Women in Music Festival
2008 Women in Music Festival
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Women in Music Festival 2008
March 24-28, 2008
Eastman School of Music
The Women in Music Festival is a celebration of women involved in all aspects of music including composition, performance, teaching, scholarship and administration.
The 2008 festival will feature five noontime concerts and special events of works written by women from a broad range of musical styles such as classical, multimedia, experimental, jazz, world and popular. These performances take place in public spaces and are free and open to the public.
Special Focus for 2008
Nancy Van de Vate’s residency
Composer Nancy Van de Vate is known especially for her music in the large forms. Her opera, All Quiet on the Western Front, was presented by the New York City Opera in May 2003 in its Showcasing American Composers series, then premiered and performed ten times in Osnabrück, Germany. Her newest chamber opera, Where the Cross is Made, won the National Opera Association’s 2005 international competition for a new chamber opera.
Her orchestral music was recently performed by the Chautauqua Symphony, Yale Symphony, Portland Symphony, Moravian Philharmonic, and Vienna’s Tonkuenstler, both in the Musikverein and the St. Poelton Festspielhaus. Van de Vate has also composed a large body of chamber music and is one of the most recorded women composers. She teaches composition at the Institute for European Studies in Vienna and holds dual Austrian and American citizenship. Born and educated in the United States, she has lived and worked on three continents.
As part of Ms. Van de Vate’s residency, the festival will feature a
noontime recital of her music, a master class, and a lecture-recital on her opera All Quiet on the Western Front (1999), based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, with the collaboration of University of Rochester historians Celia Applegate and Stuart Weaver. The Eastman Opera Theater will perform a scene from the opera.
Note: Exact dates, times, and places for all the events will be available by the beginning of March 2008.
All-Van de Vate Recital — Monday, March 24, 2007, noon — Main Hall, Eastman School of Music
Violist John Graham and the Ying Quartet will premiere A Long Road Travelled, a newly commissioned piece by composer-in-residence Nancy Van de Vate, thanks to a grant from the Hanson Institute for American Music. Eastman’s Women Chorus will perform Voices of Women (1993), a five-movement piece for women’s chorus, mezzo & soprano soloists, and small orchestra. Pianist Jung Sun Kang will play Van de Vate’s Twelve Pieces for Piano on One to Twelve Notes, Vol. II, and mezzo-soprano Lauren Iezzi and pianist Jeffrey LaDeur will perform Songs for the Four Parts of the Night, based on poetry by the Owl Woman, a Papago Indian medicine woman.
Also Featured
Student and faculty artists of the Eastman School of Music as well as guest artists will perform at the noontime concerts. Professor Vincent Lenti, Eastman’s historian, will give a lecture-presentation entitled “Women at the Piano – The Struggle for Acceptance,” about women virtuoso pianists of the last century, the challenges they faced, and their creative approaches to achieving active and fulfilling careers despite social constraints.
Dr. Sylvie Beaudette, Festival Director
Tiffany Ng, Assistant Director
The 2008 Women in Music Festival and Nancy Van de Vate’s residency are sponsored by: The Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music; the departments of Chamber Music, Composition, Piano, Voice, and Woodwind-Brass-Percussions, as well as the Eastman All-Events Committee, and the Dean of the Eastman School of Music.
