OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
On November 27, 1917, the celebrated African American tenor Roland Hayes gave an evening recital at the South Park Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. A young Margaret Bonds watched alongside her mother, Estella, enthralled by the tenor’s programming of Negro Spirituals. The city’s appetite for Black concert culture so deeply moved Nora Holt, music critic for the Chicago Defender, that she immediately proclaimed a “Chicago Renaissance.” Holt subsequently took decisive charge in further shaping Black classical Chicago and situated her work in a community of Black women world-makers. This talk explores the ways in which Samantha Ege maps these histories in her new book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene.
