There’s a lot of history to be learned in opera and recitals; but this weekend at Tanglewood will take new histories and reframe the music around them to expand the way we look at not just vocal music but a continent that western documentation has largely ignored. 

 African Queens is a newly commissioned song cycle that highlights the lives of 7 Afro-diasporic figures of femme royalty. And that’s only a fraction of the figures that creative producer and performer found in the research for this program which you can see in the Berkshires on July 27th. Soprano Karen Slack speaks with us about assembling the collective that made this series of songs and spoken word for the stage, the events that led to this idea, and some of the disparities that she and others like her have experienced in the world of classical and operatic music. 

And Word Nerd Emily Brewster, Senior editor at Merriam Webster is pretty good at language; so much so that a pretty big question from a listener has us tracing the origins of the word “pretty” as an adverb back way further than we expected.