Professor of Music Michael Cooper published a chapter titled “Luminaries” in a new book titled Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context, edited by Benedict Taylor and Thomas Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Taking as its starting point the extraordinary number of cultural and political luminaries who were drawn into the Mendelssohn siblings’ respective cultural ambits (figures including Goethe, Prussian kings Friedrich Wilhelm III and IV, Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Chopin, Queen Victoria, authors Hans Christian Andersen and Achim von Arnim, mathematician Charles Babbage, painter Ingres, and dozens of others), the chapter traces the gendered dynamics of the two siblings’ circles and the gendered nature of their techniques for using their access to luminaries for promulgating their respective artistic and social agendas.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper and his work editing and publishing previously unknown compositions of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds were featured in an article by Kyle MacMillan on January 30. For readers of these Notables, it’s worth noting that the count of “72” of Cooper’s editions of Price’s music is actually an old figure; the current count is 158 by Price and 56 by Bonds, with another six by Price and eight by Bonds currently in the hopper. MacMillan’s article is available here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of the romantic piano waltz “Love’s Triumph” by Will H. Dixon (1879–1917) with Recital Publications. Dixon was one of the leading lights of the generation of African American creatives whose genius and resistance to the oppressive forces of anti-Black racism in the U.S. prepared the way for the Harlem Renaissance and Chicago Black Renaissance in the years after his death. A recording by Miami-Dade College Professor Wayne Bumpers of “Love’s Triumph,” commissioned by Cooper and Lawrence H. Levens of New York, can be found on YouTube here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the study score for composer Margaret Bonds’ setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Credo” with Hildegard Publishing Company. Cooper published the first edition of this work, which Du Bois’ widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, pronounced “a work of art that is eternal – that will live as long as people love each other and really believe in brotherhood,” back in 2020, and in that guise, Bonds’ “Credo” has been performed dozens of times on both sides of the Atlantic, earning a solid place in the modern concert repertoire. That score and the orchestral parts were available only on a rental basis, however. The present study score, available to libraries and individuals, as well as performing ensembles, will finally enable “Credo” to be studied, taught, and discussed as a worthy peer of iconic orchestral and orchestral/choral works by Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Mahler, and other canonical white Euro-American male composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Four Pieces for Piano Solo by Will H. Dixon with Recital Publications (Fayetteville, AR). Dubbed “the original dancing conductor” by James Weldon Johnson in his iconic memoir Black Manhattan, Dixon (1879-1917) was one of the leading musical lights of the generation of African Americans who lived and worked in Manhattan’s “Tenderloin District” in the generation leading to the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Dixon, an actor, playwright, composer, pianist, and singer, was featured as a composer and performer on the great stages of Europe in the first decade of the dawning twentieth century. His music is a rich synthesis of African American vernacular musical traditions and Euro-American classical idioms. Most of his more than 100 surviving works remain unpublished. Dr. Cooper published these four from the privately curated Barnes/Dixon/Meyers Historical Harlem Papers, Archives, and Musical Manuscripts Collection. The volume contains two maxixes (Brazilian tangos) and two valses lentes (slow, romantic waltzes).