The Power of Music

Sunday, July 26 – Sunday, August 2, 2026

Join us for an inspiring and uplifting conference as we explore, discover and celebrate the power of music to heal us and change the world. We’ll be joined by leading professionals and artists who have studied and led transformative experiences that music makes possible. From South Africa to Estonia to the American South, we’ll hear and experience moving stories and songs that have led to resistance and social change.

Speakers

Larry Tye

Larry Tye is a New York Times best selling author whose latest book “The Jazz Men: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America” examines how these three maestros wrote the soundtrack for the evolving civil rights revolution. Based on more than 250 interviews, Larry reveals how each of the three groundbreakers defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening the country’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. Tye was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe and he currently runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship.  Earlier, he worked at the Courier-Journal in Louisville and The Anniston Star in Alabama. Tye, who graduated from Brown University, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern and Tufts. He has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, TIME, American Diplomacy, Fortune and the Chicago Tribune, among many others.

Sharon Katz

Sharon Katz has brought together diverse groups and tackled social justice issues through music in South Africa, Latin America and the USA.  She has worked with local partners to develop initiatives between urban and rural communities, across racial, economic and religious divides, to improve understanding of gender, equity and inclusion issues, and to facilitate positive relationships between established communities and new immigrants. Together with her Zulu singing partner, Nanhlanhla Wanda, she formed South Africa’s first 500-voice multiracial and multicultural band and youth choir in 1992, traveling to all of the separated communities to rehearse and start building trust across the country’s Apartheid-barriers. As ethnic battles intensified, they hired a train, The Peace Train, and toured South Africa with their band and choir, becoming a moving billboard for Nelson Mandela’s message of peaceful coexistence and the transition to a nonracial democracy. They eventually became the new democracy’s first musical ambassadors. Sharon continues to perform worldwide in South Africa, Ghana, USA, Cuba and Mexico.

Reggie Harris

Reggie Harris is a singer-songwriter, historian, storyteller and song leader who is a powerful interpreter of the global music narrative. A 2021 winner of both the “Spirit of Folk Award” from the Folk Alliance International and the W.E.B. DuBois Legacy Award, Reggie was recently featured in The New York Times to discuss his familial connection as a descendent of slavery as the great-great-great grandson of confederate General Williams Carter Wickham and his slave Bibhanna Hewlett. Reggie’s mentors were Pete Seeger and the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Harris is affiliated with the Kennedy Center’s Partners in Education program and has toured the country for decades. Mentored early on by Dr. Charles Blockson, a foremost authority on the Underground Railroad, and with years spent researching connections to the leaders of the modern civil rights movement, Harris is one of the premier interpreters of the use of music in historical movements for education, human rights and social change. Using song, stories, multi-media and audience involvement, Reggie will lead us toward a much deeper understanding of the secrets and passion of this powerful era. 

Maria-Kristiina Lotman

Maria-Kristiina Lotman is a classical philologist who earned her doctoral degree at the University of Tartu, Estonia in 2003. She lived through and has written extensively about Estonian’s “Singing Revolution” when the Russian army was driven out of her country after decades of occupation. She is the co-editor of the international journal Studia Metrica et Poetica and has edited several collections of articles, including “Frontiers in Comparative Prosody” in the Linguistic Insights series published by Peter Lang. She is the author of more than 100 academic publications and has translated both poetry and prose from various languages including Latin, Greek, Russian, Italian, German, English and Czech. This will be her first visit to the United States.

Seth Glier

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, pianist, guitarist and activist Seth Glier channels nature’s longing for communion with humanity into song.  His optimistic music imagines a future in which humans and the planet are re-aligned into mutual restoration. Seth worked as a cultural diplomat for the US State Department and collaborated with artists in Ukraine, Mongolia, China and Mexico. With a commitment to use songwriting as a tool for positive change, he has written with the students of Parkland, Florida for the “Parkland Project,” cowritten with soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center, and is an advocate for autism awareness citing his autistic brother Jamie as his greatest non-musical-musical influence. Seth has shared the stage with James Taylor, The Verve Pipe, Edwin McCain and Ani DiFranco.

Children and teens at IA are enthusiastically welcomed into the Youth Program by friendly faces and engaging children’s staff who help to fill each day with fun and new experiences. The program is filled with engaging, age-appropriate activities and interesting topics inspired by the Island.

 In 2025, there were six children’s groups, each with experienced staff:

Find out more…

Registration for the 2026 will open January 15th. 

The registration link can be found here: https://starisland.org/program/ia/

For further inquiry, please contact conference registrar Joy Greeley ia.registrar.star@gmail.com

IA Registration Policy