Lecture: Andrew Brooks, "Hearing The Star of Ethiopia: Reconstructing the Music of W. E. B. Du Bois's Pageant"

What did W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia sound like? Working across multiple archives and collections, this talk brings together dispersed cue sheets, manuscript scores, programs, correspondence, newspapers, and other records in an attempt to reconstruct portions of the pageant’s music. Through that reconstruction, I ask how music shaped the pageant’s staging of Black history and what attending to The Star of Ethiopia as a musical and performative event can reveal about Du Bois’s developing political-aesthetic thought in the 1910s-1920s.