Word: bluegrass
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...symposium will open with remarks from E. Forrest O’Connor ’10, president of the Harvard College American Music Association (HCAMA), and Deborah Foster, a Folklore and Mythology senior lecturer who helped adapt the department’s annual symposium to feature bluegrass music. Brown and her husband Garry West, co-founders of Compass Records—a record label that specializes in part in bluegrass music—will join scholars to discuss the roots of the genre. The day will culminate with an evening performance by Clint W. Miller ’11, Brown...
Matt Glaser, Artistic Director of the American Roots Music Program at Berklee College and the keynote speaker of the symposium, stresses the legitimacy of bluegrass music in an arena of serious intellectual discourse. “I’ll play little clips of bluegrass to demonstrate the kind of Shakespearean depth that this music has,” he said. “Just because it’s often a bunch of guys with cowboy hats not saying many words doesn’t mean it’s not deep music worthy of study. In my opinion...
...Connor, who plays the mandolin, notes that bluegrass is one of the few subsets of American folk music that was largely pioneered by one person. Mandolin player Bill Monroe formed the Blue Grass Boys in 1939, and was later joined by banjoist Earl Scruggs and singer/guitarist Lester Flatt. Bluegrass, whose instrumentation includes guitar, banjo, mandolin, double bass, and fiddle, emerged as a kind of commercially disseminated folk music a decade later. It then began to permeate early rock music in unexpected ways: the offbeat mandolin chop characteristic of bluegrass music, for example, eventually evolved into the snare-drum offbeat...
...Although scholarly interest in bluegrass arose in the ’50s and ’60s, some folklorists called the folklore of bluegrass ‘fakelore’ because it was viewed as too commercial and too popular,” O’Connor says. “But until the late ’50s it was known largely as ‘hillbilly music’—in a sense, you can’t get more folky than that. It occupies its own funny segment of the music world...
...concept of a bluegrass symposium at Harvard emerged years ago. Brown expressed interest in coming back to the college to perform after playing in a concert for President Drew Faust’s inauguration in 2007. O’Connor had dreamed of organizing an event of bluegrass music since he founded HCAMA with banjo player Clayton D. Miller ’10 that same year. “We built on jam sessions and thought we should try to represent the style of indigenous music on campus more,” O’Connor says...