Rosanne Cash, one of the country’s pre-eminent singer/songwriters, will come to New York University on Thursday, October 8, as the featured guest at the next edition of the Songwriters Hall of Fame Master Sessions at NYU. Launched in 2011, the Master Sessions are a collaboration between the Hall and the NYU Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions of the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Cash will discuss her three-decade-and-counting career with Phil Galdston, NYU Faculty Songwriter-in-Residence and Master Teacher of Songwriting.
“We are delighted that Rosanne will be the next guest at the upcoming Master Session,” said SHOF President and CEO Linda Moran. “It will be a rare opportunity for NYU students and SHOF members to get a first-hand insight into the heart, mind, and process of this prolific songwriter.”
“Rosanne Cash is one of the most vital and influential music creators of our time,” said Dr. Ron Sadoff, director of the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions and its Songwriting Program. “The hallmark of her remarkable career as a songwriter, performer, author, and advocate is a boundless curiosity and the courage to conquer new areas of creativity.”
Cash has released 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned four GRAMMY Awards and nominations for eleven more, as well as twenty-one top-40 hits, including eleven number 1 singles. She is also an author whose four books include the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Oxford-American, and The Nation, among other publications. In addition to continual touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center, and San Francisco Jazz. She completed a residency at the Library of Congress in December 2013.
Cash was awarded the AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and received the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. She was chosen as a Perspective Series artist at Carnegie Hall and will host four concerts (including a major show of her own in February) during their 2015/16 season. She is serving as 2015 Artist-in-Residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, performing three concerts there this month. On October 11, she will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.
Cash’s landmark 2009 album, The List, won the Americana Music Album of the Year award. In her latest release, The River and the Thread, a collaboration with husband/co-writer/producer and arranger John Leventhal, Cash evokes a kaleidoscopic examination of the geographic, emotional, musical and historic landscape of the American South. The album has received impressive worldwide acclaim and attained the highest debut in the Billboard charts of any of her previous albums. It received three Grammy Awards earlier this year.
“Rosanne is not only one of the great songwriting talents of the past 30 years, she’s one of the best thinkers about the art and craft. As a frequent guest faculty in NYU Steinhardt Songwriting classes, she has worked closely with our students, demonstrating that she’s one of the most articulate practitioners in the field,” said Galdston. “Now, this fearless artist will give the greater University and New York music communities an up-close-and-personal view of a life in song.”
The Songwriters Hall of Fame Master Sessions at NYU are held at the historic Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, just west of Washington Square. For more information about the Songwriting Program at NYU Steinhardt, visit here.