2020 Festival – Page 14

Tuesday A/V Archive – April 29, 2014

Recordings from the 2014 festival are finally available. If you didn’t get a chance to catch this year’s performances, be sure to check out our archives. We were thrilled to feature so much music this year (and are already planning for next year!).

Our first featured performance is an excerpt from Kala Pierson’s Bright Curves. Mary Matthews gave a great performance of this piece for flute.

Kala Pierson (b. 1977) is an American composer and sound artist. Her music’s “seductive textures and angular harmonies” (Washington Post) are “intricately structured, both mathematical and lyrical” (Dnevnik). She focuses on long-term projects including Axis of Beauty (setting texts by living Middle Eastern writers since 2004, in an ongoing answer to “Axis of Evil” wartime propaganda) and Illuminated (setting texts about sex and sexuality by living writers from a wide range of world cultures). Her website is kalapierson.com.

Dr. Mary Matthews enjoys a varied musical life as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician, lecturer, and clinician. She has appeared as a soloist with the Hartford Independent Chamber Orchestra,Firelands Symphony, Pottstown Symphony, and Baldwin-Wallace Symphony Orchestras and tours internationally as a member of theSoundscape Trio and the Cuatro Puntos Chamber Music Collective. For more about Mary, visit www.marymatthewsflute.com.

Ora Nichols: The Most Influential Woman in Radio

During the early radio era, men were the directors, composers, and sound effect technicians. But it was actually a woman- Ora Nichols- who brought sound effects to radio, even though today the radio sector is dominated by men.

Nichols was the first and only woman to run a radio sound effects department at the time. She lead the CBS sound team that brought the famous radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” to life. Often butting heads with Orson Welles, she developed innovative ways to create realistic sounds on the radio- for instance, mimicking the sound of jets by modifying an air conditioner unit, or using the turning of a cast iron lid to make the sound of an alien apace craft door opening, and making the sounds of Martian cylinders unscrewing, army bomber planes flying, and New York City being destroyed under a Martian gas attack. She would spend hours inventing new sound effects, such as one that simulated machine gun fire.

Nichols and her husband Arthur Nichols freelanced for NBC and CBS for years. Ora Nichols was once voted “the most influential woman in radio.”

Wikipedia’s Disclaimer: “No Woman Composer Met the Criteria for Inclusion Above”

Earlier this month, California State University Long Beach (CSULB) held a Women’s Research Colloquium featured a discussion of the lack of female composers in opera.

Adriana Verdié, a lecturer in CSULB’s Bob Cole Conservatory of Music, discussed “From Muses to Creators, Opera by a Female Composer, a topic spurred by research that shows the huge disparity between male and female opera composers. While she was researching recently composed operas, she discovered that a Wikipedia page about opera composers issued this disclaimer:

“A number of reasons […] have been suggested to explain the relatively few women who have been composers of opera, and no woman composer met the criteria for inclusion above. However, some experts in our sample disagreed and named one or all of the women below as comparable to those (men) already listed.”

What do you think about the lack of “comparable” women opera composers?

Read more about CSULB’s colloquium: http://www.signaltribunenewspaper.com/?p=23145

Grammy-Nominated Organist Gail Archer Performs Music by Women Composers!

Gail Archer, Grammy-nominated, internationally renowned concert organist and recording artist with seven solo albums, will perform a concert filled with music her latest album “The Muse’s Voice: A Celebration of Women Composers,” this Saturday at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.

: Gail Archer

As one of the few female artists in a largely male-dominated field, Archer advocates for female organists and composers. This concert will be featuring the works of composers including Jennifer Higdon, Nadia Boulanger, Jeanne Demessieux and Judith Bingham.

When: Saturday, April 5th.
Time: 8 pm
Where: Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Virginia.
FREE Concert!