The Well-Tempered Ear
Starting TODAY, the First Unitarian Society of Madison offers three free, online mini-concerts at noon on Fridays to celebrate Women’s History Month
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post about three free, online mini-concerts to celebrate Women’s History Month through the Friday Noon Musicales at the First Unitarian Society of Madison.
The concerts start today:
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
• To celebrate Women’s History Month, the First Unitarian Society of Madison will present three Friday Noon Musicales during March.
• All three will be guest produced by Iva Ugrcic.
• Iva Ugrcic (below) is Founding Artistic Director of the Madison-based LunART Festival, which supports, inspires, promotes and celebrates women in the arts.
• Each program will feature highlights from past LunART Festival performances.
• Each program will be approximately 45 minutes long.
DATES AND PROGRAMS
Each video will become available at noon on the indicated date, and will remain available for viewing in perpetuity.
This Friday, March 12 — Works by living composers Jocelyn Hagen, Salina Fisher and Missy Mazzoli (below top), as well as Romantic-era composer Clara Schumann (below bottom, Getty Images). Specific titles are not named.
Performers include: Iva Ugrcic, flute; Matthew Onstad, trumpet; Tom Macaluso, trombone; Elena Ross and Todd Hammes, percussion; Kyle Johnson, Jason Kutz, Satoko Hayami and Yana Avedyan, piano; Beth Larson and Isabella Lippi, violin; Karl Lavine, cello (below); ARTemis Ensemble.
Friday, March 19 — Works by living composers Linda Kachelmeier, Elsa M’bala, Doina Rotaru (below top) and Eunike Tanzil, as well as Medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen (below bottom) and Romantic-era Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel. Specific works are not named. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear flutist Iva Ugrcic play Doina Rotaru’s haunting “Japanese Garden.”)
Performers include: Iva Ugrcic, flute; Jose Ignacio Santos Aquino, clarinet; Midori Samson, bassoon; Breta Saganski and Dave Alcorn, percussion; Satoko Hayami (below), Jason Kutz and Eunike Tanzil, piano; ARTemis Ensemble
Friday, March 26 — Alexandra Olsavsky, Edna Alejandra Longoria, Kate Soper and Jenni Brandon as well as post-Romantic era American composer Amy Beach (below bottom). Specific pieces are not named.
Performers include: ARTemis Ensemble; a string quartet with violinists Isabella Lippi and Laura Burns, violist Fabio Saggin, and cellist Mark Bridges (below); Jeff Takaki, bass; Vincent Fuh and Kyle Johnson, piano; Jennifer Lien, soprano; Iva Ugrcic, flute.
THREE OPTIONS FOR ATTENDING
• Website — https://www.fusmadison.org/musicales
• Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/fusmadison
• YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/fusmadison > “Playlists” > “Music at FUS”
ABOUT THE “FRIDAY NOON MUSICALES” RECITAL SERIES
• The Friday Noon Musicales at First Unitarian Society is a free noon-hour recital series offered as a gift to the community.
• Founded in 1971, 2020-2021 is the series’ 50th season.
• The series has featured some of the finest musicians in the Midwest, who flock to perform in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Landmark Auditorium.
• The music performed is mostly classical, but folk, jazz and musical theater styles are presented on occasion.
• During the pandemic, the Musicales have largely been on hiatus.
JUSTICE AND MUSIC INITIATIVE (JAM)
• The Justice And Music Initiative (JAM) at the First Unitarian Society of Madison represents a commitment to more socially equitable and earth-friendly music practices.
• This commitment includes music performed on our campus, both for worship and non-worship events.
• To help achieve our goal, we recognize and celebrate recognition days and months with our musical selections, such as Hispanic Heritage Month (9/15–10/15), LGBT History Month (October); Native American Indian Heritage Month (November), Black History Month (February), Women’s History Month (March), and African-American Music Appreciation Month (prev. Black Music Month; June).
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Classical music: UW-Madison pianist Jessica Johnson celebrates International Women’s Day this Friday night with a FREE recital of all-female composers and a special keyboard for smaller hands
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ALERT: This week’s FREE Friday Noon Musicale at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, features Ukrainian pianist Yana Avedyan in solo works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Prokofiev and Franz Liszt. The program will include music from her upcoming appearance at Carnegie Hall. The musicale runs from 12:15 to 1 p.m.
By Jacob Stockinger
March is Women’s History Month, and this Friday is International Women’s Day.
To mark the latter occasion, Jessica Johnson, who teaches piano and piano pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, where she has won an award for distinguished teaching, will perform a program of all-women composers.
The FREE recital is this Friday night, March 8, at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall. Johnson (below, in a photo by M.P. King for The Wisconsin State Journal) will perform works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, pairing works with interesting connections.
Here is what Johnson has to say about the program:
“Dreaming, Op. 15, No. 3, by Amy Beach (below top) and The Currents by Sarah Kirkland Snider (below bottom) both feature beautiful lyricism and long-line phrases inspired by poetry.
