Arts & Sciences has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in music for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” a concerto for saxophone and orchestra.
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Samantha Hill of Penn Libraries discusses the recent acquisition of two collections of archival materials by Sun Ra, a prolific jazz musician and forefather to the Afrofuturist movement.
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Jasmine Henry of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the success of Sugar Hill Records and “Rapper’s Delight,” both created by entrepreneur Sylvia Robinson, significantly contributed to mainstream acceptance of hip-hop.
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The South Asian a cappella group Penn Masala will perform at the state dinner for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House.
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During a tour in Chile, members of the Penn Glee Club are interviewed on a podcast of the Chilean North American Institute.
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“Be Holding,” a poetry performance that seeks to heal grieving Black families, was directed by Brooke O’Harra and composed by Tyshawn Sorey, both of the School of Arts & Sciences.
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