The TAPS Graduate Students host Masi Asare for the November First Friday in Roble Gym 137. Open To the TAPS Community.

ABOUT THE LECTURE | Masi Asare will speak about her recent book, Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, which operates at the intersection of sound studies, voice studies, performance studies, and musical theatre history. In the book, Asare explores the singing practice of black women singers in US musical theater between 1900 and 1970. Challenging pervasive narratives that black women possessed “untrained” voices, Asare theorizes singing as a form of sonic citational practice—how the sound of the teacher’s voice lives on in the student’s singing. From vaudeville-blues shouters, black torch singers, and character actresses to nightclub vocalists and Broadway glamour girls, Asare locates black women of the musical stage in the context of historical voice pedagogy. She invites readers not only to study these singers, but to study with them—taking seriously what they and their contemporaries have taught about the voice. Ultimately, Asare speaks to the need to feel and hear the racial history in contemporary musical theater.

ABOUT MASI ASARE | Masi Asare is a songwriter, dramatist, scholar, and voice teacher. She is associate professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Northwestern University, where she serves as artistic director of the American Music Theatre Project (AMTP). Masi is also a Tony-nominated songwriter whose work includes Paradise Square (Broadway, Chicago), Monsoon Wedding (Off-Broadway, Delhi, Doha), Marian, and the True Tale of Robin Hood: The Musical (Concord Theatricals), and Odyssey (SF Bay Area, national tour). As a composer and dramatist, she has been commissioned by Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Lilly Awards, Broadway producers, and Marvel. Shows currently in development include Delta Blue, Kodachrome, and a commercial jukebox musical. Masi’s voice students have performed on Broadway and worldwide. 

Her book Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage (Duke University Press, 2024), won the DUP Scholars of Color First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Association for Theatre Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award and the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in American History from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). A past Dramatists Guild Fellow, Masi’s honors include the Ziegfeld Award for a woman composer of musicals, a grant from the Theater Hall of Fame, and inclusion on the “Women to Watch on Broadway” list. Her writing has been published by the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Performance Matters, The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre, Studies in Musical Theatre (where she is on the editorial board), TDR, and Samuel French/Concord Theatricals. She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, and a Fellow of the Northwestern Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In 2024 she received the highest teaching award from Northwestern, the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, in recognition of her impact. Her professional associations include PSi, ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and the Recording Academy, where she is a Grammy Awards voter.