Eva Jessye (January 20, 1895 — February 21, 1992). She was the first black woman to receive international distinction as a professional choral conductor. She is notable as a female choral conductor during the Harlem Renaissance whose professional influence extended for decades through her teaching and performance. Her accomplishments in this field were historic for any woman regardless of ethnicity. She collaborated in productions of groundbreaking works - such as with Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts and with George Gershwin on Porgy and Bess.
Early life and education
Eva Jessye was born 20 January 1895 in Coffeyville, Kansas. She was educated at Western University (formerly Quindaro State), a historically black university in Kansas and Langston University in Oklahoma. She later studied privately with Will Marion Cook in New York.
In 1919 she began work as the choir director at Morgan State College in Baltimore. Jessye returned west to teach at an AME Church school in Oklahoma. In 1926 she then went back East to Baltimore where she began to perform regularly with her group, the "Eva Jessye Choir". She had originally named them the "Dixie Jubilee Singers".
She and the group moved to New York where they appeared frequently in the stage show at the Capitol Theatre, where Eugene Ormandy conducted the orchestra. They were also a frequent presence on NBC and WOR radio in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. They recorded on Brunswick, Columbia, and Cameo records in the 1920s. In 1929 Jessye went to Hollywood as the choral director for the MGM film Hallelujah directed by King Vidor.
In New York, she worked with creative multiracial teams in groundbreaking productions that experimented with form, music and stories. In 1933, she directed her choir in Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, produced as a Broadway theatre work. In 1935, George Gershwin chose her as his music director for his opera Porgy and Bess.[1]
In 1927 Jessye published My Spirituals, a collection of arrangements of spirituals with stories about growing up in southeast Kansas. Jessye composed her own choral works, including her folk oratorio Paradise Lost and Regained (1934), The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals (1931), and The Chronicle of Job (1936),, which combined spirituals, religious narrative or biblical text, and her own orchestral compositions.
An active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Jessye and her choir participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. She was active into her 80s and taught at the University of Michigan.
Shortly before her death in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she established the Eva Jessye African-American Music Collection at the University of Michigan. She left most of her personal papers to Pittsburg State University in Kansas.
Dr. Jessye was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.
External links
- "Eva Jessye", Short biography, University of Michigan
- "Eva Jessye", Pittsburgh State University
- "Interview with Eva Jessye", WGBH series, *Say Brother
- "Eva Jessye",, Kansas State Historical Society
in 1992 Eva Jessye died.
References
- ^ "Eva Jessye", University of Michigan, accessed 4 Dec 2008
- My Spirituals. Eva Jessye. Robbins-Engel, 1927.
- The Music of Black Americans: A History. Eileen Southern. W. W. Norton & Company; 3rd edition. ISBN 0-393-97141-4
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