Beverly P. Mortensen (born 1939) is a musician, composer, and scholar of ancient Jewish religion at Northwestern University.
The Priesthood in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Renewing the Profession (Studies in Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture 4) (2006)
Oh Priests
Examining Your Childhood Religion
Mortensen received her BFA in Music and Music Education from Carnegie Mellon University, in 1961. [2] Mortensen taught music in the Pittsburgh public schools for two years, directing several choruses there. For 25 years she directed the St. Athanasius church choir in Evanston, Illinois.
Mortensen is also a prolific composer, who has written hymns, anthems, songs, Masses, and oratorios. She has also directed community presentations of Broadway shows. She wrote and directed original musicals for schools and community groups in the Chicago area. She was director of the Starlight Chorale in the Wallace Bowl at Gillson Park in Wilmette, Illinois. In the early 1970s, she was a professional folk singer.
Later, she did a PhD program in early Judaism at Northwestern University, earning her degree in 1995. She teaches there, as an adjunct professor, classes on the Hebrew Bible and Contemporary Religion. She also edits the twice yearly bibliography Newsletter for Targumic and Cognate Studies.
Bernice Johnson Reagon was an American song leader, composer, professor of American history, curator at the Smithsonian, and social activist. In the early 1960s, she was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, organized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Albany Movement for civil rights in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.
"After a song", Reagon recalled, "the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all.... This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand."
Northwestern University (NU) is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest chartered university in Illinois. The university has its main campus along the shores of Lake Michigan in the Chicago metropolitan area.
Ruth Crawford Seeger was an American composer and musicologist. Her music heralded the emerging modernist aesthetic, and she became a central member of a group of American composers known as the "ultramoderns". She composed primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, turning towards studies on folk music from the late 1930s until her death. Her music influenced later composers including Elliott Carter.
Laurie Spiegel is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic music compositions and her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse. She is also a guitarist and lutenist.
Eileen Jackson Southern was an American musicologist, researcher, author, and teacher. Southern's research focused on black American musical styles, musicians, and composers; she also published on early music.
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that teaches the development of performance skills and uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term performance is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, and performance art; sporting events; social, political and religious events like rituals, ceremonies, proclamations and public decisions; certain kinds of language use; and those components of identity which require someone to do, rather than just be, something. Performance studies draws from theories and methods of the performing arts, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, culture studies, communication, and others.
Dawn Clark Netsch was an American politician and Northwestern University law professor. A member of the Democratic Party, she served in the Illinois State Senate from 1973 to 1991, and as the Illinois Comptroller from 1991 through 1995. In 1994, she was the first woman to be nominated by a major political party to run for Governor of Illinois. In addition to being a professor, she co-authored the legal textbook State and Local Government in a Federal System.
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
Margaret Allison Bonds was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. One of the first Black composers and performers to gain recognition in the United States, she is best remembered today for her popular arrangements of African-American spirituals and frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes.
The Baháʼí Faith in Norway began with contact between traveling Scandinavians with early Persian believers of the Baháʼí Faith in the mid-to-late 19th century. Baháʼís first visited Scandinavia in the 1920s following ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's, then head of the religion, request outlining Norway among the countries Baháʼís should pioneer to and the first Baháʼí to settle in Norway was Johanna Schubartt. Following a period of more Baháʼí pioneers coming to the country, Baháʼí Local Spiritual Assemblies spread across Norway while the national community eventually formed a Baháʼí National Spiritual Assembly in 1962. The 2008 national census reported around 1,000 Baháʼís in the country however the Association of Religion Data Archives estimated some 2700 Baháʼís in 2010.
Angela Jackson is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University. Jackson has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.
Edna Dean Baker (1883–1956) was an educator, author, co-founder of Baker Demonstration School, and President of the National Kindergarten and Elementary College from 1920 to 1949. She was an early advocate for kindergarten style early childhood education in the United States.
Valerie Capers is an American pianist and composer who is most well known for her contributions in jazz.
Katherine Hoover was an American composer of Contemporary classical music and Chamber music, flutist, teacher of Musical composition and Music theory, poet, and later a conductor of her music. Her career as a composer began when few women composers earned recognition in Classical music in the 1970s. As shown in her list of known works, she has composed pieces for solo flute, mixed ensembles, chamber orchestra, choir, full orchestra, and many other combinations of instruments and voice. Some of her flute pieces incorporated Native American themes.
Pamela Cooper-White is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor Emerita and Dean Emerita of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Evelyn LaRue Pittman was an American composer, choral director and music educator.
Iqua Colson, born Kristine Browne in Chicago, Illinois, USA, is an American vocalist, composer, lyricist, arts administrator, and educator.
Elaine Fine is an American musician and composer.
Madeline Tourtelot was an American filmmaker based out of the Chicago metropolitan area. Known for her avant-garde filmmaking style and interest in musical subjects, Tourtelot was a prominent female figure in the Chicago filmmaking community in the 1950s and 60s. She collaborated on films with notable artists such as John Steinbeck, Emilio Fernández, Harry Partch, Paul Severson and Edward Bland. Tourtelot founded three artist institutions in the Midwestern United States, and is included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tourtelot also studied journalism and worked as a film critic, and a painter, jeweler, photographer, sculptor and printmaker.
Amelia Louise Tilghman was an American pianist, teacher, journalist, and activist, She founded the first African-American journal devoted to music, The Musical Messenger, published from 1886 to 1891.