The Peter Gram Swing Lecture Series returns after a hiatus from the COVID-19 pandemic.  Started in 2004, the lecture series aims to connect students and community members with professionals in different subfields of music like ethnomusicology, composition, and history. The lectures are held in the spring semester and include speaker presentations as well as meals with the speaker for music students and faculty. Associate Professor James Blasina states, “It’s important for students to hear firsthand about the new work of practicing professionals in the academy broadly.” These lectures provide a spark for students’ minds in the world of music. 

The lecture series is named after prominent Professor Emeritus Peter Gram Swing. Dr. Swing founded the Swarthmore Music Department and was a faculty member and conductor of the chorus for 34 years. He mentored some of the department’s first students, including Peter Schickele, who would later create the performance character P.D.Q. Bach. Dr. Swing held a radio show on WSRN, and frequently performed with the chorus and chamber ensembles.

Due to the series’ interactive nature, the department put it on hold in 2020 when the pandemic began. Now that the lecture series has returned, the full repertoire of activities does as well. Students will be able to have meals with the speaker again, allowing for a more personal connection to the topics, field, and presenter.

The first speaker for the series’ return is Professor Kira Thurman, a historian and musicologist at the University of Michigan. With a PhD in history from the University of Rochester and minor field in musicology from the Eastman School of Music at Rochester, her work focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of these fields. Her first book, titled Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, explores the way Black musicians performing works of white, German composers in German speaking Europe challenged the national identity of Germans in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR and has won many awards including the Marfield Prize (National Award for Arts Writing) and the George Mosse prize from the American Historical Association.

Thurman’s talk will showcase the rise of African American classical musicians in interwar Germany and Austria. As she explains, audience reception to these musicians and the labeling of renowned Black performers like Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes as “negroes with white souls” calls into question what it meant to be Black while performing German music during this time period. Thurman intends to display the conflict of ideas between the German audience’s expectations of African American musicians in the Jazz Age with a broader practice that included Black performers singing Schubert, Brahms, and other German composers.

The lectures are open to the public as well as students. Blasina explains, “One of the things we think is really important in our department is that we speak simultaneously at a specialist- academic level and a level of general interest. This is not an academic conference, it is not a talk that’s aimed only at scholars… Anyone who is interested in European history, Black Studies, vocal performance, opera, and music in the 20th century will all find something interesting here.” The lecture will take place on Wednesday, March 5 in the Scheuer Room at 4:30 pm.