That’s Professor Solange to You
On Monday, the University of California announced that its newest professor — and the Thornton School of Music’s first scholar in residence — is Grammy-winning artist Solange Knowles. If you’re wondering what that means, the Los Angeles Times reports that for the next three years Solange will teach a course, host student workshops, and help faculty develop program offerings in music curation. I’m sure every USC frat boy with a budding DJ career could benefit from this.
But that’s not all a scholar in residence does. Solange will join as the second member of the Dean’s Creative Vanguard Program, a “wide-ranging group of distinguished music artists and creative leaders.” Artist and producer Raphael Saadiq, with whom Solange and Beyoncé have both collaborated, joined as the first in December.
Solange will teach her course in collaboration with Saint Heron, a creative agency she started in 2013. The class is tentatively titled Records of Discovery: Methodologies for Music and Cultural Curatorial Practices and will, per the Times, “explore the process of constructing curatorial frameworks alongside the context, craft and creation of musical landscapes.”
“I am a G.E.D. graduate. I was a teenage mom. I was pregnant with my son at 17, so I didn’t get to further my education in the classical sense,” Solange told the Times. “But I was really blessed and honored to have enriched these other parts of education through my art, through travel [and] through the globalization of my life … so to be able to have access and broader tools as a scholar in residence, to enrich that and deepen that, is really so exciting for me.” Where do I sign up to audit?
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