Courtney Bryan
b. 1982

Courtney Bryan was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She obtained her Bachelor of Music from Oberlin College, her Master of Music from Rutgers University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts from Columbia University.

The New York Times has described her as “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests”. Her music ranges from solo works to large ensembles in the new music and jazz idioms, film scores, and collaborations with dancers, visual artists, writers, and actors, and is in conversation with various musical genres, including jazz and other types of experimental music, as well as traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Focusing on bridging the sacred and the secular, Bryan’s recent compositions explore human emotions through sound, confronting the challenge of notating the feeling of improvisation.

Bryan is currently an Assistant Professor of Music in the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane University, and the Mary Carr Patton Composer-in-Residence with the Jacksonville Symphony. She was the 2018 music recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2019 Bard College Freehand Fellow, and is currently a 2019-20 recipient of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition and a 2020 United States Artists Fellow.

Courtney Bryan – Portrait photo by Arielle Pentes

Here’s some information about a couple of Courtney Bryan’s current projects (from the American Academy in Rome’s events page):

Awakening is a one-act opera based on an imagined contemporary woman who transforms herself out of an oppressive situation with the guidance of the spirits of three nineteenth-century Black women religious leaders and freedom fighters: Rebecca Cox Jackson, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.

Bryan’s recent recording project, Sounds of Freedom, is inspired by an experimental music tradition stemming from the Black Arts Movement in New Orleans.

If you’d like to learn more about her, here are some resources from the library’s collection and from around the web:

* Courtney Bryan’s website

* “Soli Deo Gloria” (Streaming audio of a recording available via Naxos Music)

* “An Interview with Courtney Bryan” (2013 journal article by Tyehimba Jess from Callaloo via Project Muse)

* Courtney Bryan on Piano: “Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying” (2015 journal article by Hermine Pinson from Callaloo via Project Muse)

* “Black Lives Matter in the Orchestra Pit, Too” (Article from The Village Voice by Rajul Punjabi, July 8, 2016)

* “For Black Lives Matter, Classical Music Steps In” (Article in the New York Times by William Robin, July 10, 2016)

* Courtney Bryan’s YouTube channel

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