Rhiannon Giddens, Pulitzer Prize winner for music with Omar

Spoleto, May 9, 2023 - There is Rhiannon Giddens among the Pulitzer Prize names announced yesterday by the jury of the most prestigious U.S. award for journalism, literature and music. The U.S. singer-songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist - who will be at Piazza Duomo on Thursday, July 6, for Spoleto 66 - was honored along with to Michael Abels for 'opera Omar, first staged in April 2022 to Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston and expected soon also at Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto as part of the newfound artistic collaboration between the two institutions. In the jury's motivation, Omar "is an 'innovative and engagingopera about the slave trade, brought to North America from Muslim countries. A musical work that respectfully represents African and African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to slavery."

"No one has the final say on what it means to be a composer," said Giddens, who has never studied composition, in an interview with The New York Times. "We have to stop deciding who can be called a composer and who can't. There are plenty of people who could write the next Omar."

Rhiannon Giddens is among the revelation American artists of recent years and adds this to two Grammy Awards and to the MacArthur "genius" grant. In her works as a composer and performer she traces Gaelic, American, African American, and Native American folk traditions and their influence on European and American music, resulting in to powerful songs that target discrimination. Country, blues, jazz, and gospel mingle in exploring the lives of people silenced to from slaves, to victims of the civil rights murders of the 1960s, to teenagers killed by police on inner-city streets.

For the concert at Piazza Duomo, Thursday, July 6 at at 9:30 p.m. in collaboration with Umbria Jazz, she is accompanied from Francesco Turrisi, an Italian-born multi-instrumentalist who is also her life partner. Like Giddens, Turrisi comes from disparate experiences and is the perfect wingman, between assorted tambourines of various origins, piano and accordion, which she plays with very original touch. Winners at the 2022 Grammys in the Best Folk Album category, the two artists perform to Spoleto a selection from their albums there is no Other and They're Calling Me Home.

Born to Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s from European-American father and African-American mother - married only three years after the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling that allowed interracial marriages through the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws - Giddens, after studies in opera singing, attended Irish music and learned the fiddle from old African-American masters. "I am mixed." - states Giddens - "My father is white, my mother is black. And I constantly learned to go back and forth between one world and another. And that has made me who I am."