was born Geraldine Roxanne Connor in the Paddington area of London, on 22 March 1952, the first of two children born to the black actor, singer, and folklorist
Connor followed in her father’s footsteps, as she began her academic career in music. She entered the London School of Music in 1974 after which she returned to Trinidad to ...
known as the “Father of Dominican Rock,” was born on 21 June 1952 in the town of Maimón, Monseñor Nouel Province, Dominican Republic, to a working-class family. As a youngster, he demonstrated a passion for music. His mother was a spiritual singer and his father played the tres, a six-string guitar divided into three sets of two strings each. Días studied music in Bonao under the tutelage of Juan Zorrilla and Tatán Jiménez. At age 16 he formed his first musical group, Los Chonnys, blending the social, political, and historical culture of rural and urban life. In the early 1970s he left Bonao to study psychology at Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) in the capital city, thus developing a sense of social conscience.
The nueva canción chilena New Chilean Song of the 1960s and the Cuban Revolution were movements that resonated throughout Latin America and Spain including ...
was born on 7 May 1918 in Havana. He began his musical studies at the age of 8 at the Municipal Conservatory of Havana. León studied at various national and international institutions and earned several degrees, including a degree in music pedagogy from the University of Havana in 1943, and one in composition from the Municipal Conservatory in 1945, where he studied with such celebrated composers as José Ardévol. He received a grant to study folklore at the University of Chile in 1951, and in 1957 he completed his musical education in Paris with famed composer Nadia Boulanger.
Along with other prominent art music composers such as Ardévol and Harold Gramatges, León formed part of the influential Grupo Renovación Musical, whose goal was to advance and promote contemporary Cuban classical music. He incorporated many elements of folkloric music into his compositions—in his piano composition Akorín for ...
Together with sociologist Fernando Ortiz and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, Argeliers León is regarded as one of the most influential scholars of Afro-Cuban culture. From 1961 to 1971 he directed the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore of the Cuban Academy of Sciences and taught African art and Afro Cuban ...
was born in the Vere district of the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, on 28 September 1927 to the teachers Richard James Mahoney Lewin and Asanath Sylvia Lewin. The elder of two daughters, she grew up in the rural village of Hayes in South Clarendon, and was surrounded by music from an early age. Her father was headmaster, choirmaster, and music and history teacher at the village school she attended. Her mother was a staff member at the school, and also played the piano. Lewin was raised hearing a variety of musical styles, including Jamaican folk music and European classical music “from Handel and Mozart, Haydn and Elgar” (Lewin, 2000, p. 4).
Lewin learned to play both the piano and violin at an early age and she won one of the Vere Scholarships to attend Hampton High for Girls an elite grammar school in neighboring St Elizabeth From there ...
was born to Luiz Braz Lopes, a stoneworker, and Eurydice de Mendonça Lopes, a homemaker, in Rio de Janeiro on 9 May 1942. The youngest of thirteen children, he was raised primarily by a man named Camaragibe in what was then the working-class rural area of Irajá in Zona Norte (north of the city center). He went to Maria do Carmo Vidigal and Mato Grosso elementary schools, and then to Escola Técnica Visconde de Mauá, where he began to cultivate samba with his classmate Maurício Theodoro, who composed for the Acadêmicos de Salgueiro Samba School, one of many organizations that performs at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and cares for the education and well-being of its members.
Lopes studied science at the Colégio Estadual Barão do Rio Branco and law at the Faculdade Nacional de Direito at the Universidade do Brasil National Law School today Universidade Federal do Rio ...
popularly known as “Frankie,” soca and calypso music arranger, Caribbean-jazz pianist, and musicologist, was born in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in August 1946 to a middle-class family. His father was Arthur McIntosh, son of the politician George Augustus McIntosh (1886–1963). His mother, Belle (née Cordice), was of East Indian ancestry.
After primary school, Frankie attended grammar school, also in Kingstown, from 1956 to 1962. His introduction to music came when he was about 3 years old, with his father teaching him to play the flute. Sent to a private music tutor to study piano, by the age of 9 he was playing for his father’s dance band, the Melotones. In 1960 he formed the Frankie McIntosh Orchestra. In 1966 McIntosh moved to Antigua to work as a schoolteacher; there, he played piano for the Laviscount Orchestra. In 1968 he relocated to the United States ...
(b Minneapolis, Feb 19, 1920; d Port Charlotte, FL, Oct 13, 2002). Black American musicologist. She attended the Chicago Musical College, studying the piano, and the University of Chicago, where she took the BA in 1940 and the MA in 1941. She then taught at Southern University (1943–5; 1949–51) and was active as a concert pianist (1940–55). She continued her graduate studies under Gustave Reese at New York University, where in 1961 she took the PhD. In 1960 she was appointed to the faculty at Brooklyn College; in 1969 she became associated with York College of the City University of New York, where she was appointed professor of music in 1972. She was made professor of music at Harvard University in 1976 and she served on the AMS board of directors (1974–6 and the editorial ...
Before Eileen Southern’s scholarship, the history of African American music was stored within the music itself. This dedicated “Mother of Ethnomusicology” liberated the musical history of Africans in America through careful research and painstaking documentation.
Eileen Jackson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She and her sisters, Fanya Elizabeth Wiggins and Stella Hall, were reared between the homes of separated parents. Her mother, Lilla Gibson Jackson, was a teacher and social worker. Her father, Walter Jackson, was a chemistry professor and alumnus of Brown and Lincoln Universities. Eileen Jackson attended public schools in Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and graduated from Chicago’s Lindblom High School, where she majored in graphic arts.
Piano lessons with Mrs. Meza Steel led to Jackson s debut concert at age seven in Lyon Healy s Chicago studio where she played a J S Bach gavotte Regular appearances as a Sunday ...
