Howard Fishman - Special Guest Lecture

When the music of the previously unknown Connie Converse was released in 2009, decades after she deliberately disappeared in 1974 (never to be heard from again), it created a new reference point in American music, and a need to rewrite the history books. In early 1950s New York, more than ten years before the music of Bob Dylan and company created a need for the term “singer songwriter,” Converse was writing and performing witty, introspective, literary songs for voice and guitar, and also composing a brilliant catalog of art song music. Howard Fishman, author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (a finalist for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of 2023) will discuss Converse’s relationship to American song, and will play examples of her pioneering recordings.

Howard Fishman began his career as a street musician in New Orleans, and continues to perform, record and tour in the States and abroad, fronting his various ensembles, as a solo artist, and on bills with such diverse artists as Andrew Bird, Esperanza Spalding, Yo Yo Ma, Maceo Parker, Califone, and Nellie McKay. He filters a deep passion for New Orleans jazz, Brooklyn soul, open-hearted country, blues and gospel music through an original, experimental aesthetic, to create a sound that The New York Times has written “transcends time and idiom.

Fishman’s original play A Star Has Burnt My Eye, had its world premiere at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as part of the Next Wave Festival, followed by a national tour. He has made feature-length appearances on NPR’s  “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, “World Cafe” with David Dye, “The Leonard Lopate Show” and “Soundcheck.”

Fishman’s theater and scoring credits include the original oratorio “we are destroyed,” a meditation on the Donner Party tragedy of 1846 (recently programmed at New York Theater Workshop’s “Mondays@3” series); “The Frozen North,” an original score for the Buster Keaton silent film of the same name (commissioned by The New York Guitar Festival),  and original scores composed for several Off-Broadway playwrights.

Fishman has also been a teaching Artist in Residence at the Hotchkiss School, Skidmore College, Connecticut College, and at Mercyhurst Institute, and has been awarded fellowships to the Dora Maar House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Horned Dorset Colony, Moulin a Nef, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat.