Now We Listen!

A podcast celebrating traditionally underrepresented performers, scholars, and research topics in early music and historically informed performance.

Now We Listen! is curated and produced by members of EMA’s IDEA Task Force and is the only early-music podcast written and hosted by diverse individuals in the HIP community. NWL is available via the player below or wherever you get your podcasts.

Season 1

Episode 1: Hungry Listening: Indigenous Music and Early Music

Diné pianist and scholar Renata Yazzie and Karuk baroque violist and ethnomusicologist Breana McCullough will engage in a dialogue around ways in which we bring Indigenous perspectives into our interpretation of art music and pedagogy, using Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening as a starting point.

Music In This Episode:

• Connor Che: Coyotes
  Breana McCullough & Renata Yazzie
• Connor Che: Navajo Vocale N.9 
  Renata Yazzie (piano).

Links

American Indian Musician’s Scholarship

Episode 2: Female Representation in Entrepreneurship and Education

Costa Rican baroque bassoonist and arts entrepreneur Catalina Klein will lead a discussion about creating spaces for hopeful resistance in educational projects and supporting female empowerment while referring to essays from the book edited by Wayne Wu, Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice.

Music In This Episode:

• G.F.Handel: Trio Sonata in G minor, Op.2 no.5, HWV 390
  Catalina Klein (basson), Majka Demcak (violin), Amanda Kitik (oboe), Elliot Figg (harpsichord)

Links

Mount Parnassus Foundation 

Episode 3: The Colonialization of Music in Theory and Practice

Music theory professor Phillip Ewell joins us in a conversation about his own text Music Theory and the White Racial Frame and his upcoming monograph On Music Theory, And Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, available Spring 2023 from the University of Michigan Press.

Music In This Episode:

• Vicente Lusitano: Heu me Domine
  Huelgas Ensemble
• Max Richter: On the nature of Daylight
  Phillip Ewell (cello), Kazi Ewell (violin)

Links

Episode 4: Antisemitism and Early Music

Pianist Byron Schenkman centers the conversation in this episode around the pitfalls of overlooking historically antisemitic and discriminatory texts and composers of the “canonized” previous centuries when programming in the 21st century. As a starting point, they’ll use Jeffrey Sposato’s book The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the 19th Century Anti-Semitic Tradition.

Music In This Episode:

• Anna Bon: Sonata in C Major, op. 2, no. 4
  Byron Schenkmann (harpsichord)
• Jonathan Woody: Nor shape of today (Poem by Raquel Salas Rivera)
  Hailey McAvoy (voice), Andrew Gonzalez (viola), Byron Schenkman (piano)

Links

Byron Schenkman & Friends

Episode 5: Confronting the Establishment

African-American oboist and Principal Oboe of the Nashville Symphony Titus Underwood discuss with us historically ingrained biases and prejudices when hiring and managing orchestras which have largely grown out of a place of extreme discriminatory privilege. We will also examine Matthew Morrison’s article “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musical Discourse.”

Music In This Episode:

• G.P. Telemann: Fantasia in A minor
  Titus Underwood (oboe)
• Fred Onovwerosuoke: Three Pieces for Solo Flute Variation VI
  Titus Underwood (oboe)

Links