Building upon the city’s great legacy of live performance and improvisation, this concert is structured as a site-specific new musical response to the objects on view in “Empire” featuring composer Courtney Bryan from the Tulane Newcomb Department of Music as she interprets the objects on view using an interdisciplinary framework. Free and open to the public!
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Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, La, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). Her music ranges from solo works to large ensembles in the new music and jazz idioms, film scores, and collaborations with dancers, visual artists, writers, and actors, and is in conversation with various musical genres, including jazz and other types of experimental music, as well as traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Focusing on bridging the sacred and the secular, Bryan’s compositions explore human emotions through sound, confronting the challenge of notating the feeling of improvisation. Bryan has academic degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM), Rutgers University (MM), and a DMA in music composition from Columbia University of New York, with advisor George Lewis. She has been an instructor at Columbia University and Oberlin Conservatory, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department for African American Studies at Princeton University. Bryan is currently an Assistant Professor of Music in the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane University, and the composer-in-residence with the Jacksonville Symphony. She has two independent recordings, “Quest for Freedom” (2007) and “This Little Light of Mine” (2010).