IN Series Women Composers Festival opens with a festive Gala Concert to celebrate the musical works of historic and living female composers, featuring Washington DC-based composers Jessica Krash and Lori Laitman, as well as composers Gabriela Ortiz, Kate Soper, Caroline Shaw, Louise Talma and Emily Lau.
Here Be Sirens, an opera by NYC-based composer Kate Soper, explores, with wit, humor and pathos, the lives of Homer's three Sirens: Peitho, Phaino, and Polyxo. As they spend eternity trapped on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, compelled to endlessly lure sailors to their deaths on the rocky shore, each Siren embarks on a unique journey to comprehend the meaning of her own existence.
Through new streaming platform INVISION, IN Series presents The Gonzales Cantata, a satirical docu-opera of composer Melissa Dunphy’s brilliant setting of the transcripts from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s disastrous 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into the style of Handelian oratorio.
In German Romantics: Clara, streaming on INVISION, The Pleiades Project reconceptualizes the three Lieder of Clara Schumann’s Op. 12 through film. Our protagonist navigates these songs as she copes with the end of an important partnership. By concluding this cherished chapter of her life, her imagination travels to vibrant fantasy worlds of the past. In becoming the heroine of her own story, Clara reaches closure and enters a new world of possibilities.
Join us for the premiere event of German Romantics: Louise on INVISION! The second installment of The Pleiades Project's German Romantics inspires with the fascinating biographical tale of composer, pianist, teacher, and conductor Louise Reichardt (1779-1826), who overcame catastrophic loss to build an independent lifestyle and freelance career.
I take the long way there: A Capstone Project (2021) is a classical music concert-film, created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through experimental music videos, this film project engages with making art and rediscovering the everyday moments that sustain us through turbulent times.
Peabody Opera singers present a virtual retrospective of the art songs of composer Lori Laitman with interspersed commentary from Laitman about the inspirations and ideas behind her music.
German Romantics: Fanny is based on Op. 10 by composer Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) with poetry by Nikolaus Lenau, Emanuel Geibel, and Joseph von Eichendorff. Our film tells the story of a wanderer, although historically male, but now female. She sets out into the unknown to chart her own course, rejecting the anxieties and strictures that have held her back.
As the centennial celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment approached in 2020, The Pleiades Project was inspired to create and produce a music-theater work in conversation with this milestone event in American history. With a generous grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and co-created by November Christine, Noelle McMurtry, and Caroline Miller, A Women’s Suffrage Splendiferous Extravaganza! was born, inspired by early 20th-Century vaudeville.
As the centennial celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment approached in 2020, The Pleiades Project was inspired to create and produce a music-theater work in conversation with this milestone event in American history. With a generous grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and co-created by November Christine, Noelle McMurtry, and Caroline Miller, A Women’s Suffrage Splendiferous Extravaganza! was born, inspired by early 20th-Century vaudeville.
For The Shining Place, I was eager to explore music and poetry by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women artists that spoke of a desire to expand the self, either through mining the interiority of one’s life or seeking new adventures in the larger world.
With a generous Graduate Award from The Presser Foundation, I will travel to Berlin, Germany from mid-March to early June 2022. I plan to mine Le Beau’s public archives at three German state libraries for Le Beau’s unpublished Lieder manuscripts and other primary source material relevant to the compositional and performance practice of her Lieder.