From the Department of Performing Arts, the American University Chamber Singers will perform The Invisible Made Visible on November 12 and 13 at the Katzen Arts Center’s Abramson Family Recital Hall. Presented by the Department of Performing Arts in collaboration with the Antiracist Research & Policy Center (ARPC).  

Tickets are free for AU students with ID, $10 for alumni, staff, faculty, and senior citizens (55 and older), $15 general admission. 

Created by director Daniel Abraham, this program centers on the music of outstanding underrepresented choral creators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. "This program is a curated exploration of extraordinary voices made visible, of marginalized artists and creators, of musicians whose works were received only by a fragment of the choral community because of access. We seek to turn the invisible into the visible by providing our voices to support some inspiring marginalized creators of our past, important voices of the present, and equity in the future,” says Abraham.  

Expanding the Canon

With a focus on Black, Latinx, and women composers, the program will include the music of Margaret Bonds, Rosenphanye Powell, Abbie Betinis, Andre Thomas, Leo Brouwer, Emma Lou Diemer, José Maurício Nunes Garcia, Ysaye Barnwell, Joel Thompson, and other well-known artists. The concert will also feature setting of texts by Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Maya Angelou that promote equity and repudiate racism and injustice.  

Sara Clarke Kaplan, associate professor in the Department of Literature, and ARPC executive director, will present commentary providing context to the poetry and their choral settings. “Part of what makes this program so exciting is how it does the work of promoting visibility on several different levels. It introduces too-often overlooked composers of color, like Margaret Bonds, to a broader audience, which is an important intervention in and of itself,” says Kaplan. “At the same time, the contemporary settings of literary works by renowned African American writers and advocates for racial justice enable us to see and hear these well-known words anew, to decipher new meanings and resonances, even as we recognize their ongoing relevance for the world we live in today.” 

The American University Chamber Singers is a select student ensemble open to music majors and other students studying music within American University’s tradition of liberal arts education. The organization was rekindled by the current director Daniel Abraham in spring 2000 as an auxiliary ensemble to the AU Chorus. Membership in the Chamber Singers usually ranges from 28-32 members who perform a range of choral music, from classical to contemporary.  

Tickets: Free for AU students with ID, $10 for alumni, staff, faculty, and senior citizens (55 and older), $15 general admission.