Roundup: Jazz hymns; stained glass symposium; diversifying medieval studies; Josefina de Vasconcellos; Playing for Change

NEW ALBUM: Makes the Heart to Sing: Jazz Hymns: Last month award-winning composer Deanna Witkowski released an album of fourteen new jazz hymn arrangements for instrumental trio (piano, bass, drums). Injecting an element of surprise—such as changed harmonies and/or rhythms—into the church’s well-worn repertoire of hymn tunes helps people reengage with them in a fresh way, she says. It defamiliarizes. In addition to making the CD available for purchase, Witkowski is offering fully notated sheet music for piano, with the hope that church music directors will consider planning a jazz service for their congregation. (All arrangements are fit for congregational singing.) Hear more about the motivation behind the album, plus track samples, in the video below.

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SYMPOSIUM: “In Glass Thy Story,” September 8–9, Robinson College, Cambridge, UK: This weekend Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) is holding a two-day symposium that will cover over seventy years of innovation and iconography in the glass art of European churches and cathedrals. The event will seek to draw out the challenges, possibilities, and purpose of stained glass—that is, what it means theologically, and how it relates to the liturgy. Speakers include Martin Crampin, Frances Spalding, Jasmine Allen, Caroline Swash, Jonathan Koestlé-Cate, Deborah Lewer, and Fanny Drugeon. Click here for the schedule and here to register (it costs £120, with discounted options).

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EXHIBITION-IN-PROGRESS: “Dialogue: Exposing the Rhetoric of Exclusion through Medieval Manuscripts”: Getty Museum curators are soliciting advance feedback for a January 2018 exhibition that will address the persistence of prejudice as seen through lingering stereotypes from the Middle Ages. (Input on wording and on points of view to consider, for example, is welcome and is already flowing in through comment threads.) As a museum, the Getty acknowledges and takes seriously its role as a repository of history and memory, knowing full well that its manuscripts collection, which consists primarily of medieval luxury art objects from western Europe, is full of caricature and erasure of “out groups,” such as Jews and Muslims, the poor, those perceived as sexual or gender deviants, and non-Europeans. This presents challenges when trying to connect with a multicultural and increasingly international audience. Click here to read a working description of the exhibition and, if desired, provide critique.

(Updates, 10/3/17, etc.: “More Details on Exhibition-in-Progress” (Getty blog); archived exhibition page, Outcasts: Prejudice and Persecution in the Medieval World; three specially commissioned essays on race, anti-semitism, and gender identity in the Middle Ages, available for free download)

On a similar note, this Pacific Standard article appeared in my Twitter feed yesterday: “What to do when Nazis are obsessed with your field: How medieval historians can counter white supremacy.” History professor David M. Perry writes,

White supremacists explicitly celebrate Europe in the Middle Ages because they imagine that it was a pure, white, Christian place organized wholesomely around military resistance to outside, non-white, non-Christian forces. Marchers in Charlottesville held symbols of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and of the Knights Templar. . . . Someone sprayed “saracen go home” and “deus vult”—a Latin phrase meaning “God wills it” and associated with the history of the Crusades—on a Scottish mosque. . . .

Thankfully there have been robust efforts among medievalists as of late to show how the Middle Ages was actually a religiously, culturally, and ethnically diverse era (which our focus on western European Christian culture has partially disguised) and to learn from fields like critical race theory and ethnic studies how to better understand the ideologies and distributions of power that define the modern world.

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Josefina de Vasconcellos: One of the bloggers I follow is Jonathan Evens, an Anglican priest and art critic who serves as secretary to commission4mission, an organization that encourages the commissioning and placing of contemporary art in churches as a means of fundraising for charities. He frequently undertakes “church art pilgrimages” throughout the UK, researching, photographing, and writing about his discoveries. His recent visit to Kendal Parish Church and Cartmel Priory has yielded a lovely piece on the twentieth-century British sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos. Featured artworks include the Madonna and Child in a refugee camp, St. Michael the Archangel battling his way through the jaws of a dragon, a martyrs’ memorial, and a compositionally unique Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Click here to view additional photos and information about the artist.

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PLAYING FOR CHANGE DAY (September 23, 2017): “One World, One Voice”: The mission of the Playing for Change Foundation (PFCF) is to create positive change through music education. To that end the organization develops, funds, and supports music schools and programs that are operated by their local communities and then works to connect those communities around the world. Every week 1200-plus young people in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, Mali, Nepal, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, Morocco, and Argentina attend free PFCF classes in dance, instruments, music theory, languages, and cultural heritage. PFCF’s community development and empowerment efforts also contribute to meeting essential needs like food, clean water, medicine, and more.

To raise funds to further its peace-building mission, PFCF has set an annual global day of music for September 23. Last year Playing for Change Day resulted in over two hundred events in forty-eight countries on six continents, and consequently more instruments and resources for all the schools. To host an event, attend an event, or donate to the cause, click here.

From 2004 to 2008 a small Playing for Change film crew traveled the world’s highways and byways, recording hundreds of musicians from dozens of countries independently playing a set list of songs; the performances, each with its own distinctive style and texture, were then intercut to create e pluribus unum (out of the many, one; or, unity in diversity)—one seamless video performance, an across-the-globe collaboration. All the videos are up on YouTube, but they’re so much fun to watch, I bought all three DVDs, Songs Around the World 1–3. My favorite track is probably “Down by the Riverside,” a celebration of heavenly harmony featuring Grandpa Elliott, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Congolese Choir of Grace, and over a dozen other musicians. Indigenous instruments include the bombo (large bass drum) from Portugal, the pandeiro (hand drum) from Brazil, the tambura kontra (long-necked lute) and begesh (double bass) from Serbia, and the washboard and cigar box banjo from the United States.

Visit http://playingforchange.com to peruse more videos, music, merchandise, and tour information.