Music and Freedom
Cornel West and Sweet Honey in the Rock help Berklee mark an important moment.
Berklee kicked off the Black Music Programming/Africana Studies calendar of events with a monumental night that will go down in college history. Black Music Matters, on February 1, at the Berklee Performance Center, featured an electrifying lecture by Cornel West. Harvard professor and Berklee trustee Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot introduced West as an activist, scholar, philosopher, political scientist, rebel, rapper, and teacher. He was followed by the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which not only performed several moving pieces of music, but introduced each one with a glimpse into the music's sociocultural contexts and impacts. Just as significant, Berklee celebrated the launch of its new Africana Studies/Music and Society curriculum. It was an unmatched night of music and action-oriented scholarship.
Just before introducing Sweet Honey in the Rock, West underscored one of his talk's core points: "The music is bigger than each and every one of us, and if you're into the business of producing music, you have to be humble enough to know to be true to yourself . . . The music is going to take you out of your hedonistic fury and your narcissistic frenzy and your egocentric predicament and connect you to something bigger than you. And it's going to have something to do with being human, with being compassionate, something to do with justice, something to do with freedom, something to do with taking a risk, something to do with being willing to pay a price, and something to do with being willing to sacrifice for your precious children who are 100 percent of the future."
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Cornel West speaks at the Berklee Performance Center.
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Photo by Bill O'Connell
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