Ithaca College

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight, a project envisioned and led by Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023.

This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University's Freedom on the Move database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

The grant, written by Ithaca College Assistant Professor and Sparks co-founder Martha Guth, Cornell’s Interim Director of the Vocal Program and ‘Sparks’ managing editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship Erika Switzer (Bard College) was awarded through Cornell University and will be administered by Sparks & Wiry Cries.

The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets texts curated by Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji (Duke University) whose own work along with poet Crystal Simone Smith (Duke University) will contextualize and respond to selected primary source materials from the Freedom on the Move database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database.

After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, and the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.

Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight

Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Ed Baptist is the lead faculty member for FOTM, which is housed in the new Cornell Center for the Social Sciences. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression.

This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.

 “As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

IC School of Music contact: Martha Guth at: mguth@ithaca.edu.