'If you are in London, please do join
us on Thursday 27th February to listen to the works by the wonderful Brazilian composer
and pianist, Catarina
Domenici who will be joined by DONNE's founder & curator, soprano Gabriella Di
Laccio to present the UK premières of her new Song Cycle: Letters to my
Mother as well as Amazonia, Ciranda and piano solos.'
'A special concert celebrating British composer Ailsa Dixon (1932 – 2017).
Villiers Quartet
Lucinda Cox soprano
Ailsa Dixon Nocturnal Scherzo
Ethel Smyth String Quartet in E Minor
Ailsa Dixon The Spirit of Love
A recent revival of interest in the composer Ailsa Dixon has led to the performance of new works, including a set of songs for soprano and string quartet, ‘The Spirit of Love’, receiving its premiere at this concert, performed alongside the composer’s Nocturnal Scherzo and Ethel Smyth’s String Quartet in E minor.
Event supported by the Gemma Trust and the Music Reprieval Trust'
https://www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk/event/villiers-quartet/
Illuminate Women's Music, Royal College of Music 15th February
WiM Founder Member Jennifer Fowler has a wonderful CD - extraordinarily her debut featuring only her music - called Lines Spun played by the Lontano Ensemble released by Divine Arts Recording Group
A highlighted quote says:
Women in Music congratulates Jenny Fowler on her success. Read the review here:
Artist/s: Lontano, directed by Odaline de la Martinez, Raphaela Papadakis (soprano), Lauren Easton (mezzo-soprano). Lontano: Rowland Sutherland (flute), Clare O'Connell (cello), Natalie Bleicher (piano), Janey Miller (oboe), Andrew Sparling(clarinet)
Category: Classical, New Music
Label: Divine Arts Recording Group. Métier msv 28588
http://www.divineartrecords.com. http://www.impulse-music.co.uk/jenniferfowler
Reviewed by Gwen Bennett
"Expatriate Australian Jennifer Fowler was born in 1939 in Bunbury,Western Australia. Tertiary education at the University of Western Australia nurtured her talents which were soon recognised through composition prizes, performances and broadcasts. She travelled overseas for further education and experience and subsequently spent most of her life in London as a freelance composer. Her works include orchestral, ensemble, solo and choral music. Over the years she has won many awards, received many commissions and international performances. Amazingly, this CD is the first to be dedicated entirely to her output. It presents a nicely balanced program of three vocal works interspersed with three instrumental pieces..." Read on on here
Diversity Arts Network
New Projects
Tues Jan 28th, Whitstable, 2-4pm
The Horsebridge Arts Centre, 11 Horsebridge Road, Whitstable CT5 1AF
Wed Feb 12th, Gravesend, 2-4pm
The Woodville, Woodville Place, Gravesend DA12 1DD
Wishing all our members a Happy and peaceful 2020 and looking forward to seeing you at one of these DAN sessions.
Calling all local
creatives, performers, producers, artists, designers, writers, arts
organisations, diverse community groups, museums and libraries. The Diversity Arts Network
is seeking to develop 3-4 new projects and commissions using local artists,
arts organisations and venues in partnership with DAN consortium
members.
DAN has been awarded funds from the Arts Council to develop its
membership consortium in the South East. As part of this we will be
undertaking a mapping of all local organisations and artists including arts and
community organisations, museums, libraries and any other relevant networks.
We will be gathering information on projects that members have been involved in
that link to the diverse sector and the challenges that they have
faced.
DAN will share learning from this research, and explore opportunities for partnerships and collaborations with NPOs and non NPOs locally, nationally or both. Conclusions from the research will form the basis of a future local strategy that will result in more consistent and dynamic programming, partnerships and collaborations of diverse artists and arts/cultural organisations.
Overall the data will provide the Network with a valuable resource and recognised position in the locality as a body taking a central role in contributing to the Creative Case.
This data collected will
include information on venues, performances spaces and promotors/bookers
across the region with potential to work with, support and programme artists
from culturally diverse backgrounds. The mapping will be used to more
accurately access the art-form types and ranges of experience of diverse
artists and arts/cultural organisations in the region.
If you are interested in being part of DAN and developing new partnerships, projects and commissions with local artists and organisations we would be interested in hearing from you.
There will be opportunities for all attendees to talk about their projects and to network.
A light lunch will be provided from 1.30pm.
We would like to thank
The Horsebridge Arts Centre and The Woodville for their support in co-hosting
these sessions with us.
