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| December 2006
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ALUMNI NEWS |
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| Dreams are Reality for Newest Inductee to AU Arts Alumni Hall of Fame
Gaunt says this award has provided her the opportunity to reflect on what AU has given her. “When you’re an undergraduate student, you don’t have the capacity to see what your education will have on you,” she says. “Twenty years later, I can tell you that AU has significantly contributed to who I am as a professor of ethnomusicology and who I am as a vocal coach, as well as to my international perspective on the world.” Her journey to AU was slightly atypical. An early high school graduate at age 16, Gaunt first received an associate’s degree from Montgomery College in Rockville before transferring to AU in 1982. “I always knew I wanted to study music and vocal performance, but I had stage fright issues and was scared to stray too far from home,” she says. As a commuter student at AU, Gaunt says she didn’t have the same engagement with campus activities as other students. “I was a very straight and narrow music student,” she recalls. Still, she remembers fondly her vocal coach, Adriana Hardy, and her vocal pedagogy teacher, Elizabeth Vrenios, whose technical training Gaunt uses in her own vocal coaching today. Gaunt also notes her choir director, Vito Mason, was a huge inspiration. “He told me, ‘You have to be in the choir’.” As a result, the lyric soprano made her first international trip to England for New Year’s in 1983-84. A pumpkin fund raiser enabled each student and his or her guests to travel for just $200. Gaunt took advantage of the opportunity and brought her mother and aunt, who otherwise would never have gone to England. In addition to her AU degree in vocal performance, Gaunt brings to her new position as associate professor of music at Baruch College-CUNY a master’s degree in vocal performance from SUNY-Binghamton, and a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan. She calls herself “an anthropologist of music, focusing on living musical cultures and groups, as opposed to past ones.” Her courses at Baruch, as well as at NYU and the University of Virginia, where she formerly served on the faculty, focus on African American music from the 1970s on and, more specifically, the study of hip hop as a music and culture. Yet, this self-called “jack of all trades” does a lot more than lecture in classrooms. In an average week, Gaunt spends time rehearsing and performing with her bands, Rare Breed, and Kyraocity, coaching clients at her private vocal coaching studio and in self-improvement seminars, researching and writing (she is currently finishing up an article about the interaction in Harlem nightclubs between African Americans and African immigrants), and experiencing the social realm of New York City, so as to expand her capacity as a performer, teacher, coach, and writer. She credits one of her AU professors with providing her one of her own personal credos: “The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know anything. I want to be, and I want my students to be, students of life. There is always more to know.” When asked to note her biggest career accomplishment, there is little hesitation: her teaching and the tangible product of that teaching, her book, titled, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop. Gaunt says the book gave her “bigger voice” than the one normally provided her through the classroom. She is also proud of her contributions to the study of hip hop culture and music, which was largely unexplored academically before her foray into the field. The Games Black Girls Play may be her biggest accomplishment to date, but the release of Gaunt’s first CD, Be the New Revolution, may change that. With a title taken from a poem by Nikki Giovanni, the CD will feature both original songs and covers of existing work, all sung with Gaunt’s jazz-pop style. While she won’t be joining AU’s Jazz Ensemble as a vocalist when they perform in the Katzen Arts Center’s Abramson Family Recital Hall on December 8, Gaunt is looking forward to her induction into the Arts Hall of Fame that evening. She will join the ranks of nearly a dozen other AU alumni, including On Golden Pond writer/director Ernest Thompson, CAS/BA '71, concert pianist Rob Fisher, CAS/MA '86, and D.C.'s Studio Theatre Director, Joy Zinoman, CAS/MA '75. Nancy Snider, AU’s Music program director, says Gaunt is an ideal recipient of the honor: “She is doing outstanding, contemporary, and nontraditional work, but in a very scholarly way. She can serve as a role model for all AU students, but particularly for our African American students, in her commitment to African American people and healing wounds in the African American community,” says Snider. For Gaunt, the event will serve as further proof that hard work pays off. “I tell my students, there is no more ‘those who can’t, teach.’ I say, those who can’t, keep trying – and teach too! You can have your dream – and it doesn’t have to look like anything you’ve even seen.” -Tara Sherwin |
As
a little girl growing up in Rockville, Md., Kyra Gaunt, CAS/BA
’84, dreamed of becoming a professional singer and writer.
With a book released in January 2006, a CD set to debut next month, and
an established career as a professor of African American ethnomusicology,
it seems Gaunt’s childhood dreams are all coming true. Her upcoming
induction into AU’s Arts Alumni Hall of Fame on Friday, December
8, at the Katzen Arts Center is further validation for Gaunt, whose motto
of “slow and easy wins the race” has stood her in good stead
throughout her still-evolving 20-year career in music.