On July 9, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, in Katonah, N.Y., will offer a livestream exploring Shirley Graham Du Bois’s 1932 opera Tom-Tom, the first opera written and staged by an African-American woman, which has not been produced since its initial run in Cleveland in 1932. All that survives of the score is an incomplete piano-vocal reduction. During the livestream, soprano Candice Hoyes, baritone Markel Reed, and pianist Kyle Walker will perform excerpts from the score. Following the performance, Caroline Jackson Smith, professor of Theater and Africana Studies at Oberlin College, will moderate a panel discussion considering the opera’s complex representations of race, gender, and history. Lucy Caplan, a lecturer at Harvard who has written for Symphony magazine, originally produced this event at Harvard in 2018; she will join the panel alongside the three performers. The livestream will be available for 24 hours beginning July 9 at 7 p.m. ET. Listeners may submit questions for the panelists during the livestream. Visit the Caramoor website for more information.
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