2020 Festival

Congratulations to the eight composers selected for a $12,500 grant from Opera Grants for Female Composers!

Opera Grants for Female Composers supports the development of new operas by women, to individual composers and to opera companies producing their work.

“Opera Grants for Female Composers is a two-year project, with a different focus each year. In this first year, Discovery Grants identify, support and help develop the work of female composers writing for the operatic medium, raising their visibility and promoting awareness of their compositions. In addition to financial assistance, grant recipients will be introduced to leaders in the field through a feature in Opera America Magazine, and at future New Works Forum meetings and annual conferences. Supported works will be considered for presentation as part of the New Works Forum in January 2015 and New Works Samplers at future annual conferences.”

Read more here!

Happy Birthday to composer Julia Amanda Perry (1924-1979)!

Julia Perry, prolific and accomplished composer of neoclassical music, studied at Westminster Choir College and the Julliard School of Music. Perry was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships: one to study with Lugia Dallapiccola in Florence and the other with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After studying in Europe for several years, she returned to the United States to teach at Florida A & M College (now University), and later became a professor at Atlanta University.

Stabat Mater, her first major work, was released in 1951. Her opera “The Cask of Amontillado” was staged three years later, premiering at Columbia University. She also wrote “Homage to Vivaldi” for orchestra.

Listen to Julia Perry’s “Study for Orchestra”!

By the late 1960s, Perry’s works were widely praised. Her music was performed by the New York Philharmonic and other major orchestras. Over the course of her life, she completed 12 symphonies, two concertos, and three operas, in addition to numerous smaller pieces, and received numerous awards and honors from institutions including the National Association of Negro Musicians, the Boulanger Grand Prix, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Click here to read more about her!

 

 

Jennifer Higdon is composer-in-residence at Eastman School of Music’s Women in Music Festival this week, “A celebration of women involved in all aspects of music, including composition, performance, teaching, scholarship, and administration.” Now in its 10th year, the festival features works of historical and living women composers through completely free concerts performed by Eastman groups as well as guest artists.

In 2010, Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto as well as the Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical composition for her work Percussion Concerto. Her works have been featured on numerous Grammy-winning albums. Her most recent releases include a CD of string music by the Serafin Quartet (2013), works performed by Gary Graffman and the Lark Quartet (2013), and the symphonic band version of Higdon’s Soprano Sax Concerto (2012). She is presently writing an opera based on Charles Frazier’s book Cold Mountain,  scheduled to be premiered in 2015 by Santa Fe Opera.

Dr. Higdon currently holds the Milton L. Rock Chair in Composition Studies at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

“There are a lot of women composers out there writing, but not a lot of them are getting scheduled,” Higdon says. “(It has) more to do with people being aware that that music is around and giving it a chance.”

View the complete festival schedule: http://www.esm.rochester.edu/wmf/events/

 

The Poulenc Trio is staging a FREE concert featuring works of Laura Kaminsky and other composers in honor of Women’s History Month.
Read about the trio: http://poulenctrio.org/

When: This Sunday, March 23rd
When: 6:30 pm
Where: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC

The New York Times lauds Kaminsky as “an ear for the new and interesting” and her works as “colorful and harmonically sharp-edged,” whose “musical language is compounded of hymns, blues, and gestures not unlike those of Shostakovich.” Her work is filled with social and political themes, and connection with the natural world.

Check out her website: http://www.laurakaminsky.com/