Debut Recording from Award-winning Soprano, Makeda Hampton

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MAKEDA HAMPTON ANNOUNCES DEBUT SOLO ALBUM
AFRICAN ROMANCES (SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR) — AVAILABLE NOW

(New York, NY / Wilmington, DE – October 30, 2025) — Award-winning soprano, educator, and researcher Makeda Hampton and Meyer Media announce the release of her new recording, AFRICAN ROMANCES, available now for digital download and streaming on all major platforms.

PURCHASE / STREAM: https://makedahampton.com/album-african-romances

AFRICAN ROMANCES is an album that brings new life to a historic collaboration between composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. First published in 1897, their song cycle — titled African Romances, Op. 17 — is widely recognized as the first Black art song cycle to appear in print. This body of work represents an early assertion of Black creative partnership in classical music: a Black British composer and a Black American poet creating art song at a high literary and musical level in the late 19th century. The release also coincides with the 150th birthday of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, underscoring the urgency of revisiting and re-centering his contributions to vocal literature.

The album features Hampton in collaboration with two extraordinary artists, Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa (mbira) and Aurelien Eulert (piano), whose partnerships helped shape the soundscape and interpretive depth of the project. AFRICAN ROMANCES is both an artistic statement and an act of preservation.

“This music is personal to me,” says Hampton. “After Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s untimely death, a lot of his vocal music faded from the repertoire, especially these 7 songs. AFRICAN ROMANCES is about restoring that voice to the center, and acknowledging the intellectual and emotional sophistication that Black composers and poets were bringing to classical music more than a century ago.”

AFRICAN ROMANCES emerges directly from Hampton’s doctoral research on Coleridge-Taylor and Dunbar. Her work examines how their collaboration shaped early Black art song, authorship, and representation, and why so much of that legacy was later minimized or silenced.

Support for AFRICAN ROMANCES was provided in part by the Delaware Division of the Arts through an Individual Artist Fellowship grant and Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, recognizing Hampton’s work as both a performing artist and a scholar of historically underrepresented vocal literature.

For press inquiries, interviews, or review copies, please reply directly to this email.

ABOUT MAKEDA HAMPTON
Makeda Hampton is an award-winning classical soprano, vocal pedagogue, and scholar of Black vocal literature. Her work sits at the intersection of performance, research, and advocacy, with particular focus on restoring historically marginalized song repertoire to mainstream classical spaces. She appears regularly on opera and concert stages, and serves as an educator and mentor to emerging vocal artists.

| Makeda Hampton