We hope your June is going well! Here’s some news to get your week going!!
Sarah Frances Jenkins, composer
Beginning June 10, the Welsh National Opera orchestra will perform Sarah Frances Jenkins’s The Coming of Night as part of its Summer Soiree program. The Soiree runs from June 10 –20 at various venues in Wales and Bristol.
The Coming of Night began its life as a sextet for flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola and cello; in 2024 Jenkins adapted and reworked the piece for orchestra, and the new version was premiered by the Manukau Symphony in New Zealand (link below). Her original commission came from BBC Radio 3 (the classical music arm of the UK national broadcasting company) and the BBC Concert Orchestra to write “a 4-minute sextet for Radio 3’s ‘Capturing Twilight’ broadcast series.” Given twilight as her requested inspiration for the piece Jenkins did some research and came across “The Coming of Night” by American poet Emily Dickinson. She found that it offered an excellent foil for exploring the atmospheres and images of this transitional time of day, and helped strengthen the narrative thrust of the piece.
Jenkins (b. 1998) has been a regular collaborator with the BBC orchestras. In 2017 she won the Young Composer of the Year award (earning her a professional performance of a piece by the Aurora Orchestra and a broadcast on Radio 3), and in 2018 the BBC Concert Orchestra commissioned another piece And the Sun Stood Still.
Below is the premiere recording of The Coming of Night, performed by the Manukau Symphony Orchestra in 2024.
Left: Paulina Francisco; Right: Musica Pacifica, 2026
On June 12, soprano Paulina Francisco will lead a program featuring thirteen works by ten women composers entitled, “The Ornamented Voice: Women Composers of the Baroque.” The concert will take place at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley (CA) as a part of the 19th biennial Berkeley Festival and Exhibition (BFX), organized by the San Francisco Early Music Society. Musica Pacifica—a Bay Area favorite baroque music ensemble—will accompany Francisco in “a program of expressive, virtuosic, and emotionally rich works.” Composers on the program include a veritable who’s-who of women composing seventeenth and early eighteenth century music: Isabella Leonarda, Francesca Caccini, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Mrs. Philharmonica, Elizabeth Turner, Anna Amalia von Preussen, Gracia Baptista, and Bianca Maria Meda.
On June 6, the NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists will present a concert celebrating the work of women immigrant composers for string orchestra. It will feature the world premiere of The Book of Signatures by Andrea Casarrubios for cello, strings, and percussion—the centerpiece of this dynamic program. The planned works show the kind of wealth of talent that contemporary classical music has, but is often not given credit for. World premieres of Adeliia Faizullina’s Six, Before She Knew and After (Tatar from Uzbekistan) and Casarrubios’s concerto; premieres of all-string arrangements of Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s For Love Seemed Easy at First (Iran) and excerpts from Wang Lu’s Tangrams (China); a U.S. premiere of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Ur Song (Serbia); and selected movements form Clarice Assad’s Impressions.Planned as part of the celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, NEXT’s program is a true celebration of the quality and diversity of classical music in the U.S.
Lucia Dlugoszewski, composer; Credit: Library of Congress
A composer with an upcoming birthday, Lucia Dlugoszewski (June 16th, 1925 – April 11, 2000) was a Polish-American composer of experimental music. Her talents extended beyond composing and performing to writing poetry, choreography, and inventing instruments (an area, where in textbooks, Harry Partch seems to take a lot of the credit). She wrote for ensembles spanning small chamber groups to large orchestras, both with and without choreography. Dlugoszewski was the first woman to win the Koussevitzky International Recording Award in 1977 for her Fire Fragile Flight, written for 17 instruments. For many years the work was a favorite of the Philadelphia ensemble Orchestra of Our Time; you can hear their recording of the work here.
Recently a renewed interest has been showing in Dlugoszewski’s music. In 2024 Maerz Music (the festival that succeeded the Musik-Biennale Berlin) published “Contemplations into the Radical Others: The Life of Lucia Dlugoszewski,” covering both the composer’s life and her approaches to contemporary music. Though she studied analysis with Cage and Varèse‚—a contemporary music background envied by many—her voice was entirely her own. “Dlugoszewski was driven towards philosophical questions on the notion of immediacy, which she has explored with experimental and situated listening,” they have described. “She proposed a sense of ‘shattering’ normative modes of hearing in order to explore specific modes through which sounds are experienced.” Bowerbird (a Philadelphia nonprofit) has also presented a number of her works in recent years, and platformed the research of scholar Dustin Hurt into her work using her papers archives at the U.S. Library of Congress.
Our friends at the Boulanger Initiative are launching their summer series of intensive online classes — the first one “Where are the women?” starts TODAY June 8, 5:30 to 7:30 PM Eastern time — with sessions the next 4 days. If you are a WPA supporter, you are eligible for a discount! Join BI’s Research Manager Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney in this four-day in-depth learning experience. This course is designed for anyone with a passion for learning more about women composers throughout history. It can be attended synchronously or asynchronously, and recordings will be available to all registrants for a month. Boulanger Initiative offers two other classes this summer, June 29-July 1 and Aug. 3-6, more information here.
Finally, we introduce the Belgian composer Juliette Folville (1870-1946), with a biographical blog post, by our distinguished guest blogger, Dr. Fauve Bougard. We will soon be publishing a work for cello and orchestra by Folville, and additional works in the future!
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org