News and music to start your week!
Our 2020 Calendars are hot off of the press! Get yours – and gift one to a friend – here! We brought in rising-star artist Micaela Brody to design the calendar, which features twelve important premieres by women from the 17th c to the present, as well as noting composer birthdays. Your purchase helps support our work!
New Music Box has a probing piece by Dave Molk about how teaching the canon in music theory teaches inequality, and what might be done to address this problem.
We shared the news last week of the first ever work by a woman being performed at the Vienna State Opera House. Read the review of Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando in The Guardian.
And congratulations to Simone Young who has been named Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s new Chief Conductor. Read more at Limelight.
More on conductors: BillBoard raises critical issues with Settling the Score: Women Conductors Talk About the Slow Road to Equality
Tom Huizenga of NPR’s Deceptive Cadence has a round up of his 10 Favorite Classical CDs of 2019 – including music by Caroline Shaw, Ellen Reid, Julia Wolfe, and the Icelandic composers Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir.
“Women had all the best tunes” in 2019, according to Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle. He reviews the works by women that grabbed national attention – from newly composed works to spotlights cast on Florence Price and Grażyna Bacewicz! Don’t miss this great round up with lots of music.
And the end-of-year look-backs continue: the five music critics of the New York Times pick their top 25 tracks from the year’s classical CDs. The most revelatory of the choices is the first recording of Florence Price’s recently discovered Symphony No. 4. Others are by Caroline Shaw, Rebecca Clarke, Clara Schumann, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Anna Webber. I guess I haven’t noticed this before because we don’t often see them all together, but was I the only one to raise an eyebrow at the five critics all being men?