±«Óătv

 

David Schroeder Music & Culture Lecture Series

The Fountain School of Performing Arts proudly hosts the David Schroeder Music & Culture lectures. This exciting PUBLIC series features distinguished scholars presenting research on music and culture, drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches and exploring diverse repertories. Join our community’s conversation. 

POSTPONED

"Go, Boy, Go!": child Pianist Frank "Sugar Childe Robinson and the Commodification of Black Boyhood with Dr. Jacqueline Warwick

Sept. 26 | 12:00PM-1:00PM 

With a focus on Frank Robinson (b. Detroit, 1938), this lecture explores the ways in which child musicians appeal to adult audiences. A Black child prodigy of boogie woogie piano, Robinson was a star in the 1940s, before the activism of Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King, and he performed at the White House for President Harry Truman. Robinson was self-taught, and his parents were discouraged from giving him piano lessons; this presentation explores the function of  formal music training for child stars. Through study of key performances and compositions, Jacqueline considers what “Sugar Chile” offered to audiences of the time, and how his music is heard today.

Dr. Jacqueline Warwick is a musicologist and Dean, Academic, at NSCAD University. She is the author of Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (2007) and Music, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: A Teacher’s Guide (2023). She was Senior Editor for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2ndĚý±đ»ĺ.Ěý(2013), and co-editor of Musicological Identities: Essays for Susan McClary (2008) and Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music (2016). She has also written on topics ranging from the Beatles, backup singers, the musical Annie, and Michael Jackson. Her current project is Child’s Play: Musical Prodigies and the Performance of Childhood, a book under contract with Oxford University Press.