University of Orange
Orange’s Music City Festival will celebrate a decade of “community musicology,” where residents, musicians, and scholars explore how music tells the story of the city.
The annual Music City Festival, now in its 10th year, is both a celebration and a culmination of its “Music City” community musicology work that brings together musicians, scholars, and residents to explore how music shapes, and is shaped by, the life of the city. From immigrant folk traditions blending into hip-hop, to the the city’s connections to legends such as Paul Robeson, to the founding of the Orange Steel Pan Band, a multigenerational choir born out of pandemic-era need, these efforts reveal how music reflects Orange’s cultural richness and resilience.
The festival is hosted annually by University of Orange, a free school of restoration urbanism. The organization has received multiple past grants from NJCH to support its ethnomusicology efforts. The city-wide celebration will showcase the community’s musical talent, small businesses, and restaurants by transforming public spaces into stages for performers of all ages and genres, alongside interactive exhibits.
This milestone festival will also look back on a decade of its own history, with documentation capturing stories from performers, organizers, and audience members about what the annual celebration has meant to Orange. By bringing people together across generations and cultures in a shared celebration of sound, the project shows how music can serve as a powerful entry point into the past, present, and future of a community.
