WPA News Digest – October 12, 2026

By Kathleen McGowan

There’s a lot to listen to—and watch—featuring women composers this week!

On Saturday October 10, the Waynesboro Symphony (Waynesboro, Virginia, USA) presented a program celebrating the artistry of American women in music. The orchestra gave the world premiere of Blue Rider by composer Elena Ruehr alongside Florence Price’s Symphony N.4 and Dr. Wanchi Huang‘s performance of the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky. Dr. Huang, the orchestra’s concertmaster, is currently on the music faculty at James Madison University. Florence Price composed her fourth symphony in 1945, but the work was unfortunately never performed in her lifetime. It was rediscovered in 2009 and is enjoying an enthusiastic revival among orchestras and audiences. Elena Ruehr is a veteran composer of large works and chamber works alike, and extensively recorded. Her new work Blue Rider is the latest of her many pieces for large ensembles—not just for conventional symphony orchestras, but wind ensembles, chamber orchestra (with conventional and unconventional instrumentation), large choirs, and cantatas that combine choirs with instruments. Her extended works list, complete with recordings, videos, scores/parts (when available), and programs notes can be accessed through her website.

Included here is a recording of Ruehr’s Violin Concerto n.1—written for and premiered by violinist Irina Muresanu in 2017—performed by the Lviv Philharmonic with the premiering soloist on August 30, 2025.

 

Opportunities to see Dear Lara—Lara St. John’s documentary exposing the depths of institutional complicity in sexual abuse in classical music—may be coming to a theater or film festival near you!

• • • • • • October 17 & 18 – German premiere at the Donaueschinger Musiktage (Donaueschingen, Germany)
            Tickets for Oct 17 and Oct 18​
          • Oct 23 & 24, Naples International Film Festival (Naples, Florida, USA)  Tickets for Oct. 23 and Oct. 24
          • Oct 24 – LA Femme International Film Festival, at Regal Cinemas, Sherman Oaks Galleria (Los Angeles, California, USA)   Tickets for October 24

You can learn more about this documentary and check for screenings near you by visiting Lara St. John’s website, dearlara.film.

Two additional documentaries about women composers by filmmaker and journalist Tim van Beveren and pianist Kyra Steckeweh bring composers very familiar to readers of Feminist in the Concert Hall into the spotlight; Fanny Hensel, Emilie Mayer, Mel Bonis, Lili Boulanger, and Dora Pejačević. The first, Women Composers, features the works of Hensel, Mayer, Bonis, and Boulanger, and has won several documentary awards including the 2020 Opus Klassik (Audiovisual – Music Production); the second, DORA – Escape into Music, has received the 2024 Opus Classic as well as the Best Documentary award from the Florence Film Awards and Filmtage Oberschwaben. Both are available to buy or stream on demand directly from the artists here.
Fanny Po Sim Head, a contributor to Interlude magazine (an independent online classical music publication), has recently interviewed the filmmaker about the process of making both documentaries and how everyone has a role to play in determining what music gets heard.

On October 9, composer Laura Karpman wrote an essay on composing the music for the recent adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Netflix). An Oscar-nominated, Grammy-nominated, and five-time Emmy award winning composer, Karpman’s music spans works for film, television, theater, interactive media and live performance. In her work on East of Eden, she writes that she “discovered something deeper about how perceptions of iconic female roles in cinema have been shaped by the music surrounding them.” She writes at length about scoring music for “femme fatale” characters, her collaboration with director Zoe Kazan, and how music is essential to complex characterization. “What struck me profoundly as I delved into this material.” she continues, “was the empathy I felt for Cathy, who is supposedly the diabolical villain of East of Eden.” (Those who have been following the limited series leading up to its release will know that it is purposefully exploring facets of Cathy that Steinbeck’s narrator seems unwilling to consider in the book.) “Intoxicated with this bold reconsideration of a classic heroine, I decided, when commissioned by the Ravinia Festival to write a piece for the Chicago Symphony, to apply the lessons I learned from Cathy to a work for the concert hall. Unsung: A Symphonic Suite for the Superhero Women of Classic Hollywood received its world premiere last summer as part of the fifth annual Breaking Barriers Festival at Ravinia. Marin Alsop conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the four-movement suite, which gave new heroic themes to … [four] women whose original scores gave them only love themes tied to the male lead. I wanted to fix, or correct, that point of view with a new work.”
Karpman’s essay is available to read in full on Netflix Tudum (the streaming service’s companion website—think “Tudum” as the trademark Netflix sound).

