Source: Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty
Esperanza Spalding is bringing her music expertise to Harvard. According to the Harvard Gazette, she’ll be joining the faculty alongside Brooklyn-based flautist Claire Chase as a professor of practice in the university’s Music Department.
“The appointments of Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding have great symbolic importance to our department,” department chair Suzannah Clark said. “They signal a commitment to the creative performing arts as a core feature of liberal arts education in the 21st century, and position the department for the musical landscape of the future, while providing Harvard students — and all of us — with bold models for how to live as artists in the world.”
Spalding—joining 9th Wonder, Pharrell Williams, Young Guru and others who’ve recently added a teaching notch to their belt—is slated to start teaching in the spring.
https://twitter.com/EspeSpalding/status/890371192204525571
The news comes around the same time as the announcement of her forthcoming album, Exposure, which she plans to record before a web audience during a 77-hour livestream starting September 12.
“I think of it creatively as a context where you give all that’s been cooking in there permission to come out at will,” she told The New York Times. “I thought: I just need a break from framing. I’m tired of backing everything up and explaining why this character does this and that.”
Read more about her forthcoming project here.
