How do we empower ourselves and others when we are frustrated with an increasingly bleak reality? How do we continue to believe in love and care when inhuman acts of violence and greed drown out hope? The Cornell Chorus’ 2023 Empowerment through Music event centers around a recently premiered project: “Freedom on the Move, Songs in Flight.” Basing their music on the Cornell-founded “Freedom on the Move” database (the largest crowdsourced database of fugitive slave advertisements in North America), composers and performers including Shawn Okpebholo, Mason Bynes, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Rhiannon Giddens, and more collaborated to weave narratives from the source material to sound out liberation and re-humanization of people escaping enslavement.

On March 3rd and 4th, Bynes and countertenor Reginald Mobley will be visiting campus to speak about the project, perform selections, and work with students. Mobley will give a solo voice masterclass on Friday, March 3rd in Barnes Hall. On March 4th at 7pm in Barnes Hall the Chorus and Glee Club will perform Bynes' Three Dialogues, Mobley will perform solo selections, and the evening will culminate with a roundtable discussion about the project with Bynes, Mobley, Professor Martha Guth (professor of voice at Ithaca College and co-founder of the project), and Professor Ed Baptist (professor of History at Cornell and co-founder of the Freedom on the Move database).

For more information, visit https://www.sparksandwirycries.org/songs-in-flight.