UCSC Graduate Research Symposium 2020
Listening to The Star of Ethiopia:
Aural Histories, Cinematic Conjunctions, and Sonic Paratexts
This project is an attempt to understand the aural histories and sonic politics of an understudied dramatic work by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, the pageant, The Star of Ethiopia. Unlike other scholars who have examined the pageant, I look to its aurality, primarily its use of music. The pageant’s paratexts, articles and opinion pieces in The Crisis magazine (December 1915), orient readers / viewers / listeners to its aurality. I argue that the music textures the pageant’s revision of history by calling for a Black aural historical consciousness. Du Bois incorporates a wide variety of African American musical genres, Americana, and popular music interspersed with some white European composers to affirm the long and rich course of Black history. Further, Du Bois mobilizes the pageant’s fertile aural terrain in part as a response to emerging audio-visual culture in 1915, particularly in the face of the aesthetic innovations unfolding in American cinema heralded by the deeply racist film, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Though no audio-recordings of the pageant exist, a future version of this project will include a website that approximates an experience of listening to the pageant and honoring its music by gathering together archival resources and versions of the tunes in the song into a playlist. Many of these can be found on the University of California Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive and the Library of Congress National Jukebox data bases. Though they are not recordings of the pageant, linked below are some examples of period specific recordings of the music and artists Du Bois includes in the pageant.
Listen to “Big Indian Chief,” a tune used in Du Bois’s pageant by J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole.
Listen to Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!”
Listen to “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” an arrangement of the spiritual by J.Rosamond Johnson.
Though no audio-recordings of the pageant exist, a future version of this project will include a website that approximates an experience of listening to the pageant and honoring its music by gathering together archival resources and versions of the tunes in the song into a playlist. Many of these can be found on the University of California Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive and the Library of Congress National Jukebox data bases. Though they are not recordings of the pageant, linked below are some examples of period specific recordings of the music and artists Du Bois includes in the pageant.
Listen to “Big Indian Chief,” a tune used in Du Bois’s pageant by J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole.
Listen to Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!”
Listen to “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” an arrangement of the spiritual by J.Rosamond Johnson.