The Musicology Lecture Series presents guest speaker Judith Tick, Northeastern University, "Revisionist Challenges in Writing a Biography of Ella Fitzgerald" (pictured, May 1958).
The legacy of Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) spans six decades of American song, including swing, black pop, bebop, mainstream jazz, classic pop, and experimental vocals. She has entered into our musical memory: jazz singers produce tribute albums while generations now may or may not know they have internalized her voice just by buying something somewhere. Yet an iconic voice entering into tradition does not necessarily guarantee understanding of its wider and deeper cultural resonance. Drawing on new sources, including videos and archival material, and modern scholarship on race, class, and gender, this lecture offers revisionist perspectives on Fitzgerald’s life and work.
Judith Tick is Professor Emerita of Northeastern University. She is a leading authority on American music and the history of women in music. In 2004 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as an “innovator in the field of musical biography.” Her recent work on Ella Fitzgerald, supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be published by W.W. Norton.
Professor Tick is co-editor with Jane Bowers of the anthology Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition 1150-1950 (1986), a pioneering work in its field, and the author of American Women Composers Before 1870 (1983), as well as the biography Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (1997), which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and an award from the Society for American Music. In collaboration with the art historian Gail Levin, Tick also published Aaron Copland’s America: A Cultural Perspective (2000). Her book, Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion, was published by Oxford University Press in 2008.
Musicology lectures are free and open to the public. All lectures are held Mondays at 4:30 p.m. in the Music/Dance Library (2nd floor, room 205) in the 18th Avenue Library at 175 West 18th Ave., unless otherwise noted.
Upcoming lectures:
October 14 - Anna Zayaruznaya, Yale University, "Music Against Reason: Philippe de Vitry's Exceptional Notation"
October 21 - Lois Rosow, The Ohio State University, "Ironic Play in Campra's L'Europe galante"
