Dartmouth Events

“They want us to tell their story”: An exercise in fragmented listening and racial justice
Ellie M. Hisama (University of Toronto)

This lecture argues for the urgent need to center voices of BIPOC artists, musicians, and writers within universities and with people outside the academy. In conversation with the work of Tina Campt, Philip Cote, Lee Maracle, and Dylan Robinson, I share writing from my book-in-progress about the New York-based composer and musician Julius Eastman, a project that brings together fragments of his radical sonic expressions of and commentary on black being in his compositions and performances.

Ellie M. Hisama (she/her) is Dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto and Professor Emerita of Music at Columbia University. Hisama was named the Edward T. Cone Member in music studies for Fall 2024 at the Institute for Advanced Study where she will work on her book titled The Fragment and the Long Song of Julius Eastman. A social historian and music theorist, she is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism and co-editor of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds and Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies. She has published widely on twentieth-century composers, performers, and improvisors including Julius Eastman, Ruth Crawford, and Geri Allen; North American and British popular music; and issues of equity in music institutions.

She is Founding Director of For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound, an initiative at Columbia’s Computer Music Center in which New York City public high school students created, recorded, and reflected upon their work in sound. She is also Founding Director of Future Sound 6ix, a project at the University of Toronto’s Electroacoustic Music Studio and the YWCA Scarborough. She organized and moderated the panel We Have to Reimagine: A Conversation about Anti-Asian Racism and Violence held in April 2021 at Columbia.