March 19,
2007
Ongoing project examines obstacles and opportunities
facing women in music
Novelist Margaret Atwood (left) will appear as part of
the Plutzik Reading Series at the University at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, March
26, in the Interfaith Chapel. Then, at 8 p.m. that evening in Ingle
Auditorium at Rochester Institute of Technology, Cuban-American composer
Tania León will join the author for the Rochester premiere of Atwood Songs, León’s
vocal-instrumental work based on five Atwood poems.
At a February concert devoted to 12th-century
theologian, composer, and author Hildegard, a group of students from the
Ballet Performance Group took the stage to perform choreography they had
written to accompany Hildegard’s medieval songs.
For professor of music and concert director Honey
Meconi, that moment neatly captured what “Women and Music: Looking
Back, Looking Forward”—part of the Humanities Project—is
all about.
“We were celebrating the creativity of
Hildegard, and at the same time we had the creativity of these 21st-century
women,” she says. “We’re not just celebrating women in
the past—we’re creating new works by women now.”
Meconi is one of the originators of “Women and
Music,” a project developed in celebration of the 20th anniversary of
the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. The
yearlong program of lectures, performances, collaborations, and student
events is dedicated to the field of women and music, highlighting both the
advances made in recent years and the barriers that women continue to
encounter.
“Women and Music” programming continues in
March and April, with two highly anticipated events occurring in the week
of March 26: the Margaret Atwood and Tania León recital/concert and
the third annual Women in Music Festival.
“The festival has grown exponentially in three
years. It has become an Eastman tradition,” says festival director
Sylvie Beaudette, assistant professor of accompanying and chamber music at
the Eastman School of Music.
“It is a unique festival, an entire week given
over to women and music.” Many alumni travel back to Eastman to
participate. “They want to come back because they believe in the
music,” Beaudette says.
This year the festival, which runs March 26 to 30,
features five noontime concerts and one evening concert—the
Atwood-León performance on March 26.
Their joint appearance is an exceptional blending of
the literary with the musical. Cuban-American composer and conductor
León has written a song cycle for soprano and piano, setting to
music five poems by Canadian writer Atwood. She is the acclaimed author of
novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. The piece was specially commissioned by
Eastman’s Hanson Institute for American Music and the College of Arts
and Sciences at Syracuse University.
After the performance of the song cycle, the artists
will discuss their reactions to the work and will answer preselected
questions from the audience, in a conversation moderated by WXXI-FM host
Julia Figueras. Then the cycle will be performed for a second time,
allowing the audience to hear it after listening to the perspectives of the
artists.
“One hearing will be very fresh, and one will
have some knowledge behind it,” says Beaudette, who will perform at
the piano with soprano Eileen Strempel, an assistant professor at Syracuse.
“That event is very rare in classical music, to have a composer and
poet there together to see and hear the performance. We will really get
into the mind of each of those artists. I think it will be a fascinating
and unique experience.”
Festival organizers chose León, Beaudette says,
because “we wanted to have somebody of the same basic stature as
Atwood. León is often one of the first names that come to mind when
people think of contemporary women composers.”
León is composer-in residence for this
year’s festival, thanks to support from a New York State Music Fund
grant. She will be in residence for the first three days of the festival,
performing and speaking to a variety of groups at the University and in the
community.
Speakers throughout the series “have been
terrific,” Meconi says, leading audiences in far-ranging discussions
of gender and music.
People do not always realize the limitations women
faced in composing, performing, and studying music—and in being
represented in music history—in even the recent past, she says. And
obstacles remain today, for women and for men. Our perceptions of
instruments, Meconi explains, are shaded by our preconceptions about
gender-appropriate behavior.
“If you go to wind symphony concerts, you see
that women tend to be in front, where the high-pitched instruments are, and
men tend to be in the back, where the low-pitched instruments are,”
she says. Cultural expectations affect musicians’ choice of
instruments. There is a very strong association between femininity and the
harp or the flute, for example, Meconi notes.
“We may be losing some wonderful performers on
certain instruments” because of those unspoken proscriptions, she
says.
One performer who has not limited herself according to
such expectations is Hasu Patel, a noted sitar player who will be at the
University on March 29. “It’s very unusual to have a woman from
northern India playing the sitar,” Meconi says. “That’s
one reason we wanted to have her here—she’s breaking a
barrier.”
Patel will perform a concert and will also offer
workshops for students on the River Campus, 9:30 to 11 a.m. in the
Welles-Brown Room at Rush Rhees Library, and at Eastman, 1:30 to 3
p.m. in the Gamelan Room. Interested students are asked to register through
the Humanities Project Web site and to bring their instrument—whether
or not it is a sitar. Auditors are welcome.
On April 12 music theorist Lori Burns, associate
professor and chair of the music department at the University of Ottawa,
will speak about women and popular music. “At almost every talk
we’ve had this year, the subject of women and popular music has come
up, so we’re bringing in a specialist to give the topic a closer
look,” Meconi adds.
As the yearlong series nears its end, she is gratified
by how wide its reach has been. Audiences have included faculty, staff,
undergraduates, graduate students, and people from the community. Related
broadcasts on WXXI have helped to bring the program to an even broader
audience.
“We’re getting people at every event
who are not professionally connected to music,” Meconi says. “I
mean, who doesn’t like music?”
For more information on events, visit the Humanities
Project Web site at www.rochester.edu/college/humanities and the
Women in Music Festival Web site at www.esm.rochester.edu/wmf.
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