News and music to start your week!

The Guardian has a profile of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor presented in an editorial by Lenny Henry.  The profile highlights a program called Our Classical Century, which can be heard online.

Composer Reena Esmail was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times discussing her musical influences, the challenges she has faced as an Indian woman composer, and how she finds unity through music.

Over at NewMusicBox Anthony Green writes about the continued challenges that non-white composers face in the new music world.  He relates his own experiences and gives very simple steps on how these continued problems can be identified and addressed.

Composer Olga Neuwirth has written a new score to a silent film from 1924 that anticipated the anti-semitism that would ravage Europe.  The story of the film itself is amazing, as it was believed to be lost but a copy was discovered in a Parisian fleamarket in 2015!  In an interview in The Guardian Neuwirth speaks boldly about the antisemitism that continues to persist in Vienna, where she lives.  A prolific composer, she also mentions her upcoming premieres, including a new opera based on Orlando.

In another profile, the latest of several in recent weeks, NPR explores the career of Missy Mazzoli who has triumphed as a composer and in the new music world.  Again, Mazzoli is forthright about the discrimination she faced and what she is doing (composing, performing, and mentoring) to change the experiences of the next generation of women composers.

And we welcome Guest Blogger Dr. Penny Brandt, who attended the combined U.S. conferences for Musicology and Music Theory, and was prompted to wonder “Where are the women composers?” as well as ponder other gender-related issues.

What did we miss?  Be sure to let us know!   [email protected]