News and music to start your week!
Don’t miss 5 Questions to Sunita LeGallou, who is a the producer and host of Music for PhD’s, a podcast that features different Canadian composers each episode. LeGallou is, herself, a visual artist and paints to a piece by that composer in real time. It’s a fascinating visual art and music collaboration, and absolutely something to add to your podcast app!
There is also 5 Questions to Elizabeth de Brito (pictured above) who is host to wonderful radio show The Daffodil Perspective. The extensively-researched weekly program features diverse and inclusive programming that can be considered a model for what we would like to see in concert halls, and on radio stations, world-wide!
And in WQXR’s weekly series exploring music that is particularly meaningful to a member on the staff, James Bennett shares his thoughts and reactions to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score to the television series Chernobyl. Read on, and listen in, here.
And did you catch our essay on the Cholera Cantata, Fanny Mendelssohn’s response to the epidemic of 1831? The composer survived the pandemic, and wrote one of her greatest works as a means of giving thanks. Our guest blogger Regine Angela Thompson consults the composer’s diaries to fill in details.
Sydney Chamber Opera’s Breaking Glass is available to stream online — these four world premiere chamber operas, each by women, is discussed in an article in The Guardian. The composers are Josephine Macken, Georgia Scott, Peggy Polias, and Bree Van Reyk.
Douglas Shadle (writing in the NYTimes) describes the cancellation of the New York Philharmonic’s premieres, commissioned as part of Project 19, to commemorate the signing of the Nineteenth Amendment, as one of the saddest losses of the pandemic, and another hardship for diversifying the canon. Which brings him to the age-old (mid-19th c.) difficulty of persuading the NYPhil to perform music composed by US-born composers. It makes the point that, the domination of the canon by European white men leads to the neglect of many works that audiences might prefer to hear, and which prejudice alone keeps them from being able to hear.
Do let us know what you are reading, and what you are listing to! We always are interested in guest bloggers with engaging ideas! [email protected]