News and music to start your week!

NewMusicBox takes on the importance of hearing, well, new music.  It also gives readers ways to advocate for hearing works by living composers!  (We can also add, that some of these tips, like writing the orchestra administration to thank them for a performance, are also applicable to works by women composers and people of color.)  Read on here.

Advances in technology continue to help close the many literal and figurative divides – and we heard this week of a story of a woman who has designed a 3-D printed violin that can make music and music education more accessible.  Learn more about composer, designer, violinist, and neuroscientist Kaitlyn Hova at the Smithsonian Magazine. BTW, if you watch the video, the interview (which covers topics including her synesthesia) with Hova takes place at the very end of a full-day event, “The Long Conversation.”  She demonstrates her violin starting at 11:50.

Tower in 1982

Esteemed and pioneering composer Joan Tower turned 80 in September.  In honor of the occasion, William Robin of The New York Times has a profile of the composer, including a great playlist of the breadth of her oeuvre.

The candid interview also includes the composer’s confession of her lack of confidence in herself in her early years, and how she gradually overcame that, and also became an advocate for women.

Also in The New York Times is this review of the American Composer’s Orchestra concert, “Phenomenal Women.”

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