The Chicago Connection: Black composers of the early 20th century
Early in the 20th century, in which has been named the Great Migration, millions of Black southerners moved North, looking for opportunity and an escape from Jim Crow. The vibrant….
Category: Arts & Music
Not Forgotten Anymore: The African American Composer Initiative
Sometimes all it takes is one question to spur a revelation that inspires a movement. The African American Composer Initiative started with a question and has become a thriving nonprofit, discovering, performing, and recording underappreciated concert music by Black composers.
Holding the Inner Flame: On Creativity
What is creativity, how can we nurture it, and what can it do for us? In this conversation we speak about creativity from two directions: Dr. Joanne Foster researches and writes about creativity in education, and Patrice Vecchione teaches and practices creativity in her writing and visual art. Interviewed separately, Joanne and Patrice speak on the same topics through the lens each has developed in her own life and work.
Minibabble: Dystopian novels – Warning, not blueprint.
Some thoughts from Babblery host Suki Wessling about how we should read and act upon dystopian literature. It seems that reasonable people take these novels as warnings, many people seem to take them as blueprints for how we should mold our future.
Minibabble: Carol Fisher Saller on Inclusivity in Children’s Fiction
In this mini-episode, we focus on a change that has both energized and confused writers: the push for representation and the elimination of cultural appropriation. Author Carol Fisher Saller speaks with refreshing candor about the difficulties she faces as a white writer who genuinely wants to write representative, inclusive kidlit. She talks about the myths and misperceptions, as well as the challenges, as she tries to make her way in a changed industry.
Minibabble: Making music together = moving toward the good
Making music together = keeping time together
We often talk about “spending” time with friends, but how about keeping time? When we make music together, we literally interact with the time that we’re “spending,” keeping it, beat by beat, as a shared resource. There’s really no other [public] activity that we can do with other humans that allows us to interact in this way: when we play music, our bodies move in sync, our mouths say words together or in response, we are literally joined together in time.
Minibabble: Singing as…
An ode to humanity’s first instrument In which host Suki Wessling reflects on a life of singing. Singing as therapy, singing as memory, singing as body, singing as meditation, singing….
Bodies making music: composer Anne Hege
“It’s really kind of transcendental, this way that a group can come together to bring meaning to sound through our bodies.” Composer Anne Hege practices a rarefied profession. Not only….
On being a storyteller in an infinite village
Near the end of my recent interview with Brenda Laurel, she talks about the responsibility of content creators in our current world. “What we can do, what I hope we….
Play Like a Girl (or not) with Brenda Laurel
In this conversation with Brenda Laurel, we explore how girls play and what that means for women and game designers. We talk about the relationship between theater and gaming, and how the gaming world grew to change the way children live and develop. We talk about the importance of teaching. But most of all, we talk about what it means to be a creator in this world, someone who asks others to entrust their minds to our work.