The Center for the Arts and Humanities welcomes Rhiannon Giddens, the 2019-2021 Frank Sinatra Artist-in-Residence, and guests Francesco Turrisi and Justin Harrington.
Rhiannon Giddens will discuss how the music of enslaved Africans influenced not just music in the Americas but also Western classical music at large. How does this musical history complicate our understandings of music history as well as race, genre, and culture?
Tony Rivera (Music)
Multi-instrumentalist and composer, Francesco Turrisi, will share his culinary skills and Italian heritage from his home kitchen in Ireland. Two dishes he will prepare are simple and cover the basics of Italian food, a pasta and a risotto, to reflect on both his Southern and Northern heritage. On the menu: Pasta alla Milanese (nothing to do with Milan, but very Sicilian!) and Risotto con gamberi e zafferano. This program will be held in both English and Italian.
Italian Studies Program
Join SCU’s Sinatra Artist in Residence and Grammy-winning musician, Rhiannon Giddens, with special guest multi-instrumentalist, Francesco Turrisi, for this live virtual performance—their first during Giddens' Fall Residency at SCU. Both Giddens and Turrisi incorporate the history of music into their sound, bringing context and emotion to the forefront, and thus illuminating the universality of music and the commonality of the human experience.
Ray Furuta (Music)
Rhiannon Giddens will explore the history of the banjo as it relates to the diasporic links between Africa and the United States—how ideas about Africa and blackness have been both mapped onto the banjo and erased from banjo history.
Christina Zanfagna (Music)
Francesco Turrisi will talk about the improvisation repertoire for different instruments during this time period, drawing comparisons to jazz, his primary training, to explain these early Western improvisational practices.
Tony Rivera (Music)
The following sessions are also happening this week but are not open to the public: