A televised broadcast of the Edward MacDowell Medal Day celebration will premiere on Aug. 8 on New Hampshire PBS.
The broadcast includes a personal tour of MacDowell’s historic grounds with composer, writer, and Grammy Award winner Rosanne Cash as she visits artists-in-residence in their studios; a funny and insightful interview between Cash and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast; the award ceremony featuring Fellow and poet Cheryl Savageau as well as author and critic Kurt Andersen, who will introduce the 61st Edward MacDowell Medalist; and a brief performance by Emmylou Harris, John Leventhal, and Cash.
The special 30-minute co-production with NHPBS will offer viewers a front row seat to MacDowell’s Medal Day and extend the unique opportunity to see MacDowell through Cash’s eyes. Cash is the first woman to win the Medal in composition, working in Americana, rock, blues, folk, and pop, influencing American culture across musical genres. She joins an august group of other MacDowell Medal winners such as Thornton Wilder (1960), Georgia O’Keeffe (1972), Louise Bourgeois (1990), Toni Morrison (2016), and composers Aaron Copland (1961), David Diamond (1991), Sonny Rollins (2010), and Stephen Sondheim (2013).
Broadcasts will be shown on Aug. 8 at 7:30 and 11:30 p.m.; Aug. 10, 4:30 a.m.; Aug. 13, 8 p.m.; and Aug. 14, 12:30 a.m. on New Hampshire PBS station WHO.
Cash is a Grammy-winning composer, performer, songwriter, best-selling author, and essayist. She has released 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned four Grammy Awards and 14 nominations, as well as 21 top-40 hits, including 11 chart-topping singles. In April, Cash released “The Killing Fields,” a powerful new song that reckons with the dark legacy of lynchings in the South, and last October released “Crawl Into The Promised Land,” a scathing yet hopeful new single that transforms all the emotions of 2020 into a powerful ode to the resilience of the human spirit.
Her latest album, She Remembers Everything, is a poetic, lush, and soulful collection of songs that reckon with a flawed and intricate world. It follows her triple Grammy-winning 2014 album The River & the Thread and marks a return to more personal songwriting after a trio of albums that explored her southern roots and family heritage. Cash 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, The Nation, and many more publications. The totality of her role as an artist, woman, and responsible courier of a storied cultural legacy means Cash is a rare artist with many outlets. All of these point to the same end: Her belief that art and culture are a vital, shaping force in society.