New World Symphony has announced its 2023 iteration of the “I Dream a World” music festival, happening Feb. 3-15 at the New World Center. The two-week extravaganza explores the events leading up to the Harlem Renaissance and Europe’s attraction to Black artists seeking artistic and racial freedom.
This year’s event, set during post-WWI Europe, immerses its audiences in a Parisian nightclub to kick off its first night and recreate the atmosphere Black artists experienced upon arrival in Europe. Opening night will pay homage to Black jazz and blues cultures with work from artists such as Billie Holiday, Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, followed by local presentations from FIU’s Wolfsonian museum and the city of Miami Beach later in the week.
(Gregory Reed)
The Ambassador Chorale of Florida Memorial University performs at New World Symphony’s “I Dream a World” festival in 2022.
“I Dream a World: The Harlem Renaissance in Europe” will focus on the artists who found success across the pond between 1917 and 1935, a prequel to the Harlem Renaissance. It explores the impact of World War I, the rise and spread of Nazism that ultimately led Black artists to return home, and the spread of Harlem Renaissance ideology and Black music in Europe.
“This is how Black music really comes to the consciousness of mainstream white America, and a whole generation of Black composers and musicians who’ve had access to these American conservators,” said Tammy Kernodle, Ph.D., a professor and an award-winning musicologist at Miami University in Ohio. “This is a period where white people in America and Europe develop an appetite for Black culture and music.”
(Case Western Reserve University)
Langston Hughes
Christopher Norwood, a curator and founder of Hampton Art Lovers, created the exhibition “Le Paris Noir: Henry Ossawa Tanner and Lois Mailou Jones,” which will be on display in the New World Center’s Atrium Lobby Feb. 3-12. Tanner and Jones found their way to Europe and enjoyed an artistic liberation they were unable to realize in the United States, setting off a widespread influx of other artists to Europe.
“Tanner was a beacon for African American artists in America and for those who later followed his lead in the next century through the Jazz Age to sojourn to Paris, where liberty and dignity were more available,” said Norwood in an interview with Artburst. “African American artists that fled to Paris were vast, and just to think that a Black man from Philly moved to Paris in the 1880s so he could be free to be himself.”
(MiamiOH.edu)
Tammy Kernodle
The festival’s name is derived from Langston Hughes’ 1941 poem, which speaks on achieving racial equality. While Hughes’ work had a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance, “I Dream a World” curators wanted to examine the fullness of the era to include not only its visual artists and writers, but to rediscover the musical renaissance for audiences.
“Most historians write about the Harlem Renaissance starting in the 1920s and it’s over by 1935, but that completely negates the fact that musically, we have some of the high points that happened,” said Kernodle. “The conception of the movement is limited, so last year it was about creating a framework about the musical arm of the Renaissance.”
NWS’s idea for “Harlem Renaissance” came at a time of reckoning during the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and moved NWS to become an agent of change. Music became a navigational tool to ease racial and political tensions occurring now, much like during the Renaissance.
(Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University)
The “I Dream a World” festival will feature artists like Amanda Aldridge, an Afro-British composer who published most of her music under a male pseudonym, Montague Ring.
“Those people faced a global pandemic with the outbreak of the Spanish flu. The Klan reemerges in 1919, and we enter a period of race riots. We see a wave of the Black civil rights movement in the way we saw the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement during our time,” said Kernodle. “So, in some ways, we try to connect both eras to invoke history and challenge us enough to think about the now.”
NWS sought ways to engage and reconnect with the community through the help of its curators to develop the festival. Kernodle, who was brought in as a consultant for her expertise in music and who will also host the festival, was part of the team of curators who expanded on different aspects of the Harlem Renaissance in its initial development.
(Jason Dodd/Courtesy of New World Symphony)
British musicologist and pianist Samantha Ege will perform in “Transatlantic Conversations: Black Renaissance Pianism Across the Pond,” a piano-centric program of the 2023 “I Dream a World” festival, at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 8.
“The directors of the New World Symphony pitched me the idea of the Harlem Renaissance and wanted to find new ways in which New World can move beyond a bubble and begin to really interface with the broader community of Miami,” said Kernodle. “We want to teach not only about the music, but teach about Black culture, Blackness, and have the difficult conversations about how to advance social change.”
This year’s event touches on aspects of the Harlem Renaissance that it did not have enough time to dissect in the 2022 five-day “I Dream a World” and expands on exhibitions from last year. The festival explores the multiple components encompassing the era and broadens the definition of Black identity by including those across the African diaspora.
(Gregory Reed)
Pianist Michelle Cann performs during New World Symphony’s 2022 “I Dream a World” festival.
The festival endeavors to change which musicians people hear in concert halls and to recognize the work of Black composers and artists. A dream undertaking for Kernodle and other musicologists alike, it affords them an opportunity to dive into the vast musical world that led up to the Harlem Renaissance and amplify the forgotten voices of the jazz era.
“This was like my own personal mission to promote different voices. There are women who were doing the same thing as men during that time, and I don’t care if you don’t know them, we’re going to know them,” said Kernodle. “We’re featuring people like Amanda Aldridge, an Afro-British composer who published most of her music under a male pseudonym, Montague Ring. Aldridge and others you’ll see as part of the conversation to advance new forms of music.”
The festival works toward educating audiences of all ages, with local university professors leading discussions on particular composers throughout the week, and an interactive performance for children ages 4-9 on Feb. 12 at 11:30 a.m. to keep them engaged.
“Music knows no separation, knows no categories. We just know it moves the essence and spirit of the soul. I want people to imagine what a difference (the absence of) music would make in this world if we didn’t have it,” said Kernodle.
Tickets for opening night of “I Dream a World: The Harlem Renaissance in Europe” are sold out. Tickets for its remaining days range from $15-$95, depending on seats and performances, with $100 festival passes available. For more information, call 305.673.3330 or visit NWS.edu.
(Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Lois Mailou Jones, Self Portrait 1940.