“Duke Ellington’s Symphonic Poems as a Vehicle for Social Change in the Harlem Renaissance”

Maestro Chelsea Tipton, II

Harlem and Black, Brown, and Beige are symphonic poems written by Duke Ellington, a cross-over entertainer who enjoyed wide popularity during and after the Harlem Renaissance. These works play with the types of sounds and the types of music that one would hear while walking through Harlem. In a rhetorically savvy move, Ellington connected the jazz world and the classical European orchestra world. Paying homage to mainstream musical genres while also challenging the boundaries of those genres allowed Ellington to inspire empathy at a time when audiences were mostly segregated. Along with colleagues like Louis Armstrong and many others, Ellington took a strong stand against segregation. Even through the Little Rock crisis, Ellington and his contemporaries demonstrated ways that art can be a rhetorical tool that moves people to want to create a better society.

Sponsored by the Department of English; College of the Liberal Arts; Humanities Institute; Department of History; and the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences.