Arthur R. Grant
Arthur Rudolph Grant was born in 1887 to Jeffry and Diana Grant in Jacksonville, Florida[1]. He started music at a young age, being listed as a music teacher as early as age twelve in the 1900 US census. His educational career continued, as the 1910 US census lists...
Desiree C. Catlett
If you’ve looked at the maps of the 30 graduates of the Washington Conservatory of Music between 1910 and 1914, you might notice that not all 30 of those alumni are represented. What happened to those graduates? Why aren’t they...
Elsie A. Wiggins: Teacher and Activist
Teachers have lives outside of school? Children may not understand the extent to which teachers, like Elsie Wiggins, can be deeply involved in their community. Elsie Adele Wiggins (1896-1963) was a teacher and activist in early twentieth-century Washington, DC. As a...
Reconstructing the t(Ruth): A Biography of Ruth Weatherless
We’ve begun delving into the archival databases and working to form reconstructive biographies on the graduates of the Washington Conservatory of Music from 1910-1914. This unfortunately means that we don’t have a lot of the answers, but we’re using what we can find...
When Life Gives You Lemons: A Reconstructed Biography of John Cleveland Lemons
The founder of the Columbus branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians hosted the fourth annual convention of the organization, encouraging the perception that "there are more colored musicians in Columbus than in most cities."1 In an interview, he stated...
Out of the Field, Into the Rabbit Hole: From Florence Price to Jewel Jennifer Phillips- Part II
Continued from Part I here. One of the conservatory’s graduates who I’ve looked into very closely thus far is Jewel Jennifer. Jennifer was born in Texas in 1897 to William Jennifer and Syme L. Jennifer.1 She had three siblings—Harold, William Emile, and Archibald.2...
Out of the Field, into the Rabbit Hole: From Florence Price to Jewel Jennifer Phillips- Part I
As we continue down the rabbit hole of archival research—falling deeper toward CURI’s core—our process of burrowing into the lives and networks of early Washington Conservatory of Music graduates only gets hotter with the Summer. Still, it remains important to...
Gladys C. Fearing
Gladys Christine Fearing (1893-1924) was a pianist and teacher in early 20th century New Jersey and Washington, DC. Fearing was a 1911 graduate of the Washington Conservatory of Music whose life exemplifies the racial uplift ideals upon which the Conservatory was...
Wilhelmina B. Patterson at the Hampton Institute
Wilhelmina B. Patterson (1888-1962) was a highly regarded music educator, vocalist, and pianist in early twentieth century Washington, DC and beyond. As a faculty member at multiple Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) including Prairie View A&M...
Reading is What? Fundamental!
Archival research is underway, and our team has begun constructing biographies of Washington Conservatory of Music graduates. Though this is my favorite part of the project, I would not have understood the context in which they lived without reading secondary sources....
Gettin’ into it
Preliminary research into some graduates from the Washington Conservatory of Music has begun, so much of my week has been spent combing through newspaper and genealogical records in search of our graduates. Before we could get into that research, however, we had to...
Archival Research and Me
The Process Yay, archival research! Readings books and getting a feel for context is great, don’t get me wrong, but my favorite part of the project has been exactly what this post will be about: The Archival Research *cue ecstatic music*. I’ve been using databases...
Hitting the Ground Running at Howard University!
I am wrapping up my first week on campus after spending last week at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. We had a busy week talking with scholars, reading secondary scholarship, and (finally!) having our whole team together in-person. Last...
Lights! Camera! Musical Geography Project!
Week 3 already! Now that our whole crew is on set (campus), the wheels of our operation are turning as rapidly as ever; so, a summary of our work suffices. This summer, we’re attempting to tell stories of the lives of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century black...
A Fashionably Late Arrival
It’s already mid-June! Aghhh! Having lost all sense of time after nearly two weeks(?) of touring with the St. Olaf Choir, I am at long last joining my peers on the Musical Geography Project. I am still settling in my new townhouse and adjusting to the departure of...
