News and music to start your week!
The Washington Post has more about music being created during the current crisis – including more about Lisa Bielawa’s Broadcast from Home, the fourth installment was released this past week. Bielawa, pictured above, is an American composer based in New York City, and her awards include the Prix de Rome. Find out how you can add your voice to her work at her website.
Van Magazine has an article about the first known Black composer to be published – Vincent Lusitano,(ca. 1520- ca. 1561), an African-Portuguese priest and musician. Read on here, and listen to one of his works below. (BTW, just to articulate the principle in play, here, we — WPA — focus on the creative work of women, particularly in the orchestral realm. But the issue of diversity and the “un-level playing field” that has been faced by non-white musicians is a related issue that we are also interested in.)
Great news from Boston! The Handel and Haydn Society announced that Reginald Mobley will take the role of programming consultant, and will work to diversify the programming in the coming seasons. The ensemble, established in 1815, did showcase works by Amy Beach, Margaret Ruthven Lang, and other women composers who resided in Boston during the Second New England School, but we are delighted to hear that there will be an active approach to being inclusive and diverse. Read on with Celina Colby’s take at the Bay State Banner, and at the H+H website!
And Alex Ross at The New Yorker discusses his experiences with streaming events, and experiencing Liza Lim’s “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus”, which the composer completed in 2018 .
The Met Opera has been doing daily streams of past performances, and on Wed. May 6, they will stream Kaija Saariaho’s “L’amour de Loin.” THANK YOU, Met Opera, for making this compelling and hypnotic work available!
UPDATE: A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Du Yun and Raven Chacon’s opera “Sweet Land” is available as Video on-demand here. Well, we JUST noticed that Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize winning opera, “Angel’s Bone,” is available (free) as the “Opera of the Week” on the Beth Morrison’s Project website! The stream is up until noon on Thurs. May 7 at noon (East Coast time). If you have our 2020 Calendar (still for sale!) you read about Angel’s Bone in January.
What did we miss? What are you reading? Let us know! [email protected]