Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Read the program notes for this performance: www.rb.gy/ls51qd
Join us for an in-depth exploration of Shirley Graham Du Bois’ opera, Tom-Tom written while the composer, playwright, and activist was a student at Oberlin in 1932. Tom-Tom was the first opera written and staged by an African American woman and the work has not been produced since its initial run. All that survives of the score is an incomplete piano-vocal reduction. In this archived live stream from July 9, soprano Candice Hoyes, baritone Markel Reed, and pianist Kyle Walker performed excerpts from the score. Following the performance, Caroline Jackson Smith, Professor of Theater and Africana Studies at Oberlin College, moderated a panel discussion considering the opera’s complex representations of race, gender and history. Harvard lecturer Lucy Caplan, originally produced this event at Harvard in 2018, joined the panel alongside the three performers.
Read the program notes for this performance: www.rb.gy/ls51qd
Join us for an in-depth exploration of Shirley Graham Du Bois’ opera, Tom-Tom written while the composer, playwright, and activist was a student at Oberlin in 1932. Tom-Tom was the first opera written and staged by an African American woman and the work has not been produced since its initial run. All that survives of the score is an incomplete piano-vocal reduction. In this archived live stream from July 9, soprano Candice Hoyes, baritone Markel Reed, and pianist Kyle Walker performed excerpts from the score. Following the performance, Caroline Jackson Smith, Professor of Theater and Africana Studies at Oberlin College, moderated a panel discussion considering the opera’s complex representations of race, gender and history. Harvard lecturer Lucy Caplan, originally produced this event at Harvard in 2018, joined the panel alongside the three performers.
