As part of the Columbia Department of Music’s Colloquium Series.
Abstract: In this talk, I will trace the history of racial segregation in the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS) from its founding in 1938 to its reluctant integration in 1963. At the heart of this project is a rich archive of letters and administrative documents that illustrate with remarkable candidness white barbershoppers' disdain for Black Americans and their commitment to combating the anti-segregationist politics of the civil rights movement. This aversion to singing and fraternizing with Black Americans is particularly ironic given their essential role in developing barbershop harmony at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, the voices of several Black barbershoppers echo faintly within the archive, the moments of their exclusion marked but their musical and social lives otherwise absent. How might the history of racial segregation be retold from the perspective of those who were subjected to this anti-Blackness and disrupted the Society's exclusionary status quo? By supplementing the BHS's print archive with oral history interviews conducted with living descendants of the Black barbershoppers, I aim to bring these musicians' voices and experiences to the fore and to highlight their agency as actors in this history of institutional reform. This work redresses the historiographical harm done by white barbershoppers who purposefully buried the BHS's history of anti-Blackness and of Black barbershoppers, and lays much of the historical groundwork for my book project on how anti-Blackness and racial politics shaped the music-theoretical discourse of the barbershop community.