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is prominently featuring two women conductors in October. On October 9 and 11, conductor Susanna Mälkki will lead the orchestra in a program of music from Eastern Europe. From Oct 22 – 25, conductor Elim Chan will lead the orchestra in a program featuring male contemporaries of Germaine Taillefaire (Debussy and Stravinsky). One has to wonder how long the orchestra expects such specialty programs of all-male composers to last as more than an occasional novelty. Really, HOW LONG???

Worth noting is that Missy Mazzoli’s long-awaited opera, Lincoln in the Bardo, will be premiered at the Met Opera starting October 19, with performances through November 14. Mazzoli is the fourth woman composer in recent years to have a work performed by the Met (preceded by Gabriela Lena-Frank, Jeanine Tesori, and two works by Kaija Saariaho, and the first time the Met will perform a work by a woman it commissioned. The Met first performed a work by a woman in 1903, Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald (and then, infamously,  none until 2016’s L’Amour de loin by Saariaho).

On Oct. 17, the Idaho Falls Symphony will perform Amy Beach’s monumental and exciting Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, op. 45.  The soloist is Kara Huber (“Absolutely dazzling…in a word, flawless. Let’s repeat that: flawless.”)  Huber is a seasoned veteran of Beach’s Concerto, having championed the work widely.  Shizuo Z. Kuwahara is the conductor.  Sponsors include Mountain View Hospital & Teton Cancer Institute and ElevateHer Music, and the concert is designated a MVH Pink Ribbon Concert, bringing awareness to breast cancer screening and treatment.

 

FINALLY, in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day (USA) we’re featuring some historical and contemporary indigenous women composers from North America. The first is Zitkála-Šá (Lakota: “Red Bird,” also sometimes known by her married name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), who was a musician, educator, writer, editor, translator, and political activist for indigenous rights in the USA. Born on the Yankton Dakota reservation in South Dakota and educated in both traditional ways and in residential schools, her work digs deep into struggles with cultural identity and the oppression of indigenous peoples. Many of her writings were responsible for bringing traditional stories and folklore from her Dakota background to an English-speaking readership, and with her husband she co-founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926—a political organization fighting for citizenship and civil rights for native peoples, as well as women’s suffrage. In addition to her activism, she worked with composer William F. Hanson to write the libretto and songs for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), which she based on Dakota and Ute cultural themes, traditions, and stories and in which she included traditional dances and melodies. In a world where many women composers music is being re-discovered and revived, hers should be included on its own merits as well as for its rich cultural crossover between opera and traditional music.

Cellist, vocalist, ethnomusicologist, activist, and composer Dr. Dawn Avery (of Kaniènkéha/ Mohawk heritage) works to indigenize composition and performance in every area she encounters. In addition to her dissertation on indigenous research methodologies classical music, her scholarship can be read in the journal Music Cultures and the collection Music and Modernity Among the First Peoples of North America (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2019). Among her many and diverse projects is the North American Indian Cello Project, an initiative dedicated to commissioning and performing works by native composers and increasing native representation in classical music that she began in 2006 with support from the First Nations Composers Initiative project through the Ford Foundation. The excerpt included below is from a longer featured broadcast on Montgomery College TV, and includes part of her string quartet Hohonkwe:ta’ke for String Quartet and Native Flute (with guest artist R.C. Nakai).

Composer and bassoonist Dr. Jacqueline Wilson plays principal bassoon with the Washington Idaho Symphony, is currently Professor of Bassoon at Washington State University, and regularly commissions and records work by indigenous North American composers (including women!). In her own words, her work “centers Native American and Indigenous self-representation and artistic sovereignty through meaningful collaboration and relationality.” Her recording efforts can be heard on her album Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers (available via her website and major streaming services). The album includes the premiere recording of For Jacqueline Wilson—one movement of composer Raven Chacon’s collection of graphic scores For Zitkála-Šá. Wilson has participated in performances of For Zitkála-Šá as both a performer and dedicatée at the Whitney Biennial and the Getty Center. Recordings of these works and others that she has commissioned can be streamed through her website.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org or use our handy contact form.