Preliminary Work
In the famous words of Lemon Demon’s Redesign Your Logo, everything’s connected. Such is the truth for the reading I’ve been doing in my first week on the Summer ‘22 Musical Geography Project, drawing from books, a doctoral thesis, and articles. In this post, I’ll be...
A New Tour
Hitting the ground running two weeks after finals and holding fresh excitement from last week’s St. Olaf Orchestra tour, I eagerly enter into the space of the Musical Geography Project’s own "tour" of sorts, albeit one of African American musical history. I'm ready to...
The Beginnings
Orchestra tour took up the first week of CURI, so I am jumping straight into the Musical Geography Project straight after a week of wonderful music. Lizzie and Louis started already and will help myself and my fellow touring researchers get into the swing of things...
aaaaand we’re back!
The mosquitoes and stink bugs have not yet breached my dorm room window and for that I am grateful. The 2022 Musical Geography Project begins with me, Lizzie Gray, alone and so lost without my fellow researchers who will save me from the horrors of Dr. Louis Epstein’s...
The caveats
Cathedrals, Colonization, and Conversion: Mapping the Music of New SpainThe caveatsOur research process is still incomplete, and there are many relevant sources that are just out of our reach. For example, there are many original manuscripts that have been lost or are...
More about the scholars
Cathedrals, Colonization, and Conversion: Mapping the Music of New SpainAbout the scholarsKristin Dutcher Mann, a historian and professor who specializes in the history of Colonial Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, gave us a whole new perspective on our...
More about our research process
Cathedrals, Colonization, and Conversion: Mapping the Music of New SpainMore about our research processOur research process is still incomplete, and there are many sources that are out of our reach. For example, there are many original manuscripts that have been lost...
Marching Bands at HBCUs
A Fond Farewell to CURI 2019
This summer took me to so many places, metaphorical and otherwise. After arriving a few weeks late from choir tour, I jumped straight back into thinking about mapping and spent a fair amount of time trying to re-immerse myself in texts that could tell me more about...
CURI 2019: Final Blog Post
Somehow 10 weeks of CURI concludes tomorrow! Time flies when you're in an ongoing battle with WordPress. This summer has been very eye-opening in many ways, but I think I have grown the most in the visual design aspect of the project. One of the unique things about...
Rethinking What Archival Data Has to Offer
After a week in the archives of the Library of Congress and Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, we've arrived back on campus with more data than we were expecting -- a considerably larger amount. Between the two institutions, there were five...
The Pitfalls of Symbolism
Part of this summer project is looking at our data from the January H.T. Burleigh and figuring out what the next steps are in interpreting this data. For an example of a similar mapping exercise, check out this post about my attempts to understand the race of...
The Research Continues: Library of Congress Edition!
Greetings from the same laptop, new location! This weekend we are in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress! Yes you read that correctly! I have been looking forward to this trip for a long time so to finally be here is a somewhat surreal feeling. There are a few...
Oh the Places You’ll Go Pt. II: Performance Locations According to Race
This week, Thea and I were able to reorganize our "Where Burleigh's Music was Performed" data into spreadsheets that categorized the performers by race. The most difficult thing about this process was accurately determining (or sometimes guessing) the race of the...
drumroll please…..introducing the first H.T. Burleigh Performers Census Map!
After combing through the performances of H.T. Burleigh spreadsheet, we've spent the last two days determining the race of our recorded performers, so that we could create two separate map-able layers. Right off the bat, it was clear that black and white performers...
Racial Census Data Breakthrough
After a week of struggling to find geographic breakdowns of census records for the early 1900s, we did it! Actually Ann Schaenzer did it. Thea and I went to her today to ask if she knew of any good resources, and she pointed us to Social Explorer. Not only does this...
Jumping in to Research!
I’m back at St. Olaf and ready for summer research! After spending a few months away from our H.T. Burleigh maps and progress on the musicalgeography.org website it has been surprisingly comforting to be back at the research routine. I am so impressed by the amount of...
Oh the Places You’ll Go Pt. I: Williams & Walker and Vaudeville
This week has been full of researching the famous vaudeville/Broadway duo Williams & Walker. Bert Williams and George Walker were extremely successful actors who used vaudeville as a subversive comedy medium. Even though their shows were branded using racist...
Practice Map: Burleigh Performing Burleigh
It's time to get back into the swing of things! This map was a quick build in order to practice embedding audio samples (via Spotify) into ArcGIS. I used data from Dr. Snyder's Burleigh bible to include 13 known instances of Burleigh performing his own work. Each data...
Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Heading
CURI 2019 is here! The sun is out and the Musical Geography website is open on my computer. Especially after reading through the interim team’s final blog posts, it is clear that we accomplished so much more than we thought we would. For one, all of our maps are in...
Moving Forward with Maps
Over the course of this interim term, I have done extensive researching, map making, and web-app building. Today, as a class, we were finally able to present our work to the general public, and wow was it gratifying. When you are buried in folders upon folders of...
My Future is in the Digital Humanities
This past interim studying H.T. Burleigh has been a whirlwind. Starting out the first week of class, I definitely felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of work we had to undertake. Especially coming off of the East Asian music mapping project in which I had a rough time...
Farewell, For Now
If there was only one thing I could take away from this interim, it would be a whole lot of gratitude for being only a first year student. This project on H.T. Burleigh, besides all the valuable information I’ve learned on early American music and composers, besides...
Burleigh Scratching the Surface
As we wrap up a month of research, it feels fitting to reflect on the things I’ve learned over the past few weeks. When I was writing the prose for the introduction of our project page and the “Mapping H.T. Burleigh” section, I found myself trying to grapple with the...
What a Month
In my usual way, I went about starting this blog post by trying to come up with a witty (at least to me) title. Check out hits like On the Media (for you NPR fans), and Pulling Out All the Stops. Seeing as this is my wrap-up of H.T. Burleigh research, this title...
A List For the Next Brave Soul
For my last blog post as apart of the Winter 2019 team, I would like to offer my reflection in the form of a list containing my biggest takeaways from this experience. If this was a CD, it would be a compilation album of all jams. Time is Money… But So Are Breaks:...
Mission Accomplished (At Least Mostly…)
Well, it’s about time to close the book (or is it fold the map?) on H.T. Burleigh, at least for now. It feels like we’ve spent so much time looking into Burleigh, when in fact it’s only been a couple of weeks. In reflecting about the course, I’ve come to a few...
Goodbye Burleigh, Until Next Time
Throughout the entirety of January, I worked with eleven other hard-working student researchers to create our final project, The Life and Legacy of H.T. Burleigh, and what a month it has been! I wasn’t sure what the culmination of our efforts would look like, but I am...
I’m Sorry, DUR, But I’m Breaking Up With You.
Dear DUR, We’ve only known each other for a month, but this month has simultaneously been the shortest and longest month I have ever experienced. 30 days ago, I had no idea how this relationship was going to work, with all of your complicated intricacies, but I’m...
Final Reflection
Harry Thacker Burleigh, the man, the myth, the legend. Through the course of these past few weeks I have taken on many different projects and roles, each of which has informed my learning throughout the month. I will go into detail on each of the aspects of this...
Data Rich Sources, Where are They?
I have had amazing results from online Newspaper collections where data streams into my spreadsheets at over 20 entries per hour. Other sources have not been so fruitful. Textbooks and periodical collections include more steps to transcribe data and are often less...
A side-project on Dvorak
Though the main focus of this month has been on the life and music of Harry T. Burleigh, one of the common ways he is known is as a student of Antonin Dvorak at the National Conservatory of Music in the early 1890s. While studying with Dvorak, Burleigh would sometimes...
On the Media
Greetings from the final week of Music Geography 396 here at St. Olaf College! We've split into groups depending on our specialties in the spirit of efficient and equal work responsibilities for this project on H.T. Burleigh. I was in two groups at the start of the...
It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday
While this phrase is the title to a classic Boyz II Men song, it doubles for my feelings on the phase of research I just finished ⎯ looking at the racial makeup of various places Burleigh performed or spoke at. At first, I was excited to add this element to our data...
Data, Data, and more Data!
As a data scientist (of sorts), I'm feeling quite at home in the layers and layers of spreadsheets that represent all the research we've done to date. I've learned a few things during my time amongst the data, so I figured I'd share these things here. 1. Format is...
Making Maps Special: on specializing in map-making
At this point in the term, we've split the class into small subgroups, but this time, instead of dividing based on research interest, we've grouped ourselves based on our "specializations." To clarify, we've decided that at this point, the bulk of the research has...
Letter From an Editor
When we began this project, one of our first readings was parts of Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps1. Now that Jacob and I are working on our editing specialization, I’m reminded that his lessons apply to words as well. That might seem like a little bit of a...
Forget Ned’s Declassified—This is My Research Survival Guide
We’ve now moved into specializations for our Burleigh projects, which means as peers slave over normalizing and checking over data, organize extensive bibliographies, and design maps, I am doing the same thing I have been all month: researching! As a certified...
Shoveling in a Blizzard
As our research project on H.T. Burleigh is beginning to come to a close, we've been assigned specialization tasks to divvy up the final work that has to be done in order to get the maps finished. Alongside Ian, I've been given the role of a data specialist, and my...
A Bibliographer’s Nightmare: Inconsistent and Incomplete Data
As we move on to the final stages of our Musical Geographies class, I have assumed the specialist role of "bibliographer." This means that I survey all of our data entries and compile a comprehensive bibliography of every source we have used in our research. This is...
Re-Researching
As we are beginning to piece together our project on H. T. Burleigh, our class has divided into a handful of different specializations in order to create a more polished, cohesive project. I am looking forward to taking on another week of researching with Jessie and...
I’m the Map(maker)
Though we have been making maps throughout the month, it is only this past week when we have been instructed to finish up our research on the various areas of the life of Harry T Burleigh and begin constructing our final maps and project. The students have been...
A Letter to Future Editors
As we begin to wrap up this month of research and map-making, the class has been divided up into different areas of specialization. My area of writing and editing the prose for the final project page is one that I’m particularly excited about. First, the other editor,...
Research Across the Sea: Finding Burleigh Abroad
The most recent challenge that has popped up in my Burleigh research is tracking down places where his compositions were performed abroad. Over the past week, I have been focusing on rounding out my Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes research, trying to fill in gaps of...
Just Keep… Researching?
In my work on musicological mapping up to this point, I have found that by far my greatest and most important asset has been persistence. At this point in the term, our class has divided mostly into smaller subgroups each tasked with researching and mapping different...
Different Perspectives in Research
Conducting research on someone from an era as foreign to me as the early 20th century is really a blessing as much as it is a curse. Of course, being almost one and a half centuries younger than H. T. Burleigh has left me with a severe lack of knowledge of his...
Research Has Become a Giant Puzzle – and I Love Puzzles
The chances of finding new data is diminishing everyday, but the enjoyable thing about this is that its turned into an ad lib puzzle of sorts. Although it is time consuming, it has been fun to cross reference various sources when you’re trying to find the last bit of...
Programs and Archives and Maps, Oh My!
I cannot believe we have reached the halfway point of our month-long DUR course. There are only two more weeks to gather and finalize data before sending our maps out into the growing world of digital humanities. In order to learn more about the spread of H. T....
Scraping the Surface of H.T Burleigh’s New York Performances
As a class we've now spent a week reading about and researching Harry T. Burleigh. After a meeting where we chose the kind of maps we want to eventually make, everyone got to work on their projects. I am focusing on a map of Burleigh's performances in New York City,...
Burleigh’s NYC Performances: Did He Sing in Harlem?
Now that we have moved onto the Burleigh stage of our research interim, we are getting into the real, fun, and juicy stuff! This is the main project of our course, and I am seriously enjoying it so far. My research process thus far has been looking into historical...
Diverging paths
It has been about a week since we started looking at the life of Harry Burleigh, and I have learned much more than I expected over this short time. I was initially tasked with mapping Burleigh's relationships in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, which is a really...
Early Burleigh: Erie Beginnings
After reworking maps from the Atlas Historique de la Musique or from A History of Western Music last week, our class has now delved into our research on H. T. Burleigh and started to plot our first sprinklings of data onto maps. My researching and mapping is focused...
