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No matter the genre of music, Black women seem to dominate it all. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who started rock and roll, to Aretha Franklin and Koko Taylor, who dominated the soul and blues scene, Black women have divine voices. This statement holds true even in the opera music scene. Yes, Black women can sing opera, and one woman is revered among many. Her name is Jessye Norman.
If you’re unfamiliar with opera music and Norman, then keep reading to learn more about this amazing woman.
A brief history of opera
Opera is a singing style where performers render from their voice boxes, extremely high and low pitch notes. Because singers’ can amplify their voices, they don’t use microphones when singing. In addition to singing songs, opera singers use their voices to tell a story through music while a live orchestra is playing just below the stage.
Opera originated in Italy in the 17th century and has become an international art form. Within the opera world, there are many different vocal types for female and male singers. For female singers, the main types include Soprano, the highest pitch, Mezzo-soprano, which is a little lower than Soprano, and Contralto/Alto, the lowest pitch.
Norman was a dynamic Soprano and could sing in all three vocal ranges.
Gender and racial disparities in opera
Few art forms haven’t been influenced by gender and racial inequality — opera is no exception. According to the Empowered Musician, male opera singers are 3.5 times more likely to be cast in roles than female opera singers.
Research done by Middle-Class Artists revealed that non-Black singers who regularly perform at the Met will perform 115 more times in their career, about 58% more often, than a Black singer. Despite these racial and gender inequalities Norman has accumulated a long list of national and international performances.
Who is Jessye Norman
From a young age, Norman was destined for a music career. Her mother was a pianist, and her father was a choir singer. She told NPR during an interview that music was simply a part of her childhood. It was melody and song that helped ease some of the hardships of growing up in the segregated south in the state of Georgia. Yet, Norman didn’t think music would be her career.
Norman first began singing in the church when she was four years old. On her ninth birthday, her world opened up when she was gifted a radio and exposed to opera as a part of a weekly broadcast from the Metropolitan. From this broadcast, Norman spent her time being serenaded by opera singers such as Lucia di Lammermoor.
As she grew older, her fascination became stronger, and she attended an opera performance program in northern Michigan. She also attended Howard University and studied at the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied vocal performance.
It was in 1965 that her award-winning career started. That year, she won the National Society of Arts and Letters singing competition. A few years later, in 1968, Norman won the Munich Competition, which helped launch her international career. Between 1971 and 1972, she performed commanding and noble roles throughout Europe in cities such as France and London.
In 1989, in the Metropolitan Opera’s first single character production, Norman did a memorable performance of Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg. In this same year, she was chosen by the President of France, Mitterand, to sing the French national anthem La Marseillaise in celebration of the French revolution.
She was sought after by many countries for her powerful voice and her ability to sing in multiple languages. She sang in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian.
With a long list of international performances, she’s also racked up some memorable shows in the United States. She performed at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 and the second inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1997. That same year, she became the youngest recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.
Norman is also known for performing Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts at Carnegie Hall. Norman often performed alongside composers George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.
Off stage, she expanded her career by writing a book titled Stand Up Straight and Sing. In it, she shares her life story from humble beginnings to performing on international stages. She also talks about the mentors and role models that guided her while growing up. In her book, she reveals the hardships of dealing with racism as a child and as an adult. It’s an inspiring story filled with life lessons.
On September 30th, 2019, Norman passed away due to medical complications but her soul and spirit live on through the music she’s left behind.
No matter the genre of music, Black women seem to dominate it all. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who started rock and roll, to Aretha Franklin and Koko Taylor, who dominated the soul and blues scene, Black women have divine voices. This statement holds true even in the opera music scene. Yes, Black women can sing opera, and one woman is revered among many. Her name is Jessye Norman.
If you’re unfamiliar with opera music and Norman, then keep reading to learn more about this amazing woman.
A brief history of opera
Opera is a singing style where performers render from their voice boxes, extremely high and low pitch notes. Because singers’ can amplify their voices, they don’t use microphones when singing. In addition to singing songs, opera singers use their voices to tell a story through music while a live orchestra is playing just below the stage.
Opera originated in Italy in the 17th century and has become an international art form. Within the opera world, there are many different vocal types for female and male singers. For female singers, the main types include Soprano, the highest pitch, Mezzo-soprano, which is a little lower than Soprano, and Contralto/Alto, the lowest pitch.
Norman was a dynamic Soprano and could sing in all three vocal ranges.
Gender and racial disparities in opera
Few art forms haven’t been influenced by gender and racial inequality — opera is no exception. According to the Empowered Musician, male opera singers are 3.5 times more likely to be cast in roles than female opera singers.
Research done by Middle-Class Artists revealed that non-Black singers who regularly perform at the Met will perform 115 more times in their career, about 58% more often, than a Black singer. Despite these racial and gender inequalities Norman has accumulated a long list of national and international performances.