Please register on Eventbrite at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/diversity-arts-network-meeting-jan-28th-2020-tickets-84761061617
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/diversity-arts-network-meeting-wed-feb-12th-2020-tickets-88663297309
http://www.equatorfestival.com/diversity-arts-network/
Herstory Rewritten exploring the life and music of Romantic composer, pianist, teacher and trailblazer Louise Farrenc in this week's show.
A is for Auerbach in the start of my A-Z of contemporary composers, every show featuring composers at the forefront of the classical scene.
A brand new world premiere of Florence Price by pianist Lara Downes.
Plus new albums by Nicholas Phan, Yolanda Bruno, Paula Gudmundson and music by Reicha, Ades, Arutiunian, Lili Boulanger and more gender balanced fun.
https://www.mixcloud.com/TheDaffodilPerspective/the-daffodil-perspective-17th-january-2020/
Among the many women composers side-lined in musical
history who are becoming the focus of new interest, Ailsa Dixon (1932-2017)
only began to receive her share of recognition in the last months of her
life. While there were a handful of
performances during her most fertile period of composition in the 1980s and
’90s (most notably by Ian Partridge, Lynne Dawson, and the Brindisi Quartet),
there followed several decades of almost complete neglect. Then, in 2017, a work that had been lying in
manuscript for thirty years was chosen for premiere as part of the London
Oriana Choir’s Five15 project highlighting the work of women composers. These things shall be
received
its first performance in the spectacular glass-roofed concert hall surrounding
the keel of the Cutty Sark just five weeks before the composer’s death.
It was sung again at memorial concerts in London and Bristol, and is now showing signs of entering the choral repertoire, with subsequent performances by choirs in Oxford and Cambridge and festivals from Little Missenden to Romsey Abbey. With its vision of a future when ‘New arts shall bloom’, it seems especially apt that it came to light in the context of the enterprise to give due prominence to the work of women composers.
Born Ailsa Harrison, she came from a musical family background: next to the piano in the cottage where she grew up was a portrait of her musical ancestor Feliks Yaniewicz (1762-1848), the Polish composer and violinist who co-founded the first Edinburgh Festival. She played the violin in the London Junior Orchestra, studied the piano with Hilda Bor, took her LRAM, and went on to read music at Durham University in the early 1950s. It was here that she first began playing the lute, which she later studied with Diana Poulton. There was no formal tuition in composition, but by the time she left university she had written her first work for string quartet (a Scherzo recently rediscovered in her archive), though it was not until some decades later that she returned to composition in earnest.
The intervening period was spent teaching and singing, but her musical life took a new turn in 1976 when she undertook a production of Handel’s Theodora. This was an all-consuming project, and left her with such withdrawal symptoms that afterwards, to fill the gap, she began to conceive an opera of her own, Letter to Philemon (based on an episode in the life of St Paul) which was performed in 1984 and proved to be the start of her most fertile period as a composer.
In the following two decades she wrote three works for string quartet (Nocturnal Scherzo, Sohrab and Rustum, and Variations on Love Divine), chamber works including a set of 3 fugues on Biblical subjects, and Airs of the Seasons, a sonata for piano duet (4 hands). Among her vocal compositions are a variety of songs and duets, including settings of two Shakespeare sonnets for soprano and tenor, a cycle of 5 Songs of Faith and Joy for mezzo soprano and guitar, a set of 3 songs for soprano and string quartet entitled The Spirit of Love, and Shining Cold, a vocalise for high soprano, ondes martenot and strings.
Many of these works went unperformed in her lifetime, but recent discoveries in her musical archive have stimulated a raft of new performances, including posthumous premieres of Airs of the Seasons at St George’s Bristol in 2018 and The Spirit of Love (in February 2020). Plans are underway for a recording of her complete works for string quartet by the Villiers Quartet. Her manuscript scores are now being digitised as part of a project in Finland to preserve the work of neglected female composers, and there are plans to deposit her archive at Heritage Quay, where the British Music Collection is held.
Religious themes are a strong element in Ailsa Dixon’s works, while literary texts (from medieval Latin lyrics to Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold and Walter de la Mare) inspired many of her compositions. When asked about her musical influences in an interview in the ‘Meet the Artist’ series shortly before she died, she cited ‘Fauré (for his harmonic suppleness), Britten (for his powers of evocation and empathy), and Bartok (studying his compositional processes at Durham stimulated an interest in his lively variations of time signature and the elasticity of musical motifs)’, while observing that ‘the Greats preside over it all’. Her interest in counterpoint is especially prominent in the three instrumental Fugues and the quartets, and was often deployed to figure the interplay and resolution of conflicting emotions, as in the Nocturnal Scherzo, and a farewell fugue sung by four characters in Letter to Philemon.
