Candice Hoyes: Belle Canto

Candice Hoyes is an award-winning soprano, composer, and multidisciplinary artist whose "eclectic and delicious voice" (Jazz FM UK) delivers songs that are “mesmerizing, moody, and deep” (BOMB Magazine). A MAP Fund recipient and Harvard graduate, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Detroit Symphony, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has collaborated with Chaka Khan, Jessye Norman, Wynton Marsalis, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Candice’s 2023 experimental jazz album Nite Bjuti was hailed by the BBC as “one of the most original and exciting” releases of the year. Her work spans music, film, and archival research, exploring untold stories of African American and Jamaican heritage through Afrofuturist sound, feminist performance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Belle Canto features as a lens the complex life and legacy of Belle da Costa Greene, a groundbreaking scholar and founding librarian of the Morgan Library, the second woman elected as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She was born to two Black parents, the Greeners, and her grandfather’s church was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Candice has curated an hour of music that arcs the canon of the Morgan Library, encompassing Baroque and operatic works, and extends into works of Florence Price, William Grant Still, Rita Dove, and Duke Ellington. The overall presentation addresses Black librarianship from Nella Larsen to Dorothy B. Porter to Carla Hayden. Candice also discusses passing, other forms of transracial and transhistorical experience in law, history, and archives, and fugitivity as issues that pervade the current American reality.