I dropped the stylus onto the same grooves again and again, and the passage was shimmeringly installed in my mind, to play at will. A few minutes later, toward the end of the movement, Mozart returns to the same sequence, this time giving the arpeggiated run to the pianist, surely aware that this twining filigree was the real beauty, holding together all the other assembled beauties. Suddenly, what had seemed formulaic is beautiful almost beyond bearing. But then! Mozart, ruler of repetition, brings back the cadence, now with the second violins doing a gorgeous arpeggiated run underneath and then he brings it back a third time, enriched now by surging mixtures of woodwind and horns. It’s pretty and restrained, reminiscent of Handel. For a moment, the sound is a little boilerplate-a stately cadence unfolds, violins trilling as the basses make their moves up through A-flat and B-flat on their way back to the tonic of E-flat. Thirty or so bars in, the piano finishes this first tune, and the orchestra bursts into a loud tutti.
Insistent, too, because we will hear it ten times in this short movement. It sounds stark, exposed, almost tentative. The piano opens the movement on its own, a four-bar melody of mournful beauty.
But the slow movement, the Larghetto, that was what I needed. The third movement was a dance, a 6/8 romp. I discounted the first movement, with its gracious and sprightly tunes, the piano scampering around the orchestral parts with the usual firm joy of Mozart-far too happy for me. We had an LP of the concerto (I don’t recall the pianist, but it wasn’t Curzon, an intensely self-critical performer who didn’t release a version in his lifetime), and I started listening to it. Curzon had studied with Artur Schnabel and Wanda Landowska, and, above all, Curzon was English, and in those days you could feel almost patriotic about famous English musicians. My father collected pianists and their performances. I didn’t know the piece, but I knew about Curzon. My father, a man who in later life would think nothing of driving forty miles on his own to hear Bach or Beethoven, had recently seen the English pianist Clifford Curzon in concert, playing Mozart’s last piano concerto, No. I was thirteen, fundamentally cheerful but convinced I was fundamentally melancholy, and ravenous for all the music I could get my hands on, especially music that made me tearful. At some point in the autumn of 1979, I became obsessed with a few bars of Mozart. Cooper considers herself a small-town Southern girl at heart, which explains her affinity for soul food, crunk music, and warm weather.Music has its seasons, and people have their needs.
Professor Cooper blogs for the CFC as "Crunktastic."Ī native of Ruston, Louisiana, Dr. The Collective also does speaking tours, conducts workshops, and engages in a range of activist causes related to women's issues. The CFC blog was also named as one of the top 25 Black blogs to watch in 2012 by The and one of the top "Lady Blogs" by New York Magazine in November 2011. Three members of the CFC were recently profiled in Essence Magazine's list of Young, Black, and Amazing women under age 35 (August 2012 issue). Susana Morris of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a feminist of color scholar-activist group that runs a highly successful blog. She has a forthcoming article on Sapphire's Push as a hip hop novel.ĭr. She has published several book chapters and articles on representations of Black women in popular culture, including a piece on the representation of the "baby-mama" figure in Hip Hop music and film, the feminist implications of Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl mishap, and the importance of Michelle Obama in the tradition of Black female leadership. Using Black feminist thought to understand contemporary articulations of Black womanhood is Dr. She has two forthcoming book chapters on the history of the Order of Eastern Star and the history of Black women's fraternal and club activism in North Louisiana. Cooper studies Black women's organizations as sites for the production of intellectual thought. Along with work on black female public intellectuals, Dr. In particular, this work interrogates the manner in which public Black women have theorized racial identity and gender politics, and the methods they used to operationalize those theories for the uplift of Black communities. She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower(St.
Cooper is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017). in English and Political Science, Howard Universityīlack Women’s Intellectual History, Black Feminist Thought, Hip Hop Feminisms, Hip Hop Studies, Race and Gender Representation in Popular Culture, Digital Feminisms, and New Media.ĭr. in American Studies, Emory University (2009)ī.A.
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