“2019 is the bicentennial celebration of Clara Schumann’s birth, so I wanted to honor her and her tremendous legacy. Her Romance, Op. 11, No. 1, was composed in 1839 in the midst of the difficult year when Clara (below) was separated from her beloved Robert. (You can hear the Romance in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
“Bolts of Loving Thunder by Missy Mazola (below) was written in 2013 for pianist Emanuel Ax as a piece that would appear on a program of works by Brahms. Mazzoli alludes to the romantic, stormy side of “pre-beard” Brahms, with exuberant floating melodies, hand crossings and dense layers of chords.
“Troubled Water (1967) by Margaret Bonds (below) is based on the spiritual “Wade in the Water,” with hints of blues, jazz and gospel traditions throughout.
“Azuretta (2000) by Chicago-based composer, Regina Harris Baiocchi (below) describes Azuretta as a musical reaction to a debilitating stroke Dr. Hale Smith, her former composition teacher, suffered in 2000. The work honors his incredible legacy by mixing classical and jazz idioms.
“Germaine Tailleferre (below), the only female member of Les Six, the group of early 20th-century French composers, wrote her beautiful Reverie in 1964 as an homage to Debussy’s “Homage à Rameau” from Images, Book I.
“Preludes (2002) by Elena Ruehr (below) draw inspiration from Debussy’s Preludes, mimimalism and Romantic piano music.
“Also, as an advocate for the adoption of the Donison-Steinbuhler Standard — which offers alternatively sized piano keyboards for small-handed pianists — I will perform on the Steinbuhler DS 5.5 ™ (“7/8”) piano keyboard.
“By performing on a keyboard that better fits my hands — studies suggest that the conventional keyboard is too large for 87% of women — and featuring works by female composers who are typically underrepresented in concert programming, I hope to bring awareness to gender biases that still exist in classical music.
“For more information about both me and the smaller keyboard, go to the following story by Gayle Worland in The Wisconsin State Journal:
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Classical music: These women composers should be household names
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By Jacob Stockinger
It may be known more for basketball, for March Madness and the Big Dance.
But March is also Women’s History Month.
Before it ends, The Ear wanted to share a terrific story about women composers that appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine.
It discusses women composers who should be household names like Johann Sebastian Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Who are they?
Can you guess their names and match them to the photos?
Have you heard their works?
Read the story and see for yourself.
Here is a link:
And at bottom is a YouTube video with a beautiful and tuneful example of one woman composer as well as background about a great but unknown female American violinist, who is championed by the Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine (below), who herself has performed several times with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra.
And leave what you think about a specific composer or women in music in general in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Amy Beach, Arts, Bach, Barbara Strozzi, basketball, Big Dance, Chamber music, Chicago, Clara Schumann, Classical music, Elizabeth Maconchy, Jacob Stockinger, Johann Sebastian Bach, Madison, March Madness, Music, NCAA, NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship, Orchestra, photos, Piano, Rachel Barton Pine, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Violin, vocal music, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Women's History Month, YouTube
Classical music: Women’s History Month will be celebrated at Edgewood College this Sunday afternoon with a FREE choral concert of works by female composers. Plus, the piano duo Troika performs a FREE concert on Friday at noon.
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ALERT: This week’s Friday Noon Musicale, to be held from 12:15 to 1 p.m. in the Landmark Auditorium of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, will feature the Piano Duo “Troika” — made up of Vladislava Henderson and Ludmilla Syabrenko (below) — in music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Antonin Dvorak and others.
By Jacob Stockinger
This coming Sunday, March 8, at 2:30 p.m., in Edgewood College’s St. Joseph Chapel, 1000 Edgewood College Drive, two choral groups at Edgewood College (below) will present their winter concerts.
The Chamber Singers will perform under the direction of Albert Pinsonneault (below top), and the College Women’s Choir will sing under the direction of Kathleen Otterson (below bottom).
In recognition of Women’s History Month, the Women’s Choir will feature works by female composers, including Hildegard von Bingen (below top), Linda Kachelmeier (below second), Francesca Caccini (below third), and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (below bottom). Sorry, no word on specific works to be performed.
The Chamber Singers will perform “Ave Verum Corpus” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which you can hear at bottom in a performance with Leonard Bernstein in a YouTube video that has almost 3 million hits).
Also included are “Famine Songs” by Matthew Culloton (below top) and “Lammaa Badaa Yatathannaa” by Shireen Abu-Khader (below bottom).
There is no admission charge.
Tags: Albert Pisonneault, Arts, chamber singers, choral music, Classical music, composer, Dvorak, Early music, Edgewood College, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, First Unitarian Society of Madison, Francesca Caccini, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hildegard von Bingen, Jacob Stockinger, Kathleen Otterson, Linda Kachelmeier, Madison, Matthew Culloton, Mozart, Music, Piano, piano duo, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninov, Shireen Abu-Khader, vocal music, Wisconsin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, women, women composers, women's chorus, Women's History Month, women;s choir
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