South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene (Dr Samantha Ege, University of Southampton)

Combining a mix of lecture and recorded performance, Samantha Ege brings the story of the South Side impresarios to life. She delves into the ways that Chicago's early 20th-century Race women (i.e., Black women intellectuals and creatives committed to the entwined tasks of racial uplift and gender equality) operated out of their South Side base and shaped a new vision for classical music that transformed the city and beyond.

SAMANTHA EGE is a leading scholar and interpreter of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Her first book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene, and first edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price illuminate Price in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance and Black women's dynamic networks. She has received awards such as the 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award, 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award, and more. Her work appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, and more. She has also written for the New York Times, Guardian, and New Statesman, as well as writing and presenting radio documentaries for BBC Radio 3. She released her debut album in 2018 called Four Women. She released her critically acclaimed second album called Fantasie Nègre in 2021. Her third and fourth albums came out in 2022: Black Renaissance Woman and Homage with the Castle of our Skins string quartet. Her fifth album Maestra: Julia Perry and Doreen Carwithen Piano Concertos with Lontano Orchestra came out in March 2025. Her next album is with the BBC Philharmonic and features Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and was previously the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.