Overview:

Your choir is preparing this year to perform a new composition by Michael Bussewitz-Quarm entitled, “Where We Find Ourselves.” We are inviting you to collaborate with your choir teacher by using these interdisciplinary curriculum prompts with your students. Our hope is that these studies will deepen their understanding with both Mangum’s brilliant photography and Bussewitz-Quarm’s beautiful music.

The music for this choral work was inspired by photographic portraits taken by Hugh Mangum. They were on display in an exhibit at Duke University in 2019, and are featured in the book Where We Find Ourselves, edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris. Mangum captured images of everyday people living in the Jim Crow south at the turn of the 19-20th centuries. His life and work subvert the narrative of race relations following the civil war; he was able to capture his subjects in a way that was authentic, soulful and timeless. Studying his portraits, we enter into the mystery of what it is to be human, regardless of our race, sex, nationality, or the era in which we are alive.