Kevin Parks

Do you come from a musical family?

No. I was a first-generation college graduate, born on Staten Island. After high school, we were encouraged to take the firefighter’s and postal worker’s tests or think about the military. There wasn’t a lot of talk about going to college. But I had a music teacher who said my harmony homework was solid and that I should try CUNY, that ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ had an excellent conservatory. I entered as a music performance major in guitar. But an accident with my hand made it clear I would not have a career in performance. So, I left school and reapplied to the Conservatory of Music as a composition major. That decision ended up impacting my entire life.

What was so special about ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ that you decided to return and try again?

At ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ, I got the feedback and encouragement from faculty and mentors that I needed, and without judgment. They never said my chops weren’t good enough or I didn’t have traditional European-style ear training or anything like that. They took me as they found me, schooled me up, made me a scholar and a composer, and put me on a path. I went on to Dartmouth and got a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. I lived and worked in South Korea for 20 years. None of these things would have happened if I hadn’t gone to ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ. I’m prouder of my bachelor’s degree than anything.

And now you’re at the New York Public Library.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that a first-generation kid from Staten Island would get the gig. I had been working for two decades teaching, composing, and performing experimental electronic music in clubs and other venues in South Korea. I had had some small experience working as a media specialist doing archival work for NYPL, but I applied, not expecting anything. I got an interview, was offered the position, quit my job as a college professor, and moved back to New York City. I love teaching, but come on, it’s the New York Public Library!

What does your typical day look like?

I work on public programming and scheduling free events, but much of what I do is acquire archival materials. I might work on taking in the collection of a radio station that closed down or composers who are looking for a home for their papers. I travel to look at collections and assess their conditions and whether our patrons could make use of them.

What’s in the collection?

Anything that has research value. A collection could have musical scores and photographs. We take analog tapes, videotapes, film, negatives, prints. We take hard drives, but we don’t take a lot of what we call 3D objects—they take up space and often have limited research value. For instance, we were given all of Lou Reed’s letters, notebooks, and audio recordings, but he also had a ton of guitars. We gave those back to the donor, his wife, Laurie Anderson. But one of the fascinating things about the Lou Reed archive is there’s a lot of crumpled things in it. I got the impression that while creating, he would get sort of grumpy and crumple up a piece of paper with notes on it, throw it in the trash, and then somebody would think, “Maybe I should get that and smooth it out.â€�

Are the archives open to the public?

I always joke about my collection, but the reality is that it belongs to the people. It’s everybody’s collection. If you are a New York City resident and even if you aren’t—it’s all yours. If you want to see something, you make an appointment, and we show it to you. I might stand there while you look, but you get to see what’s in the archives. We are constantly working to make it so that when people like me who were born and raised in New York City come to the library, they can find a little of themselves in it, and that the collection reflects the population that uses it.

There is a big emphasis on documenting the musical life of the city. Someone like Arthur Russell was an essential part of the downtown experimental music scene since the mid-Seventies. His collection materials would overlap with avant-garde composers like Meredith Monk, Mikel Rouse, John Cage, and Christian Wolff, all of whom are in our collection.

Are any faculty from the Conservatory of Music in the public library’s collection?

Yes. Some of the works of professors who were my teachers at ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ—H. Wiley Hitchcock, Noah Creshevsky, and Charles Dodge—are now in NYPL’s collection. I went back to campus two weeks ago for the first time since graduating to make an inventory of those items. It was amazing to get off the train at Flatbush Avenue and see that everything was different and yet sort of the same. The avenue was still the chaos that it always was, everybody on the street, on the make, doing the do. And then I got on campus—and this will sound corny—but I felt all the feels. I saw the students and the buildings, and I thought, ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ took a kid like me and decided I was a worthwhile investment. I wouldn’t change that experience for anything in the world.

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Since the early 1950s, the “nation’s troubadour of conscience,” as public radio host Steve Curwood once called Seeger, has had a connection to ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ. Seeger formed the band The Weavers with Fred Hellerman ’49, appeared on the radio with host Oscar Brand ’42, and led a sing-along at the college’s 2012 centennial celebration of friend and fellow folk legend Woody Guthrie.

At the center of a folk revival that began in the 1950s, Seeger’s strong conviction that folk music could be a galvanizing force sent him wherever he believed his performance could highlight a movement or spark activism: protest rallies, colleges, music festivals, concert halls, stadiums, and community and neighborhood gatherings. No venue was too large or too small for the things he believed in, among them the labor movement, environmentalism, and anti-war causes.

Seeger was ever-wary of celebrity, despite his popularity and accolades: a lifetime achievement Grammy Award (among his individual Grammys) in 1993, the National Medal of Arts a year later; and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

“My job is to show folks that there’s a lot of good music in the world and if used right it will help to save the planet,” he was quoted as saying in 2009. To that end, with either a 12-string guitar or a 5-string banjo, and his bright tenor voice, Seeger would encourage audiences to sing along to songs—some of which he wrote, some of which he adapted from earlier traditional songs.

