Author: Women Composers

Women Composers Festival of Hartford on Generosity

It’s October, which means its time to fundraise for the Women Composers Festival of Hartford! Putting on a yearly festival requires lots of support, including financial support. When you donate to the Women Composers Festival of Hartford, your money goes directly towards our efforts to bring underrepresented repertoire to the Greater Hartford area. With your help, we are able to commission new works, support and showcase working composers and performers, and undertake new advocacy and community engagement projects! Please help us continue our 17-year tradition of bringing great music, performances, and community to the Greater Hartford area.

We have all kinds of great merchandise, featuring designs by incredible local artist Moana McAuliffe: stickers of our “Matron of the Arts” caricatures, a mug with the Nadia Boulanger caricature and our new Matron Elizabeth Austin, limited-edition WCFH t-shirt with caricature of Florence Price, and more, including concert tickets and festival passes!

Donate to the Women Composers Festival of Hartford, support incredible art and artists, and get cool stuff!

Spotlight on: The Foundry Music Company

The Foundry Music Company
102 Audubon Street
New Haven, CT 06510

 

 

 

A century ago, The Foundry made birdcages. When the city’s movers and shakers of the 1970’s decided to transform the area into an Arts District, a top-quality music shop was an essential component of their plan. Local musician Marcia Stevens was enlisted to make it happen. She looked to Patelson’s world-class sheet music store, across from Carnegie Hall in NYC (which sadly closed in 2009) as a model for her store. The Foundry Music Company opened its doors in April, 1975. Since then, it has been a thriving part of New Haven’s Art District, located next-door to the Neighborhood Music School and a block from Yale University. The Foundry Music Company has been helping musicians make music for over forty years.

WCFH board member Marcia Killian is the current owner of The Foundry Music Company. 

The Foundry Music Company seems a bit of an anachronism in today’s digital world. It is a brick-and-mortar sheet music store, with shelves filled with opera scores, libretti, cantatas, and instrumental music for everything from solo piano to euphonium. To stay relevant in a time when it is easier to make a purchase on your cell phone than to take the time to visit an actual storefront, we need to offer something to our customers that larger retailers like JW Pepper and Amazon can’t replicate.

This is where my interest in the Women Composers Festival of Hartford originated. One thing we can do to differentiate ourselves from our competitors is to promote and highlight the work of composers who are not well-known, or those that are not part of the traditional canon of vocal, choral, and instrumental music. In most cases, the work of women composers throughout history has met these criteria. I came across the Women Composers Festival of Hartford as part of the research I was doing to both try to promote the work of local musicians and to find out more about the work of women composers. My participation in the festival in 2017 was as an attendee, and I was very impressed with the quality of the performances, range of composition styles, and the sense of community that was created over just those few days. This year I have joined the Board of Directors and am learning the art and science of grant-writing.


My store has a monthly theme, and we will, of course, highlight the work of women composers during the month of March, but I am also planning to devote a section of the store, year-round, to their music. We see a lot of little girls coming through our doors, looking for rosin for their tiny violins, or in search of a book of Disney-themed easy piano. If they are exposed to the work of women composers when they are young, they will grow up knowing such music exists, loving it, and perhaps someday composing it themselves. At least that is my hope!

One notable composer you can find at The Foundry Music Company is Florence Price. The music of Florence Price will be performed by the WCFH 2018 Ensemble-in-Residence, Cuatro Puntos String Quartet, in partnership with Alika Hope and the Ray of Hope Project, as well as part of their Roots at 40 concerts.

WCFH is proud to welcome and support Marcia and The Foundry Music Company!

Visit The Foundry Music Company
Shop The Foundry Music Company

2018 WCFH Featured Artists Announced!

We are excited to announce our Featured Artists for the 2018 Women Composers Festival of Hartford!

2018 WCFH Composer-in-Residence:
Tawnie Olson

Described as “especially glorious… ethereal” by Whole Note, and “a highlight of the concert” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, the music of Canadian composer Tawnie Olson draws inspiration from politics, spirituality, the natural world, and the musicians for whom she composes. She has received commissions from the Canadian Art Song Project, Third Practice/New Music USA, the Canada Council for the Arts, Mount Holyoke College/The Women’s Philharmonic, the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Robert Baker Commissioning Fund, among others. In 2017, she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant to develop a new work with re:Naissance Opera, and a Canada Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant to study field recording at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Read more about Tawnie Olson

2018 WCFH Ensemble-in-Residence:
Cuatro Puntos String Quartet

Cuatro Puntos is an ensemble dedicated to intercultural dialogue and universal access through the performance, writing, and teaching of music. Cuatro Puntos has performed extensively throughout the United States as well as in Bolivia, Brazil, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Afghanistan. A four-year collaboration with Afghanistan’s only music school, which included several teaching artist visits to Afghanistan and a one-year teaching tenure by Cuatro Puntos’ executive director, resulted in a collaborative album between Cuatro Puntos and the Afghanistan National Institute of Music titled “The Rosegarden of Light.” The album is released on Toccata Classics, distributed by Naxos, and has received critical acclaim worldwide as well as airplay on major stations such as BBC and NPR. Blackmore Vale Magazine in the UK said “At a time when we are bombarded every day by images of the world in crisis, The Rosegarden of Light is a joyful celebration of musicians who share a fundamental right to express themselves through the universal language of music.” Read more about Cuatro Puntos

2018 WCFH Keynote Speaker:
Karen Cook, Ph.D

Dr. Karen M. Cook specializes in medieval and Renaissance music theory and performance. She is currently working on several new critical editions and translations of late medieval theory treatises as well as a monograph exploring the development of rhythmic notation in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. She also maintains active research interests in popular and contemporary music, especially on music and identity in television, film, and video games and on (neo) medievalism in contemporary culture. In addition, she is an active singer and performer of both early and contemporary music, and is routinely on the faculty and staff of Amherst Early Music, the largest presenter of early music workshops in North America. In the 2017-18 school year, Dr. Cook is a University of Hartford Humanities Center Fellow. Read more about Karen Cook

 

Apply to be our Composer-in-Residence or Featured Performer(s)!

Each year, The Women Composers Festival of Hartford features one or more invited composers and ensembles or soloists.  We typically receive a large number of inquiries about how one can be considered for these positions, so we are happy to announce the creation of a formal application process.

If you’d like to be considered as a potential Composer-in-Residence or Featured Performer(s) for 2018 or beyond, application forms are now available on our Calls page.  Applications must be received by 5/15/17 to be considered for the 2018 Festival.

Our annual calls for participation will be announced in the summer, so check back for additional opportunities for composers, performers, and scholars!