This is spring semester's first faculty WIP series event! Join us for presentations by Kim Mack and Amy Hassinger in one week, on Friday, February 21 from 4-6pm at Analog Wine Library. They will speak on "How Music Saves Us: New Approaches to the Music Memoir."
How Music Saves Us: New Approaches to the Music Memoir
Abstract: Kimberly Mack and Amy Hassinger will each read short excerpts from their memoirs in progress before opening a conversation about their experiences writing memoirs shaped by music. Questions and comments from the audience will be welcomed.
In the summer of 2014, stuck in a midlife gloom, Amy enrolled as a vocalist in a jazz combo class at the local community music school. She spent the next few months—and eventually, ten years—renewing and deepening a love for jazz music that had kindled back in her college days in early 1990s Manhattan. Part memoir, part existentialist meditation, part multi-vocal experiment, Amy Hassinger’s Apocalypse Always: An Improvisation weaves memory, philosophical inquiry, and close listening into a lyric investigation of personal despair alleviated and transformed by the power of improvised music.
Exploring the erasure of Black people from rock, while braiding together memoir, biography, and cultural criticism, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”: A Black Girl’s Playlist of Musical Listening tells the story of how rock music both empowered and alienated Kimberly Mack while growing up in a violent and musical home, and her hard-fought journey to finding her own voice. “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” also tells the stories of the artists who made a different way of being possible in spite of the alienation she often felt in rock culture.