Who Hears Here? A Book Launch and Talk with Dr. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.

Join Artspace New Haven for a launch of Dr. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. book Who Hear’s Here? On Black Music, Pasts and Present (University of California Press, 2022) and accompanying talk with Dr. Michael E. Veal, Yale University Henry L. and Lucy G Moses Professor of Music and African American Studies. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey’s search to understand America’s Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.

This in-person, free public program is held in conjunction with the exhibition, [Voicings], on view February 11–April 15, 2023. For in-person programs, Artspace encourages mask-wearing and social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within our community. Sign-up for our newsletter, follow us on Instagram @artspacenh, and check this online calendar regularly for more information.

A Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and Professor of Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely-published writer, he’s the author, co-author, or editor of four music history books and many essays and articles such as Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013). Dr. Ramsey is co-author beside Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., with Melanie Zeck of The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs and the Ships of the African Diaspora (2017) and editor of Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020). His book Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts and Present was published in fall of 2022, and his book in progress is Sound Proof: Black Music and Racial Intimacies is a history of African American music from the slave-era to the present. He was editor for the series “Music of the African Diaspora” at the University of California Press for ten years and founding editor of the blog Musiqology.com.

As a producer, label head, and leader of the band Dr. Guy’s Musiqology, Ramsey has released five recording projects and has performed at venues such as The Blue Note and Harlem Stage in New York, and the Annenberg Theater of the Performing Arts and Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia, and other venues
worldwide. His musical commissions include “Someone Is Listening,” written with poet Elizabeth Alexander, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP; he recently scored the prize-winning documentary Making Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. His documentary Amazing: The Tests and
Triumph of Bud Powell was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival in 2015 and his multimedia performance piece Hide/Melt/Ghost made its New York debut at Harlem Stage in 2019. The “Renaissance, Refried,” a multimedia performance piece debuted at the Barnes Foundation in 2022. He has organized and performed in several Jazz Vespers and fund-raising concerts for St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Ramsey hosted the Musiqology Podcast, and Musiqology Rx is his community arts initiative that provides quality arts programming to under-served communities. He has written for and consulted with museums and galleries such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Barnes Foundation and was co-curator of the acclaimed exhibition Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2010. Dr. Ramsey has lectured on music nationally and internationally.

Michael E. Veal is Henry L. and Luce G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale University. He is the author of Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (2000), Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (2007), and the forthcoming Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital. Professor Veal is also an electric bassist, soprano saxophonist, and bandleader.