The opening festival TheShedNY is a hymn to the influence of African-American music
it was said that “Kumbaya”, a well-known American folk song, was written by a white man. In 1939 Marvin Frey, a young Pentecostal evangelist and songwriter—and one of 12 children born to German immigrants who settled in Oregon—registered the copyright on a chorus to a song he called “Come By Here”. These lyrics were taken by American missionaries to the Belgian Congo and Angola, where Christian choirs sang them in a local dialect as “Kum Ba Ya”.
It was such casual obfuscation of the roots and influence of African-American music that inspired Steve McQueen, a British film director and prize-winning artist, to begin work on Soundtrack of America, a five-night festival of historical and contemporary music that will open the Shed, New York’s newest performance space, on April 5th. “I wanted to celebrate [black America] rather than commiserate,” Mr McQueen says.
The vision for the Shed chimed with Mr McQueen’s ideas. In a city already rich in stand-alone cultural institutions, it had to be both flexible and innovative to make a mark. “What New York needed”, says Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the lead architects, “is an entity that could bring all the arts under one roof.” It had “to be a place that can constantly be reinvented by what’s inside it,” adds David Rockwell, another architect involved in the development.
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