Matthew D. Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His research focuses on the relationship between (racial) identity, performance, property, copyright law, and inequities within the history of American popular music and beyond. His current book project is titled, Blacksound: Making Race and Identity in American Popular Music. Morrison will talk about his notion of “Blacksound” and its relationship with timbre and orchestration.

Minister, musician, and musicologist, Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and Yale’s Divinity School. A musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology. Shelley will give a talk on orchestration in gospel music, specifically focusing on the Hammond organ.

Ayò Olúrántí is a composer, conductor, organist, and music theorist specializing in pre-colonial Yorùbá music and culture. Equally fluent in the fields of production and computer technology, he is also an active member of the digital and virtual pipe organ community. His cross-cultural approaches to composition and scholarship have earned him considerable international attention. He has performed and composed in Nigeria, the UK, the USA, South Africa, and Germany. Olúrántí is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Morehouse College Sub-Sahara Africa Commission Award, Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and was the winner of the Donald Sutherland Endowment Fund Composition Competition. He has published research on tonality of African languages, polyrhythm in African pianism, intercultural music composition, and orality as a compositional technique. Olúrántí received his Ph.D. in Composition & Theory from the University of Pittsburgh.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through 50 years of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it. McCalla’s performances here are captivating, fueled by rich, sophisticated melodic work and intoxicating Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the juxtaposition of voices is similarly entrancing, raising the dead while shining a light on the enduring spirit of the Haitian people. McCalla isn’t just some detached observer, though; she writes with great insight and introspection, grappling with memory, family, and her own Haitian-American identity as she searches for a clearer vision of herself, both as a woman and an artist.

Born to a pair of Haitian emigrants and activists, McCalla first rose to fame with the GRAMMY-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops before launching her solo career to widespread acclaim in 2014. The NY Times raved that “her voice is disarmingly natural, and her settings are elegantly succinct,” while Rolling Stone hailed her “politically pointed lyrics,” and NPR declared that her writing is “partly in the moment and partly looking beyond it...seeing truths that we've missed.” McCalla currently resides in New Orleans, LA.

Kevin C. Holt is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Stony Brook University where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focused on the music, culture, and sociomusical interventions of hip-hop. His research interests include American popular music and issues of race class & gender as they manifest in popular culture. He was selected as a featured contributor to the inaugural Transcultural Hip Hop Conference hosted by the University of Bern (2021). His current book project is an ethnographic study that draws heavily on Africana studies, musicological analysis, linguistics and performance studies in order to discuss crunk, a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop, as a performed response to hypersurveillant policing of black youth in the city’s public spaces in the 1990s. This research has direct implications for analyzing contemporary hip-hop subgenres like trap and political movements like #blacklivesmatter. The title of his presentation is “Crunk, Trap, and Compositional Representations of Embodied Experiences”.

Dr. Bibian Kalinde is Zambia’s first female doctorate degree holder in music education. She is the elected president of the Pan African Society for Musical Arts Education (PASMAE), founding director of the University of Zambia (UNZA) choir, Assistant Dean of Postgraduate Studies at the UNZA School of Education, and the Vice President of Africa Affairs in the Intercultural Music Initiative (IMI). Dr. Kalinde has published and presented work on the music of Zambian marriage ceremonies, music globalization, depictions of women in popular Zambian music, the effectiveness of song in childhood education, and music therapy. Her current research focuses on the intersections of gender and music in traditional Zambian society. The title of her presentation for this speaker series is “Unraveling Timbre in the Music of the Marriage Ceremony of the Chewa and Bemba in Zambia.”

Marvin McNeill is an assistant professor at Emory University. After serving 20 years as a collegiate band director—most recently serving for sixteen years as the Associate Director and Chief Arranger for the “Pride of Connecticut,” the University of Connecticut Marching Band—McNeill attended Wesleyan as a PhD student to pursue and expand upon personal scholarly interests and passions. His research interests include African American folk and popular music traditions with special attention on Black New Orleans brass band and HBCU [Historically Black College and University] marching band history, culture, and traditions. Additional research interests include youth culture studies; community and social bonding studies; and affect theory. McNeill is the founding member of The Funky Dawgz Brass Band, a New Orleans style brass band that has toured nationally and internationally. This research project is supported by a 2021 Global South Fellowship awarded by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. His talk is titled “‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’: An Afrological Approach to the Study of Sonic Representations from the African American Band Tradition”