My Life in Music a discussion with Jessye Norman and Anna Deavere Smith at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival.
In this, its third year, Aspen Ideas Festival once again gathers scientists, artists, politicians, historians, educators, activists, and other great thinkers around some of the most important and fascinating ideas of our time. As these thinkers present their provocative ideas, they engage a sophisticated and highly motivated audience.
Bio
Jessye Norman
Jessye Norman is one of the most celebrated contemporary opera singers and recitalists in the world and a 2007 Aspen Institute Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence. A distinguished American soprano, she pursued formal musical studies at Howard University, the Peabody Conservatory, and the University of Michigan. In 2009 she curated Honor!, a celebration of the African American cultural legacy.
She made her operatic debut in Berlin and soon conquered stages from Lincoln Center to Covent Garden and from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. Over the years she has won at least a dozen major singing competitions and has made many dozen more recordings. She is a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Equally at home singing arias, spirituals, or lieder, this year she is performing a wide-ranging repertoire in France, Spain, Germany and the United States.
Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, teacher, and author. Known for her distinct brand of documentary-theater, she wrote and performed Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities which was the runner-up for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and earned her an Obie and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 which received two Tony Award nominations, an Obie, and numerous other awards.
Currently a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Smith was the Ford Foundation's first artist-in-residence as well as a MacArthur Fellow. As of July 2009 she is the artist in residence with the Center for American Progress. Smith is also the founder of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and has received honorary degrees from several universities. In 2006, Smith was the first Aspen Institute Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence. She also received the 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc. and a Fellow Award in Theater Arts from United States Artists in 2009.