Who is Jessye Norman
From a young age, Norman was destined for a music career. Her mother was a pianist, and her father was a choir singer. She told NPR during an interview that music was simply a part of her childhood. It was melody and song that helped ease some of the hardships of growing up in the segregated south in the state of Georgia. Yet, Norman didn’t think music would be her career.
Norman first began singing in the church when she was four years old. On her ninth birthday, her world opened up when she was gifted a radio and exposed to opera as a part of a weekly broadcast from the Metropolitan. From this broadcast, Norman spent her time being serenaded by opera singers such as Lucia di Lammermoor.
As she grew older, her fascination became stronger, and she attended an opera performance program in northern Michigan. She also attended Howard University and studied at the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied vocal performance.
It was in 1965 that her award-winning career started. That year, she won the National Society of Arts and Letters singing competition. A few years later, in 1968, Norman won the Munich Competition, which helped launch her international career. Between 1971 and 1972, she performed commanding and noble roles throughout Europe in cities such as France and London.
In 1989, in the Metropolitan Opera’s first single character production, Norman did a memorable performance of Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg. In this same year, she was chosen by the President of France, Mitterand, to sing the French national anthem La Marseillaise in celebration of the French revolution.
She was sought after by many countries for her powerful voice and her ability to sing in multiple languages. She sang in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian.
With a long list of international performances, she’s also racked up some memorable shows in the United States. She performed at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 and the second inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1997. That same year, she became the youngest recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.
Norman is also known for performing Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts at Carnegie Hall. Norman often performed alongside composers George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.
Off stage, she expanded her career by writing a book titled Stand Up Straight and Sing. In it, she shares her life story from humble beginnings to performing on international stages. She also talks about the mentors and role models that guided her while growing up. In her book, she reveals the hardships of dealing with racism as a child and as an adult. It’s an inspiring story filled with life lessons.
On September 30th, 2019, Norman passed away due to medical complications but her soul and spirit live on through the music she’s left behind.
Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain (Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart) has written, directed, and produced an engrossing documentary that spans the incredible life of Zora Neale Hurston. BGN spoke with Strain via Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon in early January 2023 about this captivating film.
What do you admire most about Hurston’s connection to her work?
After she discovered anthropology she decided that her life’s work was to collect Black Southern culture to show that it was beautiful and significant. She made it her business to gather that information together and bring it to the world, both for the general public and the world of academia.
And what did you find to be the most frustrating aspect of her character?
She was probably a challenging person. I’ve met someone who had talked to Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance figure who was Zora Neale’s roommate at one point, and Dorothy said Zora was both charming and difficult, and they had a really warm relationship. We don’t get into this in the film, but it sounds like she [Zora] could be a handful and probably didn’t make it easy for some people to help her. She stuck to her convictions.
The film focuses on how many of her peers at Howard and Barnard had financial support, but Hurston was on her own after her mother died when she was thirteen and she struggled to meet her basic needs and pursue her talents her entire life. If she had strong community connections, a stable relationship, and access to resources, how far do you think she could have gone with her career?
She could have gone much further in the variety of careers she chose. She was writing. She was doing anthropology and theatrical productions. At one point, we don’t get into this in the documentary, but she was going to go to Yale Drama School! The sky was the limit. I feel like sometimes, even today, African American brilliance and ambition is not supported in the way that I think it should be when people show promise. I can speak to a variety of people just in the filmmaking field who should have had bigger careers. And they were brilliant. They showed their brilliance in their first films. Some guys and guys who are white got support when they did these great first films. But so many women who came before me weren’t supported.
One of Hurston’s supporters was a domineering wealthy woman, Charlotte Osgoode Mason. At the end of the day, was that relationship worth it for Zora?
It’s hard for me to say for sure, but we’ve benefited from that relationship in a number of ways. We have beautiful motion picture imagery of Black southerners, children, and adults, doing everyday things. Zora Neale Hurston was able to interview Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last survivors of what we consider the last slave ship, the Clotilda. Even though she couldn’t get her book Barracoon published during her lifetime, it was published in 2018. That’s an important document. So she was able to do important work.
It must have been entirely stressful. Charlotte Osgoode Mason was a woman who only allowed Zora to have one pair of shoes at the time, and she had to ask to buy new ones when the holes in the bottom were so large you could see her toes through the soles. I made a point of putting it into the film.
Hurston was married twice, and she attracted friends and patrons, but why do you think she wasn’t able to maintain those relationships?
I’m not sure exactly why she couldn’t maintain relationships. I have some thoughts about it. She had to raise herself, stay true to the self-raised person, and stay true to her Southerness in a northern Harlem society that was trying to get away from Black Southerness. And she was unabashedly Southern, and she was loud. So I can just totally imagine some people finding her to be off-putting. Also, even though Charlotte Osgoode Mason supported other people, people seemed to want to leave the impression that Zora did something bad, that she was particularly pandering. There are some letters that she wrote to Mason that are actually cringe-worthy. But I try to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. You have a goal, and you have to decide what you will and will not do to try to achieve your goals. Maybe Zora went too far in some cases, but I also think she saw Mason as a mother figure in some ways. It wasn’t perfect, but there was some kind of love there. It was complicated.
