Pianist Artina McCain returns to CIM to continue musical labor of love

Pianist Artina McCain (MM ’06, Brown) is about to return an old but critical favor, repaying sage advice from Joseph Joubert with a video recording of his piano music. 

What’s more, she’s doing so at CIM, where she was a student when she met the composer and he inspired her by recommending she seek out music by African Americans.  

“He encouraged me to look to other composers, other voices, and now I’m championing him,” said McCain, now Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Memphis and Career Advisor at CIM.  

“Nobody knows he has all this fantastic virtuoso piano music, so I’m bringing it to the masses.” 

McCain plans to revisit her graduate alma mater in late February and use Mixon Hall to record video performances of two Spiritual Virtuosic Transcriptions by Joubert along with a Prelude by Rachmaninoff and Poulenc’s little-known Les Soirées de Nazelles. While at CIM, she plans to allow students to observe a portion of the recording process.  

It will be the second such recording she’s made of Joubert’s transcriptions, of which there are 12, but the first at CIM. The whole project is intended to accompany – on a date to be decided – the first printed edition of Joubert’s music, which McCain is editing with support from the New Jersey-based Frances Clark Center. 

“People are always asking me where they can get this music,” McCain said. “I’m Joubert’s Mendelssohn.” [Mendelssohn famously championed the music of J.S. Bach.] 

Joubert is a Grammy Award-winning conductor, pianist, and arranger best known for his work on Broadway. McCain met him at a conference while at CIM and said his words inspired her ongoing quest for music by Black composers.  

But it was Joubert’s own music that first captivated her. Looking into his unedited transcriptions, which he largely wrote for himself, she said she was transfixed by works that freely quote the classical giants she grew up studying and reflect the spirits of gospel music and jazz.  

“That’s what got me glitter-eyed,” McCain recalled. “It speaks to so many different people. It seems like the best of my two worlds.”