Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Guthrie Ramsey

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Doctoral Colloquium: Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, University of Pennsylvania; McGill University (Distinguished Visiting Professor and Schulich Dean’s Chair in Music)

Title: What I Did with Musicology and What It Gave Me Back

Biography: A Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. An honorary member of the American Musicological Society, he's currently the Visiting Dean's Distinguished Chair in Music at McGill University.

A widely published writer, he’s the author of Who Hears Here: On Black Music Pasts and Present (2022), The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013), and Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003). He edited and wrote a foreword for Rae Linda Brown’s The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020) and co-authored with Melanie Zeck, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music (2017).

As a producer, label head, and bandleader, Guthrie has released five recording projects, including A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 1 and has performed at The Blue Note, The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and Harlem Stage. He recently scored the 2019 prize-winning documentary Making Sweet Tea and his documentary Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell (2015) was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival. Ramsey co-curated the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s 2009 exhibition Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment and was a consultant and narrator in the 2020 Emmy Award winning HBO documentary Apollo: The Soul of American Culture. Guthrie is the CEO of Musiqology Media Group, a production and consulting agency that helps artists produce their best work and to tell their story successfully.

Abstract: This talk explores my thirty years of multimodal inquiry as a scholar, writer, musician, teacher, and community activist as a route of possibility for an academic career in music.