Some people label Hurston as the first Black female documentarian. What have you learned from studying her work as a documentary filmmaker as you worked on this project?
I see Zora Neale Hurston as the first ethnographic filmmaker because the term “documentary” hadn’t been coined yet. You can tell that the footage was, in many cases, ethnographic in nature, particularly the footage of the woman walking toward the camera, turning her head, and then you see this woman lounging. It’s not clear to me that she [Zora] was thinking storytelling. The main part of the definition of a documentary [is that] you’re trying to tell a creative story that’s being made with nonfiction material. I’m not trying to take anything away from her. What she did was groundbreaking and difficult.
I wonder who trained her, how she changed the film? For those of you who don’t know about film, you have to [develop] in the dark so that sunlight doesn’t expose it. How did she do this at that time while doing fieldwork? I admired that she knew film was important. When she was down in Beaufort, South Carolina, she even told her friend Jane Bello the anthropologist, “You gotta get a crew down here. You have to capture it.” So now we have this beautiful imagery and even a little bit of sound from inside the Commandment Keeper Church that, as a bonus, also includes Zora Neale Hurston in the church playing the drums. It also serves as an example of her social science expertise. Her participation with people as part of the community looked like she was enjoying herself, and it was a way to gain trust and have people feel connected.
What do you think brought Zora Neale Hurston the most joy?
I think she must have felt the most joy when she received not only one Guggenheim but two Guggenheims after being turned down a few years earlier. With those grants, she was recognized, was able to travel independently, and was her own boss. And while she was in Haiti on those Guggenheims, she wrote Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which wasn’t successful at the time, but it’s very successful now.
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space premieres Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 9:00 pm–11:00 pm EST on PBS and streams on PBS.org.
The TV series The Last of Us, based on the popular video game of the same name, shows us a version of post-apocalyptic America wherein society has fallen to a deadly, brain-altering fungus. But, while most of the population has died or become shambling zombie-like hosts for Cordyceps, control has not fully broken down. No, the Federal Disaster Response Agency, or FEDRA, have largely taken over, plunging America’s remaining cities into martial law. FEDRA dictate every aspect of life in their crowded QZs, or quarantine zones. But one group has sprung up to fight them: the Fireflies. But just who are the Fireflies, The Last of Us‘ rebel group? And what role do they play in the HBO series? Let’s find out.
The Fireflies in The Last of Us, Explained
Now, the one thing you need to know right away about the Fireflies in The Last of Us is that their “war” is largely very unsuccessful. FEDRA sees them as nuisances at best and terrorists at worst. The second thing, while The Last of Us’ Fireflies may have started as a group of citizens intending to reestablish civilian government, after a while, they were just an organized militia group. Worse than that, when their first war against FEDRA failed, they turned to pseudo-religious zealotry. As we see in The Last of Us series’ first episode, the Fireflies try to recruit people who are lost and despondent. Their slogan, “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light,” is as much a rallying cry as a prayer. Although, of course, the infected are the chief “bad guys” in the show and game, we can’t exactly call the Fireflies good guys in The of Us‘ universe either.
Joel (Pedro Pascal) has no time for Fireflies. He sees them as a pain in his butt. Moreover, he resents them for convincing his younger brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) to join. Because of this, he specifically has a grudge against Marlene (Merle Dandridge), the Fireflies’ leader. He calls her “Queen Firefly” derisively. Maybe the thing he resents the most is that they preach about hope. They believe they can find a cure for the fungal infection that has leveled the entire world. Joel, probably reasonably, thinks after 20 years, were a cure possible, someone would have found it by now.
But, as the premise of the show and game show us, Joel and Tess (Anna Torv) have to make a deal with Marlene to transport Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the Fireflies base in Boston. The aim was for the militia to give Joel and Tess a car battery so they can look for Tommy in Wyoming.
The Importance of the Fireflies in The Last of Us‘ Universe
And while smaller, more brutal rebel groups will be their main consternation from Boston to the Rocky Mountains, the Fireflies are everywhere. Look around in The Last of Us game, and in the backgrounds of the first TV episode; you’ll see the Fireflies’ logo, a, you guessed it, stylized firefly, graffitied on walls and fences. The Fireflies are omnipresent, even when they aren’t physically around. Hell, the Fireflies symbol is practically also The Last of Us‘ unofficial logo.
The Fireflies may be the MacGuffin necessary to get The Last of Us started, but the context for them and their war against FEDRA and the infected create the backbone for the entire adventure.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
The post Who Are the Fireflies in HBO’s THE LAST OF US? appeared first on Nerdist.