It looks like it’s contemporary music and chamber music season as 2024 comes to a close and we begin 2025! With many orchestras between Christmas concerts, productions of The Nutcracker, and their upcoming 2025 programs, some smaller ensembles are getting a share of the stage lights.
On December 15, 2024, Vox Feminarum presented a concert celebrating the work of women composers at Zankel Hall—one of NYC’s hottest venues for hearing contemporary classical and chamber music. Composers and works featured on the program included: Bondage, Selections from Wonderland, and Liaisons Dangeureuses by Kervy Delcy; Fifth Element and Lucidity by Imani Garner; the plum tree I planted still there by Sarah Kirkland Snider; Forgiveness Machine by Missy Mazzoli; The Purist, Rage, and Philosophy, all by Ruth Hertzman-Miller; and Mangetsu by Susan Botti. The program featured a lot of VF’s own talent. Delcy is the NYC founder and president; Sarah Kirkland-Snider and Ruth Hertzman-MIller are both members of the board of directors; Garner is on the board of advisors. Many of the composers also performed part of all of their own works, and a number of the other performers were fellow board members.
Below is an excerpt from Botti’s Mangetsu, performed in 2023 by Duo della Luna with the composer singing the vocal role.
On January 17, 2024 Éliane Radigue and The Orchestra Of Futurist Noise Intoners will present a concert at Wigmore Hall, London as the closing event of the London Contemporary Music Festival. I am particularly encouraged by the presence of women composers and artists on the LCMF’s programs. Women have been involved with futurist and technologically avant-garde music since its beginnings, and have also (predictably) found male chauvinism and prejudice against women in it for just as long. At 92 years old, composer Radigue is both old enough to remember such attitudes and getting to see women be much better represented.
The festival in total has featured music by women composers throughout. The December 13 program by the LCMF Orchestra entitled “Actually sorry” included music Our Wits About Us (2024, world premiere) by Maggie Nichols, Kind (2024, UK premiere) by Lisa Streich, The murals in Quinta del Sordo (2024, world premiere, LCMF Orchestra Commission) by Sofia Jernberg, and WALL PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA to Yoko Ono (1962, UK premiere) by Yoko Ono. The January 17 program will include the world premiere of Éliane Radigue & Carol Robinson‘s OCCAM DELTA XXIII (2025; co-commissioned by LCMF, Wigmore Hall, and Ensemble Klang), as well as the UK premieres of four piece by women: Pauline Oliveros‘s Waking the Noise Intoners (2009), Ellen Fullman‘s Sunday Industrial – Post Futurist Reverie (2009), Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad collaboration Fancy Palaces (2009), and Margareth Kammerer‘s Blues or Woman in the Mind at Night (2010, performed by the composer).
Below are two pieces from the program, and one previous piece by Élaine Radigue:
Sunday Industrial (Post Futurist Reverie) · Ellen Fullman, The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (A Performa Comission, 2013)
Wall Piece for Orchestra, Yoko Ono, Mai Ryuno (artist, educator); 1962
Occam Ocean – Occam Delta X, Élaine Radigue (2018); Well-Tuned Brass, 2021
Let us know what you’re planning to listen to in 2025! Email us at [email protected]