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
