Black Music In Our Culture

One of the purposes of  our meeting was to function as a strategic planning session for a sustainable  series of events focusing on the future programming of concerts, symposiums, publications, sharing and resource gathering,  connected to scholarly information  and collegial base support of our efforts to create  new music. We also felt it needed to be initiated by us, creative musicians for our cause, not any institution.

But, we thought it ” smart” to invite “administrative heads and doers”
first, to the table who through their expertise and associations can help to put down a sustainable track of events. And so a draft mission statement was proposed, meant to be  amended at the first annual meeting…

And we remember the famous 1969 summit at Indiana U, that the book Black Music in Our Culture( 1970) and The Black Composer Speaks( 1978)were published which both serve as the landmark works that help to chart our challenge forward.