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.