About This Program
Center for the Arts, Gore Recital Hall View map
110 Orchard Road, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19711, USA
October 11, 2024. Doors open at 6:00 pm. Concert begins at 6:30 pm
Registration is required
Cooch’s Bridge: The African American Presence is a ten-movement jazz suite inspired by the African Americans, both free and enslaved, who lived, worked and fought on the Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site from the mid-1700s to the present. Cooch’s Bridge: The African American Presence asks many questions with answers research may not be able to prove but that humanize these amazingly resilient, strong-willed, funny, loving, sassy, hardworking, community-building men and women.
Composer Jonathan W. Whitney spent hours talking to scholars and researching the many Black bodies that passed through the Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site. In doing that research, he found that there was little written history from the Black perspective; everything was written by members of the Cooch Family or other white members of the Welsh Tract community.
“This is when I decided that this composition will ask questions we can’t answer through historical fact but will bring these bodies to life,” Whitney said. Cooch’s Bridge: The African American Presence brings these stories to life while speaking back into existence names that were lost to history.
About the artist
Composer and jazz drummer Jonathan W. Whitney received a B.M. in music education from the University of Delaware and an M.M. in jazz studies from the University of the Arts. He grew up in the city of Newark, where his father, a former professional drummer who owned an organ repair business, was his earliest musical influence. Whitney is the artist-in-residence at the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew, and he received a Delaware Established Artist Fellowship in 2020.
Whitney’s compositions include Cooch’s Bridge | The Family; collaborations with the choreographer Ashley S.K. Davis to craft music for her dance works Divided We Fall (2019) and Ode (owed) to Black Women (2022); When The Two Shall Meet (2019) a large scale work written for the combined ensemble of the modern baroque ensemble Melomanie and the Whitney Project; and a separate work, Bedtime (2019), written for Melomanie.
About Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site
The Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site is the location of Delaware’s only Revolutionary War-era land battle and sits about four miles from UD’s Newark campus.
The site’s history covers centuries of early American agricultural use, industry, the Cooch family who lived on the property for seven generations, and the experience of Black families, both free and enslaved.
This presentation and concert of Cooch’s Bridge: The African American Presence
is possible thanks to the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS),
the Departments of Anthropology, History, and Music, and the Center for Black Culture.
Cooch’s Bridge: The African American Presence was originally made possible
with support from Friends of Cooch’s Bridge.