Many of his compositions would become classics of the American folk music canon: “If I Had a Hammer,” “Goodnight, Irene,” which became a number one hit, the anti-Vietnam war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and the enduring civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

In 1949 Seeger formed The Weavers, along with Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman, a ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ graduate who had picked up the guitar in the Coast Guard. While at the college, Hellerman majored in English by day, and played with a folk group at nights. In a couple short years The Weavers became national stars, selling some four million singles and albums.

But the band, and Seeger’s resolve was tested in 1955 when he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his earlier membership in the Communist Party. He refused to testify about what he considered private beliefs, and as a result he was indicted for contempt of Congress. The indictment was later dismissed as faulty, but he was blacklisted, and The Weavers then disbanded.

“He appeared on my program when few others would have him,” says Oscar Brand, who continues to host the award-winning , the longest-running radio program with the same host.

“There was an honesty to him—a difficult honesty. Pete managed continually to tell the people around him, the people in schools and colleges, the people whom he met on the street, why he was doing what he was doing.”

A peer of the equally influential Woody Guthrie, whom he met in 1940 at a benefit concert for migrant workers in California, Seeger was mentor to younger folk singers such as Bob Dylan, Bernice Johnson Reagon (who founded the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock), Joan Baez, and Don McLean. Even as newer musicians continued to draw inspiration from Seeger—among them Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo, and John Mellencamp—Seeger himself kept performing, including an appearance President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, and at Occupy Wall Street protests.

In September 2012, Seeger shared the stage at the Walt Whitman Theater at the (¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ) with Judy Collins, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, and others at a 2012 centennial celebration of fellow folk legend Woody Guthrie

“I first met Mr. Seeger earlier in my career,” says Maria Ann Conelli, dean of the School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts. “It was a thrill then, but nothing could match the great pleasure of seeing him on Whitman stage as we celebrated Woody Guthrie. It was a delight to see him perform—a living moment in music history. He will be missed, but his legacy will endure.”

“He appeared here twice,” says Ray Allen professor of music at ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ and the CUNY Graduate Center, and associate at the , which co-hosted the event. “He also visited in October of 2001 to take part in a conference honoring his stepmother, the composer and folk music scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger. His half-brother, Mike, and half-sister Peggy were also here, and they performed together at a sold-out tribute concert.”

“He was my friend,” says Brand. “We were constantly meeting in the places where there were microphones and performances and audiences. He was a person of great ability. And he used his ability to reach the people.”

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As part of the program, Lee met earlier that day with close to 80 students in Introduction to Production (FILM 1201), taught by Mustapha Khan, an Emmy Award–winning visiting professor in the Department of Film.

During both talks, Lee took questions from students and shared with them his personal experiences in crafting his career as a filmmaker.

“Students who attended both events enjoyed how direct and to-the-point Spike Lee was,” said Khan. “I think he became genuinely interested in the experiences of our students and relished taking questions beyond the time allotted to us.”

“Listening to one of the most famous directors in the world talking about his experiences can only help our education,” said junior Jennifer McQuaile, an Irish native who traveled to the United States to study film at ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ. “He also reminded us that it is our films, scripts and our work in general that will get us jobs. Talks like his help us stay on the right path to pursue our dreams.”

Originally from Atlanta, Lee and his parents, schoolteacher Jacqueline Shelton and jazz musician and composer Bill Lee, moved to Brooklyn when he was still a child. After graduating from high school, Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee returned to Georgia to attend Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black institution of higher learning established in Georgia in 1867.

“I did not find film. Film found me,” said Lee during his keynote address. “The beauty of a liberal arts education is that you get exposed to many influences, and you can learn something different from each discipline until you find what you love, and then you can do it for the rest of your life.”

Lee, who has directed, produced, written and acted in dozens of films over the past 30 years, is also a film professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he received his master of fine arts degree in film production. He founded , based in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, in 1986.

“The quest for knowledge never stops,” Lee said toward the end of his talk, before accepting a New York City proclamation presented to him by Councilman Jumaane Williams ’05 M.A. “When you find, not what makes you money but what you love, you can spend the rest of your life learning.”

Other panelists for “Conversations on Race and Performance” included Africana Studies Professor George Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Racquel Gates of the College of Staten Island, Film Department Chair Paula Massood, English Professor Michele Wallace of The City College of New York, and Professor Ray Allen, senior research associate at ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ’s .

Next fall, the ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema will enroll its first cohort of students. The product of a partnership between ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ and Steiner Studios, the school will be the only one in the country seamlessly integrated into a working film lot.

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