Genealogical Investigation
In our search for sources with specific location information, Latitude-Longitude pairs or street address, I decided to search for Harry T. Burleigh in the genealogical databases Familysearch.org and Ancestry.com. Before long, I worked my way through all available...
5 Things I’ve Learned So Far
I am three weeks into my research on the people H.T. Burleigh knew, and it has been full of so many different twists and turns. But researching is different for everyone. Today, I’m going to share with you the 5 things I’ve learned through our research thus far. 1....
Down the Rabbit-Hole, Don’t Stop Digging
In an attempt to better understand the life and impact of HT Burleigh, my group has decided to look at his influence through the lives of three of his most notable mentees and contemporaries: Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and Roland Hayes. Each of these influential...
First Crack at Mapping HT Burleigh’s Performances
Researching HT Burleigh has proven an engaging and inspiring process. My task, as I've chosen to accept it, is to find performances of Burleigh outside of New York City. I chose to make this a cluster map to show how many times he performed in a city or in a single...
On Data Compilation and the Cartographic Presentation of Musical Concepts
Last week we were tasked to redesign musical geography maps from A History of Western Music (Norton, 2014) and Atlas Historique de la Musique and in groups of two we set out on our cartographic quest. The map below shows the distribution of Italian Music Centers in...
Atlas Tragique de la Musique
The Atlas Historique de la Musique map of Conservatories, Festivals, and Opera Houses in Eastern Europe and Beyond was eye catching because of its simplicity, but was confusing for the same reason. As many others did with their own maps, our goal was for the map to...
Look Mom, a Map!
Over the past week, our class has split into groups tasked with the goal of recreating/updating a preexisting physical map in a digital form. We've learned about data formatting, digital tools, (Google Maps and ArcGIS online) important stylistic and aesthetic...
Digitizing and Improving Maps
The goal of our first mapping assignment this January was to take an existing map that says something about music, then digitize it and improve it in ways that would make it useful to a music scholar or a music history student. The map I chose to digitize was the...
A Mingling of Minds and Maps
After trying separately to fix Les Voyages de Mozart, Izzy and I got together to combine maps. We immediately realized that in trying to solve some of the problems of the original map, we created maps that looked almost nothing alike. Whereas I tried to follow the...
Mapping East Asian Music: (Mostly) A Success
In my last blog post, I posted the state of the map that I had made featuring opera houses and companies in East Asia. Since then, I added a few more points that locate centers of opera in East Asia, combined my data with my partner's, and tidied up the map. I'm...
Don’t Map Something You Haven’t Thought Through
If there's one thing that I took away from this small mapping project, it's that you want to set your goal from the beginning and have a good vision of where you what you want to show with your data before you start delving into books and web archives. To be at least...
Pulling out all the stops
Its been a week now since we first started on this mapping endeavor, which also means that I've spent the last week researching ancient organs in France. For our first assignment, I selected a map on the "La Diffusion de l'Orgue dans le Chrétienté Occidentale" or the...
Mapping in the humanities: good intentions and asking questions
Any well-made map should be easy to read. No matter how complex the subject matter is, I should be able to look at a map and at least get a good sense of what is going on and what message the map is trying to convey. Unfortunately, this map on Influential Centers for...
New Map, Same Data
The Protestant Reformation happened over 500 years ago, so why should we still care about it? It was just a whole bunch of religious white men arguing with each other, right? Well to some extent, yes. But the Reformation changed the entire world, especially in regards...
Perché gli Italiani hanno scritto tanta musica?
Throughout the process of mapping the musical centers of Italy in the 17th century, I found myself falling into exactly the same pitfalls I predicted. I...
Mapping Mozart Through His European Adventures
After critiquing the cluttered and vague print map on Mozart’s travels created by Atlas Historique de la Musique, I immediately regretted my criticism once I learned I would have to replicate the map with the goal of improving upon it in some way shape or form. Where...
Map-making can’t be that hard, right?…
In our first three (has it really only been three?!) days of class, we have read about the use of Geographic Information Systems, or GIS for short, in the humanities, and about the various subtle traps one might fall into if one is not diligent in map-making. A...
