Vocalist Phoenix Miranda sings the Black national anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing at the 2024 MSU Juneteenth celebration at Breslin Center on Friday, June 14. Miranda, a versatile soprano, is a master’s student in the College of Music. Her renditions of the song are passionate and personal, and she has been asked to sing the anthem at several MSU events as a result.
This article, written by MSU student Hannah Locke, first appeared in the June 17, 2024 edition of The State News. It is shared here with permission.
At Michigan State’s fourth-annual Juneteenth celebration, there was a host of musical performances from the MSU College of Music’s jazz quintet to performances of Gospel music and the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Vocal performance master’s student Phoenix Miranda performed the anthem at the celebration.
She said it wouldn’t make sense not to showcase such a variety of music when celebrating the Black community.
“It shows the diversity of Black sound because we’re not a monolith and you see how Black people are in every form of music and there’s reimagining done, there’s cultural fusion done,” Miranda said.
Assistant Professor of Music Theory Richard Desinord has personal and professional goals that include making music theory more accessible to, and inclusive of, people of color. As a theorist, he studies Black artists, genres, and eras and explains how they are influential in culture and communities today. MSU’s Juneteenth celebration featured a variety of music and proved an excellent way to see his point in practice.
Assistant professor of music theory at Michigan State University Richard Desinord said the influence of Black music, such as music created by Black artists or genres that were created and influenced by Black artists like jazz, Motown, gospel and hip hop, is seen everywhere, even in genres like country and rock and roll.
“I would say popular music in general has a large influence from Black music. I don’t care what the artist is most of the time,” he said. “It’s really integral to our conception of popular culture here, and across the world, because the rest of the world…takes elements from the United States anyway, so it’s really hard to pin down.”
Despite this widespread influence, Desinord acknowledged that in many spaces there is not enough attention paid to Black culture-inspired music and artists. When it comes to his field, music theory, Desinord is working to bring more attention to this music.
“You don’t see it in an academic sense, but it exists,” he said. “It permeates all the types of music we listen to. So for me, I just wanted to be able to give voice to this sort of music in academic circles, to be able to present this stuff as something that is worthy of study.”
Similar to Desinord, Miranda finds that there can always be more acknowledgement of Black influence in her own field as a classically trained vocalist.
“There’s a whole lineage of us in classical music as well,” she said. “In the music that I’m mostly involved in in classes, it’s been amazing, because there’s a connection there…these Black composers that just blow my mind, and have pioneered for people like me to come after them.”
Through Miranda’s performances, she seeks to honor the Black classical artists – like William Grant Still, Robert Owens, Joseph Bologne – that came before her and the impact that they have had.
“As I am in my Western-based classical field, I’m always trying to find ways to give back those flowers, to find people that I miss because they weren’t on the front lines,” she said.
Not only does Black music have a large amount of influence across genres, it also holds a lot of cultural significance. From before the Transatlantic slave trade, in African communities, Desinord said music played many roles.
“It was something that was used as community building,” he said. “I think it was something that was celebratory. It could be used for funerals. It could be used for hosting things. It was something that was also communicative.”
The various roles that music played in the Black community has not changed.
“Slaves communicated with music,” Desinord said. “It told stories. It passed down information from generations…and we don’t really see that disappear today.”
According to Desinord, from the protest music of the Civil Rights Movement, songs from artists like James Brown and Marvin Gaye, to hip hop songs in more modern times, the music continues to serve a similar purpose: to tell a story and to communicate with communities.
“I think that’s the magic of music,” Desinord said. “Even though it’s not necessarily written down, we can kind of look at it as sort of a ledger for Black history in some ways.”
As a part of Desinord’s research, he has focused on Black church music, a genre that has been one of the most influential in the community. The Black church, as well, is a monumental fixture when discussing Black history.
“The Black church is integral to Black history,” Desinord said. “I’m not religious, and I could say that the black church is still a part of me, and I don’t want it to not be. The advancements in the civil rights period were largely done from people who had strong ties to the Black church.”
The historical significance is tied to the importance of the music as well.
“A lot of the places of refuge that Black people had was the Black church,” Desinord said. “And music, of course, played a huge role in that.”
MSU Music alum Rodney Page is a violinist and pianist who performs, teaches, DJs, and more. He showed his range at the MSU Juneteenth celebration by performing on violin, as a DJ, and as the emcee of the event.
Rodney Page is an alumni of MSU, a violinist and music educator. He performed at the Juneteenth commemoration and said in addition to music being communicative and storytelling, it also acts as a form of expression.
“I think it’s a way and a mechanism for Black people to express themselves but then it can also be used as a way to celebrate accomplishments also, whether it’s a graduation or in this case Juneteenth, I think it has many different roles,” Page said.
When choosing the music he was going to perform and play at the event, Page had a wide variety of genres to choose from and wanted to evoke a sense of celebration.
Rodney Page exudes joy in everything he does, and his role in the MSU Juneteenth event at Breslin Center was no exception.
“We want people to be joyous,” he said. “We want music to represent the years and the contributions that African Americans have made musically to American culture, which have been significant throughout the years.”
Miranda, in her performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” felt the historical and cultural weight of the song she was performing.
“It’s not until recently that I really started to think about what we’re really singing about because you start hearing all these verses and they can get intimidating,” she said. “But to me, the song is reimagining what this place that we’re in could be for, for Black people.”
Performing this song gave her the ability to tell a story and connected her to a long line of people who have created and made this song what it is.
“James Weldon Johnson and his brother, they composed the song. They were civil rights leaders in the NAACP and now I am a part of this lineage,” she said. “Anybody that is with us, we’re now inviting them to look back at this lineage and remember that this is only today…we need to remember it’s a lifestyle so we need to always be encouraging the lifting of our voices, especially the lifting of Black voices.”
For Desinord, hearing songs like these and listening to Black music, has instilled a sense of community in him since he was a kid listening to it performed at church or in the car. This sense of community has grown into a sense of pride.
“When I hear certain pieces within gospel or hip hop or anything, it makes me feel pride within the Black community, and not undue pride or pride over a different cultural group, but more so that this is something, a cultural artifact that’s our creativeness, and it makes me feel good in that kind of way,” Desinord said.
For Page, it is a way of honoring the past and looking towards the future.
“The music, to me, is a template for that ideology of optimism, knowing that we made progress and we will continue to make progress throughout the years,” Page said.
