News and music to start your week!
Arizona State University is in the news for their new Black Women Composers Project. Lorrie McAllister, associate university librarian of collections and analysis at ASU library says:
The Black Women Composers Project is illustrative of our strategic initiative to prioritize the preservation and digitization of resources that elevate the voices of communities that have been underrepresented in libraries and archives. Increasing access to these rare materials and diverse collections is a great way for the library to contribute to realizing ASU’s charter.
Included are works of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and pianist and composer (and first blind person to graduate from Juilliard) Valerie Capers, pictured above. Read more about the project here.
Dr. Samantha Ege’s presentation “Black Classical Herstories and the Piano Music of Florence Price,” part of a series at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, is available for viewing here and includes Dr. Ege in performance as a pianist as well as a scholar.
Even though Women’s History Month is coming to a close, you can still listen in to concerts celebrating women (we at WPA emphasize that these should occur year-round). Find a list of concerts and events at IdeaStream, which also includes events in honor of the International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31.
One individual was inspired by the work of women composers as she was completing an art project. Alexis Benson remodeled busts of famous male composers into a sculpture, “Forgotten Women Composers.” Read on here.
At OperaWire David Salazar reports on how composer Daniel Bernard Roumain was decommissioned from a work with the Tulsa Opera because of his choice of language in a libretto for a work to commemorate the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. A few days later, the Black Opera Alliance offered a statement condemning the management of Tulsa Opera for the move, and for scapegoating Black mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as the reason: “Tulsa Opera … chose to weaponize the voice of one Black artist to justify the silencing of another.” Roumain’s text, They still want to kill us, and the piano-vocal score, are available here, a page created to help organize a performance of Roumain’s censored work.
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