Frances Wilson wrote of her musical style in a review
of Airs of the Seasons, ‘The opening chords… are reminiscent of Debussy
and Britten in their distinct timbres, and the entire work has a distinctly
impressionistic flavour. Ailsa’s admiration of Fauré … is also evident in the
harmonic language, while the idioms of English folksong and hymns, and melodic
motifs redolent of John Ireland and the English Romantics remind us that this
is most definitely a work by a British composer with an original musical
vision.’
More details at www.ailsadixon.co.uk To subscribe to
occasional newsletters featuring recent and upcoming performances of Ailsa
Dixon’s works and news on the availability of scores, please use the Contact page on her website.
Women in Music would like to congratulate Judith Bingham for her OBE, Helen Grime for her MBE and Errollyn
Wallen for her CBE in the New Year's Honours List. This national recognition for their contributions to music is a much deserved tribute and we wish them continuing success and recognition for all the fabulous works they have given us.
Discover 10 of the best, 10 of the most special, innovative and trailblazing recordings of 2019.
'Winners announced for national 2019/20 Emergent Commissions for Disabled Musicians
Three emerging Disabled musicians have been awarded national
commissions by Drake Music and its partner, Sound and Music. The winners of the
2019/20 Emergent commissions - Dyr Sister, Robbie Ashworth and Remi Fox-Novak -
will create new work which brings together music and film, responding to
the question: “What does it mean to be you and living in today’s
society?”.
The composers, from Nottingham, London and Hull, come from very
different musical backgrounds, including contemporary folk music, underground
techno and composition for moving image.
The commissions aim to support emerging Disabled musicians to take
the next step in their musical and career development, offering a supported
opportunity to create new work and push their practice further.
The two organisations are working in partnership to raise the
profile of Disabled composers within the UK contemporary music scene. As well
as partnering each musician with a film-maker, the organisations will support
them to become part of the British Music Collection, an
online space and discovery platform for new music and creators in the UK.
Carien Meijer, Chief Executive of Drake Music, commented:
“This is the third year of our Emergent
commission programme and it is wonderful to see the quality of the musicians
coming through.
"Disabled people are massively under-represented in the UK music scene, so it is exciting to be working in partnership with Sound and Music to bring these talented musicians to a whole new audience.”
The three Emergent Commission winners are:
Dyr Sister (Hull)
Sally Currie is a Multi-Instrumentalist based in Hull who is partially deaf and has an extensive history writing and performing music with bands and solo. Her main instruments are the Viola and the Piano which she learnt as a child, subsequently playing in local orchestras and string ensembles. As a solo artist she has performed her work all over the UK at venues and festivals sharing bills with acts like Laetitia Sadier, This is the Kit, Ruth Theodore, Thomas Truax and The Dead Rat Orchestra.
Sally’s current project is The Dyr Sister, a contemporary folk band which expands on her previous solo work and is described as ‘Fairy tales for the Modern Gentleman’.
Sally says:
“I am very excited as a deaf artist about turning my music into visual art and all the different possibilities that this entails. Being able to add another dimension to the presentation of my work that is accessible to the deaf community is something that means a lot to me and I feel privileged to be able to join the programme and explore this.”
Robbie Ashworth
A composer, performer and
entertainer from South West London. His main instrument is piano but he
also enjoys playing guitar and African djembe drums. He has a music degree
from Kingston University and an HND from North East Scotland College.
His favourite genres are jazz, blues and 1950s rock and roll but
has also been classically trained to Grade 8 (piano).
“I am thrilled to be able to compose a piece of music set to a moving image which highlights how inclusion is still in its infancy with regards to people with hidden disabilities as well as visual ones. I would like my music to show how living in today’s society can be an isolating experience for those who are different.”
Remi Fox-Novak
Emerging from the Nottingham underground, Remi Fox-Novák is a producer, live performer and sound artist as a member of the Surfacing collective. This summer he released his first solo record ‘+’ and has begun performing his angular brand of dancefloor techno live. A self-confessed music technology nerd, he is passionate about finding ways to make playing music accessible for all.
Remi adds:
“I am so pleased to be working with Drake Music. It’s a great opportunity to push my sound design skills in partnership with film makers and make connections with other artists.”
The Emergent: A Music Legacy programme is funded
by Help Musicians UK to support new artistic and career opportunities for
Disabled musicians and composers.
Drake Music brought the three artists together for a collaborative and exploratory music making session in November and they are now working on their commissions individually. In early 2020 they will be matched with film-makers, ready to release the new work in spring.'
Source: Drake Music https://www.drakemusic.org/blog/becky-morris-knight/emergent-commission-winners-2019-20-announced/