Musicologists Dream of Cartography
Interim 2019 and our DUR (directed undergraduate research) has begun with data compilation and presentation on a variety of topics ranging from Conservatories of East Asia to the topic to which I have been assigned, Music Centers of 17th Century Italy. My impetus...
A Place to Start…
One summer, when I was maybe eleven years old, my friends and I decided to draw a map out of chalk that took up the entire street of the cul-de-sac so that we could use our razor scooters and bicycles on our drawn roads. Now, I’m a senior in college and I’m still...
Mapping is Hard: The Unrealistic Expectations of the Amateur Cartographer
Maps. We look at them all time, nestled between blocks of text in articles and textbooks or on classroom walls, and we never give them a second thought. We accept them as they are—why? Because that’s what’s easy. We assume it shouldn't be that difficult to gather...
Uncertainty and Some Organs I Found…
After just three days of class, I have learned much more about the 8th-century organ builder Georgios than I ever could’ve dreamed. After selecting a map to remake about the diffusion of the organ between the 1st and 15th centuries in Europe I have started to...
Researching is Difficult: The Struggle of an Amateur Mapper
Thus far, my experience making my first map was frustrating primarily because of the research involved. Mapping opera companies of East Asia, much of my work involved reading websites in foreign languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese), finding mentions of obscure opera...
Influential Readings that Minimized Stress and Mess
After three days of DUR in the books, I am officially an expert map-maker. Well, I made a map, but it’s a start! While discovering the exciting world of cartography through revising Atlas Historique de la Musique's map on Mozart’s Travels, I connected with the lessons...
Map-making: Trial, Error, and a Lot of Patience
I am sure every researcher has been prepped about the necessity and inevitability of failure in the research process. That being said, it still came as a surprise to me when I realized just how difficult thorough data collection is while trying to envision how I would...
First Lessons
Boy it has been a busy few days. When I first started last Thursday I had never heard of GIS, Google MyMaps, critical spatial thinking, the digital/spatial humanities, or data cleaning. Not to mention the various Renaissance composers, works, or cities that have been...
Playing with Lies and Lines
There's something about making a map that feels incredibly nostalgic, and maybe even light-hearted. I don't know if its simply working with colors and visuals that brings me back to scribbling capitals onto the pictures of states in grade school or sketching the deer...
If It Ain’t Baroque, Don’t Fix It…
The purpose of mapping has always been to convey information, whether specifically or generally. In recent years, the so-called "spacial turn" has changed what kind of information maps should convey, but it didn't change that fundamental truth. Maps in the 21st...
Uncertainty is My Middle Name
There is a quote from Diana Sinton’s “Critical Spatial Thinking” that stuck during the first read through, and will continue to stick with me as the mapping process continues: “eliminating uncertainty may be an impossible task but acknowledging and understanding it is...
What Makes a Genre?
What defines a genre of music? Who gets to authoritatively determine that their definition is correct? When discussing folk song, it already is difficult enough to find a way to securely define it. Then, when we aim to divide the category up further, even more...
Digitally Displaying Distinctive Data
Every song collected has a story. Consider where it came from - perhaps a 12th c Scottish farmboy hummed a song to himself that later was heard in a field in Kentucky, passed down from plantation owner to slave. Consider who sang it - was it a child, unaware of hidden...
Links between European song and Southern American folk song
While researching the Dorothy Scarborough book On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, I ran into a genre of music that Scarborough discusses in-depth: folk songs in America that are associated with black singers, but have their roots in European sources. These songs were...
Categorizing Race and Music – a Map-maker’s Quandry
During the process of mapping, we must figure out how to categorize our data. Shall we look at it chronologically? Shall we see how many times a song was performed, and where a song was performed? Given the nature of my research on Lomax and Scarborough's music...
Collecting songs v. collecting memories: a comparison of Dorothy Scarborough and John Lomax
On an adventure we go, to the American south, where folk songs and tunes await! This spring, I've been conducting research on folk song collecting in the American south. Thus far, I have cataloged all of the songs from John and Ruby Lomax's 1939 Southern Field Trip...