Changing the Voice of American Music: Professor Louise Toppin Discusses the Importance of the African Diaspora Music Project, Collaboration, and Hitting the Archives
Louise Toppin. Credit Mark Clague.
Designed as a living and growing database that will strengthen as more compositions and recordings are submitted and discovered, African Diaspora Music Project (ADMP) supports Dr. Louise Toppin’s ongoing mission to help bring classical works in various languages and from across the globe to concert halls worldwide.
Designed with conductors and artistic administrators in mind, this free repository for music provides access to scores and holds potential to inspire research, exploration, and performance of underperformed and new classical compositions. Users can search ADMP by ensemble size and length of work, allowing them to find many pieces for their programming needs, and with perusal PDFs of scores and recordings provided whenever possible. Users will not only be impressed with the easy-to-use platform, but that this globally inclusive database offers compositions in Pende from the Republic of Congo, French Creole, Portuguese from Brazil, and a plethora of other languages. ADMP provides access to pieces composed between the 17th and 21st centuries, including H.T. Burleigh, the first prominent Black composer in America born at the end of the Civil War to millennial composer Brandon J. Spencer, and from well-known artists to compositions waiting to be fully appreciated and performed.
Dr. Toppin, a professor at University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance, speaks to Classical Post about how this database of works by Black composers may change the very voice of American music.
Colleen Kennedy: I'd love to hear about the creation of the African Diaspora Music Project. When did you first have the spark to create this database?
Louise Toppin: Necessity is the mother of invention. This is where I began my career, and while I was researching my dissertation I didn't see many resources. Certainly, there were history books but I didn't see a way for people to really explore the repertoire. And so, I just collected it, while I was singing, teaching, and lecturing on this music. And then once we hit the digital age, where people began to do databases, I realized that I had so much repertoire and that this new platform might be a way to share this information that I've collected through a lifetime with others. I asked, “How do we make a site that if someone has no knowledge of African American music, or African Diaspora music, they can they can begin to explore?” Thinking that through was really essential to me first, before just jumping in and creating something.
The other point that intersected with that is that I began the George Shirley Vocal Competition 10 years ago with him. Even though there are four divisions, I kept hearing the same songs. Because that’s what’s published, and that's what singers have access to. So not only was that the impetus for the database, but this last year spawned working on publications.
CK: Are you also publishing scores?
LT: Yes. I took it a step further, and said, I've given you the information in the database. Historically, many African American composers did not have the same opportunities in recording and publishing, so their works remained with them. But because of my career of singing this music and getting to know these composers, I knew where the music existed and I knew who the people were. They were very happy to work with me because they trusted me, as a part of their community who has worked so hard to make sure this music was in the public's eyes. So, they worked with me on publishing these scores as well as in anthologies and collections, too, so that the music is accessible.
CK: Can you tell us more about the George Shirley Vocal Competition?
George Shirley
LT: For years, George Shirley [American operatic tenor; Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Professor of Music at University of Michigan] wished that there was a competition that focused on African American music. And because of the lack of music education that he perceived at that time in Detroit we focused the competition on high school students there. We partnered with a local choral festival, the Nature of Spiritual Festival in Detroit, and as a way of getting this started, I put my own $1,000 in as the prize money. That was our pilot year, and we've just celebrated our 10th year giving away about $35,000 in prizes. Our unique model is that we have a first, second, and third prize in each of the categories, but we also have wildcard prizes. That means that one year, the Spiritual Prize might go to high school students and another year this may go to a pre-professional singer. The other thing we do with the competition—because I'm all about education—is make sure participants see a concert. Michigan Opera Theater has been a sponsor in the past and continues to be one of our sponsors. This year they are doing X, Life and Time of Malcolm X by Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony David (Central Park Five) and directed by Robert O’Hara (Slave Play). The festival features have lectures during the weekend, they have spiritual classes, and master classes. It’s not just come, sing for 10 minutes, you don't win, and go away. It's you come for three days and you leave enriched. Your $50 entrance fee lets you into all of these other events and connects you to all of these people.
CK: And because this project is about diaspora, not just American based, how are you finding these international pieces?
LT: The effort is not just mine at this point now, which is the beautiful thing. It started with 4,000 songs and it has grown because of the partnership of others. I have gotten to know those scholars who are working on Brazilian music. And others glad to share Haitian music. Someone else shares beautiful music from Paris of the diaspora. I travel all over the world to research where the archives are to find music and present it.
CK: I’ve heard that you were a budding archivist even before you began your music career. Can you tell us more about that?
LT: My father [Edgar Allan Toppin] was an internationally known historian of Civil War and the Reconstruction. My dad was the kind of person that decided that we were going to be a part of research. He took me to the microfiche and taught me how to use it. I was 11 years old writing an article—I think I wrote it on George Shirley, the person who eventually became my teacher—but that's the thing. Dad taught us very clearly how to how to research and my mother did her Master's while I was a child, so she also took me to the library.
CK: The database includes many links to media so we can hear these performances. What happens for those works that haven’t been recorded or the recordings are lost to time?
LT: We really did an exhaustive search of what media is available for the voice pieces that we had. And it's really disappointing that there aren't more pieces that we could link to. We are talking about 4,000 works. But there were two grad students who spent last summer exhaustively looking for repertoire. We now have a better sense of what has been recorded and what hasn't been recorded.
We began a project with 45 songs as sort of as a pilot experiment, because we're trying to figure out how to do this. Because I'm at the University of Michigan with some of the best singers I made it one of the student assignments to each record five songs. And so those five songs will go onto the database. Now, that's certainly not going to get 4,000 songs done quickly, but it shows that it can be done with college and graduate students. It doesn't have to always be the well-known professional singer. But if other universities were contributing in such a way, think of what we could do in terms of filling in these gaps.
My next step is I want to clean up everything, get more in it. I also want to put the links up from different archives, universities, anyplace that can help. When I go to all these archives, I know that if I go to Emory [University in Georgia], there’s Undie Smith Moore William Dawson, but then I have to go up to Yale [University in New Haven, Connecticut] to get Margaret Bond, and then I have to go to the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem]. That’s how much they're all over the country. So, if you want to really research these composers to look at their papers you have to know where they are.
CK: What else do you hope to get up on the website?
LT: The last little piece I want to do is put one page of the composer’s handwriting. That may sound like a strange thing, but nowadays as composers compose digitally, we don't get to see what their pen in creating this music looks like. Old school composers wrote by hand and this is part of recovering their works and histories. I started studying Margaret Bonds in 1990. I noticed there were three songs published by her at that point, but I had read that she won a major prize in Chicago where she was described as a prolific composer. I am sure there are hundreds of Margaret Bond songs and over the 30-year journey I spent researching her, I've found 45 of those songs. Because I know her hand I can tell you instantly. She didn’t keep her songs, but gave them away. She has a certain curl to the way she even writes her text and I know what it looks like. That’s a pet project of mine, but I think it’s an important one in terms of historical documentation. It’s also reclaiming some of these older composers who wrote practically, composing their music for someone to perform, and they sent it to them. I recorded her songs in 2000, but it took me until 2021 to publish her songs, because that was another whole journey trying to convince a mainstage publisher.
CK: So, the website will continue to evolve and grow?
LT: That’s the constant work of this database. We’re going to need funding to hire people to help me constantly update, because it’s a living document.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
