Special programming to celebrate Juneteenth on WRKF. Stories celebrating identity. Music acknowledging Black composers.
Black, Queer & Free
Sunday, June 16 at 6pm
Living at the intersection of blackness and queerness, we bring you stories about the joys... and challenges ...of living at the intersection of blackness and queerness. We should all be free to be, free to love, and be celebrated in that process... if not by others, then definitely by ourselves. We explore three stories centering queerness and spirituality, Black drag culture, and shifting relationship structures through polyamory. Through it all, the episode guests had to wrestle with disapproval from their communities and sift through feelings of being outcasts- to eventually accept themselves.
Modern Notebook's Juneteenth 2023
Sunday, June 16 at 7pm on WRKF Classical
Two hours celebrating contemporary music by living Black composers in America. We hear Shelley Washington’s “Black Mary,” inspired by the Black American historical figure Stagecoach Mary; music by Courtney Bryan including her “Secondline for Black Love;” Nia Imani Franklin’s re-imagining of Aphrodite as “Afro-Dite;” and Alice Coltrane’s “Prema.” Also hear works by Nathalie Joachim and Shawn E. Okpebholo inspired by historical moments in Black History; and the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Adolphus Hailstork, whose music draws on the composer’s experience as an African American and his own love of jazz and blues music. This program also features music by Anthony R. Green, Carlos Simon, Rhiannon Giddens, George Lewis, and Jessie Montgomery; and performances by Ensemble Pi, fivebyfive, harpist Ashley Jackson with The Harlem Chamber Players, PUBLIQuartet, saxophonist Jeffrey Leung, cellist Seth Parker Woods, pianist Stewart Goodyear with the Buffalo Philharmonic, baritone Will Liverman, and more.
