Speaks: with Dr Harald Kisiedu

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Abstract

The history of music in the 20th and increasingly in the 21st century has to a great extent been shaped by the cultural dynamic of creolization, a process by which elements of distinct cultures are blended together to create a new culture. This cultural dynamic has destabilized and continues to destabilize cherished binary oppositions deemed essential to the formation of individual and collective identity formation such as high - low, Western - non-Western, own - foreign, and Black - white. Focusing on Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s involvement with African American music and Alvin Singletons’ engagement with the concept of mestizaje this talk elucidates the wider ramifications of the process of creolization for the field of new music.

Biography

Harald Kisiedu is a historical musicologist, author, and saxophonist who received his PhD in historical musicology from Columbia University. He also holds a graduate degree in political science and German studies from the University of Hamburg. His research interests include Afrodiasporic classical and experimental music, jazz as a global phenomenon, improvisation, music and politics, and Wagner. Kisiedu’s writings have appeared in the WIRE, Grove Dictionary of American Music, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Journal der Künste, and Darmstädter Beiträge zur Jazzforschung a. o. He has taught at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück, the British and Irish Modern Music Institute Hamburg, and the Darmstadt Summer Course. As a saxophonist, Kisiedu has performed with Branford Marsalis, George Lewis, Henry Grimes, Jean-Paul Bourelly, and Hannibal Lokumbe and has recorded with the New York-based ensemble Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber, led by Greg Tate. He is the author of European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-1975 (Wolke) and the co-editor (with George E. Lewis) of Composing While Black: Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute/Afrodiasporic New Music Today (also Wolke Verlag).

Image credit Andrea Rothaug