WINTER-SPRING '25 PICK
"An eye-opening work that depicts how Black women transformed classical music in Chicago sheds a light on hidden stories that need to be told."
South Side Impresarios How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege
Publisher Description: Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making. Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community.
How to present this to library customers: To showcase this book, you can use it as a great addition to book campaigns that shed a light on Black History in February or June and even for Women’s History month in March. September is an additional time to showcase this book for Classical Music month. There are many options for people to learn something new.
Audience Key:
NOVICE:
A patron who does not know about the arts but is looking for new interests. These items are for public collections that call for you to introduce the arts to patrons and ignite their interests. They often know much more about popular culture than what’s happening in the arts.
EXPLORER:
These items are for customers who have some knowledge of the arts and want to learn more. Oftentimes these patrons stream music from your music streaming service, take out music and art biographies and they may attend music and art programming at your library.
AFICIONADO:
Ordering for aficionados requires knowledge about their habits when consuming the arts. These patrons are aware of the arts through museums, classical music, jazz and more. Oftentimes, these patrons attend music and art programming at your library, are professionals in the arts world with thorough knowledge of visual and/or performing arts.