Latest content

April Article of the Month

Papers, Tapes, and Ephemeral Traces of a Singer’s Life and Legacy: The Cullen Maiden Archive at the British Library

Frankie Perry and Gail Tasker

Extract

Cullen Maiden was a bass opera singer, poet, actor, composer, and teacher born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. After serving with the US military in Korea and postgraduate study at the Juilliard School, he toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Belafonte Folk Singers before travelling to Europe — Stockholm, Rome, London, Munich — for further study and professional engagements in the early and mid-1960s. His move to Europe was motivated by racist barriers in the music industry which, while still inescapably present in Europe, seemed more navigable than those in the United States at the time.1 Maiden therefore belongs to a multi-generational cohort of African American musicians who made similar moves to German-speaking Europe, as outlined in Kira Thurman’s landmark study Singing like Germans.2 A successful audition for the Komische Oper in East Berlin led to stable employment in the house’s ensemble, and Maiden later rose to prominence as a popular Porgy in productions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Maiden lived in West Berlin for over thirty years, regularly crossing the border for work, and he pursued many independent artistic projects there, some in collaboration with political and aid organizations. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, while still living in Berlin, he made a professional return to the United States to give a series of recitals and to perform with the Black-led company Opera/South. By the early 1990s, Maiden was experiencing difficulties singing due to a medical condition, so took on increasing teaching work during his final decade in then-reunified Germany. Maiden and his British wife, Chris Hall-Maiden, moved to London in 2000, from which point he focused his multifaceted creativity on composition. He died in 2011.