Francis Johnson: Music Master of Early Philadelphia

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Associate Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania, delivers a lecture on Francis Johnson (1792-1844), Philadelphia band leader and composer. Johnson holds a special place in the history of American music. Although a free African American, he lived in an age when racial segregation and prejudice were commonplace. Despite these obstacles, he was able to achieve extraordinary renown and respect among the elite of Philadelphia through performances of his band at balls, parades, and promenade concerts. Following a series of concert tours late in his life, Johnson\u27s fame eventually extended through the Midwest and across the Atlantic to London. His music survives today in piano arrangements published during his lifetime. The lecture marked the opening of an exhibition in the Otto E. Albrecht Music Library. The exhibition included a selection from the over forty pieces of Johnson sheet music in the collection of the late Kurt Stein. Also part of the exhibition were prints, period newspaper articles, and a Kent bugle like that favored by Johnson. To download a podcast of the lecture, select one of the additional files below. Welcome, H. Carton Rogers, 00-04:52 Introduction, Richard Griscom, 04:52-13:06 Lecture, Guthrie P. Ramsay, Jr., 13:15-37:27 The event announcement is also available for download, by selecting the download button, at upper right. The exhibition is available in an online version, at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160422121347/https://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/music/fjohnson

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The art of bebop: Earl Bud Powell and the emergence of modern jazz.

Earl Bud Powell (1924-66) came of age musically during the bebop era. Born in New York City, he began piano study at age six, concentrating primarily on the literature of the European masters. At fifteen, Powell began playing New York nightclubs and within a decade became the quintessential modern jazz pianist. Despite his importance to jazz piano, Powell has not been the primary focus of a scholarly study. Through an examination of his early career, this thesis explores Powell's distinctive contribution to jazz as both a soloist and composer (through 1947) during bebop's formative years. The bebop idiom is often depicted as a modernist musical form, the work of an elite class of musicians who consciously moved jazz into the realm of art. But bebop also displays links to black vernacular culture as well as to popular music. Thus, the bebop as fine art interpretation privileges only one part of the bebop aesthetic, overlooking much of its complexity. In this study, cultural and musical analysis of Powell's early recordings and a variety of secondary sources show why bebop can be interpreted both as an African-American expression and as a modernist Western one. While bebop's complexity has often been compared to its European antecedents (as in the notion that jazz is America's classical music), its place within black vernacular and intellectual culture--especially within the context of other arts--has yet to be assessed convincingly.PhDBlack historyCommunication and the ArtsMusicSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129485/2/9513465.pd

Chapter 7: Racial Identity and Education

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