A SPECIAL WISC EVENT FEATURING WOMEN COMPOSERS
WHO Donna Coleman, Jane Brockman, and Laura Clayton
WHAT: A special event with music, discussion, and reception
WHEN Sunday October 20, 2019 3:00pm
WHERE REGISTER FOR EVENT to find out about location
EVENT info
In honor of the two hundredth birthday of composer-pianist Clara Wieck—wife and inspiration to Robert Schumann and muse of Johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim, and countless others—world renowned concert pianist Dr. Donna Coleman has created The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] Womens’ Music that will take place at the San Miguel Chapel in October of this year (see below for details). Donna has invited two longtime friends and musical collaborators, Dr. Jane Brockman and Dr. Laura Clayton to be Composers-in-Residence for the festival. Meet the composers and hear a preview of the beautiful music—including world premieres of Jane’s and Laura’s works—that will be showcased in the festival concerts.
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Donna Coleman’s performances of American music earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina and the Southern Arts Federations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, Radcliffe College, and Second Prize in the first John F Kennedy Center International American Music Competition, among others. Her recording of Charles Ives’s“Concord” Sonatafor Amsterdam’s prestigious Et’Cetera label received France’sDiapason d’Orand Editor’s Choice, and Christian Tarting’s review for Diapasonmagazine claims, “this Second Pianoforte Sonata. . . finds here its most convincing recorded version, due to its assertion, the assurance in its manner of effectively carrying out each detail, its analytical finesse.” James North writing for Fanfare found “Donna Coleman’s performance of Ives’s First Sonata(also on Et’Cetera) is grand and sweeping, strong and confident, filled with charm and overflowing with joy. It immediately becomes my preferred version.” A dual US and Australian citizen, for more than two decades Donna inspired Australia’s finest talent as Head of Keyboard in the Victorian College of the Arts, produced dozens of world concert tours and direct broadcasts for ABC Classic FM, and created her OutBach®project that explores relationships between Indigenous, art, and popular music and creates performances in unexpected locations and combinations, includingthe world-first piano and didgeridoo collaborations. She recorded two compact discs for ABC Classics, Rags to Riches: A Syncopated Centuryand Havana to Harlem. Her own label OutBach®released Don’t Touch Me, the Danzas Cubanasby Ignacio Cervantes (2010), described by Jean-Marc Warszawski, writing for musicologie.org, as “a beautiful recording event. . . . a rare musical success, thanks to the serene majesty of the interpretation, the tone color, the presentation, and the interest and curiosity that these compositions arouse,” andThe Lost Lady(2015). All of Donna’s CDs are available at amazon.com and iTunes. She created The Emerson Trio to explore the rich repertory of chamber music by American composers, and the ensemble has performed for the popular “Sundays Live” series, streamed direct-to-air via internet, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art annually since 2016. In November 2018, she produced and performed in the first OutBach®Festival of [Mostly] American Music in Santa Fe NM that featured The Emerson Trio and her scripted version of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata.
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Laura Clayton grew up near Lexington KY where she studied piano with Faye Miles and Nat Patch. She began her compositional studies with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music School in 1968. While completing her Master of Music (1971) at the New England Conservatory of Music, she turned her focus to composition when Gunther Schuller became the Director in the late 1960s. Her principal mentor was Charles Wuorinen, who was a “wonderful influence, extremely supportive, and very strict.”
For the next three years, Clayton lived and taught in Brazil where she collaborated with a group of musicians, artists, and poets in a series of concerts in Rio de Janeiro. With artist Ana Maiolino, she created two prizewinning films: Construçöes for slides and synchronized music (chosen to represent Brazil at the Paris Biennale in 1973); and In-Haut, an art film on oppression that won First Prize at the Curitiba Film Festival in 1974.
Further studies leading to the Doctor of Musical Arts degree (1986) took place at the University of Michigan School of Music where she worked with Leslie Bassett, George Balch Wilson, and Visiting Professor Eugene Kurtz.
Among her compositions are Mobile No. 2 for cello and piano; Implosure for two dancers, slide projectors, and tape; Simichai-ya for saxophone, tape, and echo-plex; Passaggio for solo piano; Cree Songs for soprano and chamber ensemble; Panels, a chamber work commissioned by the American Dance Festival; Sagarama for piano and orchestra; Herself the Tide for soprano and piano; Clara’s Sea for women’s choir; Joie for solo piano; Train Azul for solo guitar; Standing in a Field of Stars for flute and piano; and First Daughter of the Moon, a song cycle based upon ancient Sumerian hymns to Inanna (Diana). At present, Clayton is completing her first opera about a family living on the banks of the Amazon River, inspired by a story entitled “Third Bank of the River” by Brazilian statesman and author Joao Guimaraes Rosa.
In 1978, she was awarded the prestigious International Chamber Music Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for Cree Songs, premiered by Constance Barron in Carnegie Hall. This success led to an invitation (one of only two) to represent the United States at the 1980 International Rostrum of Composers / UNESCO in Paris. Cree Songs was further distinguished in 1982 by the Walter B. Hinrichsen Publishing Award from Columbia University and the C.F. Peters Corporation. The songs were recorded in 1983 by soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson with Arthur Weisberg conducting the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble for Composer’s Recordings Incorporated (CRI #498, 1983).
Clayton is the recipient of many other prizes, fellowships, and awards, including the Charles Ives Prize (1980) and the Goddard Lieberman Prize (1992) from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the MacDowell Colony (1981), the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music (1983), the Jerome Foundation (1983), the University of Michigan’s Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University (1983), the National Endowment for the Arts (1985 and 1992), the New Hampshire State Arts Council, and she has been honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship (1984).
Clayton resides in New Hampshire where she composes and teaches private students in composition and piano. Her music is published by the C.F. Peters Corporation and recorded on CRI and Sony.
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Jane Brockman’s concert music is influenced by her experience composing for dance and film, as well as by the formal structures of academia. Raised in upstate New York, she was the first woman to earn a Doctorate in Music Composition in the 150- year history of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also studied in Paris with Max Deutsch on a Fulbright / Alliance Française fellowship and in Vienna on a Rackham Prize fellowship. Other honors and fellowships have been awarded by the MacDowell Colony (three years), the State of Connecticut, Meet the Composer, and the Composers Conference (directed by Mario Davidovsky). Her first orchestra piece won the Sigvald Thompson Prize for orchestral composition. Brockman’s mentors include Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett and Ross Lee Finney, as well as George Balch Wilson, Wallace Berry, and Eugene Kurtz. She was one of four composers selected nationally for a Sundance Institute Film Composers’ Lab fellowship, working with Henry Mancini, Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, David Newman, and the Utah Symphony.
Brockman taught music theory and composition at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she founded the University’s Computer Music Studio and produced electronic music concerts. She has also been on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Michigan. She traded her tenured professorship at the University of Connecticut for life as a freelance composer in the Los Angeles area, scoring films and television, as well as writing concert music.
Today, in Los Angeles, her focus is entirely on concert music. Her music is recorded on the AIX, Leonarda, Opus One, Coronet, Drimala, Centaur, and Capstone labels, and it is published by Arsis Press, Washington, D.C., and Diaphanous Music, which is distributed by Theodore Front Musical Literature Inc. Her music has been in the touring repertoires of Continuum and the New Music Consort in NYC, and of virtuoso clarinetists F. Gerard Errante, William Powell, and Roslyn Dunlop (Australia).
Jane Brockman has served on the Boards of Directors of New York’s Composers Concordance, Women in Film, the Society of Composers and Lyricists in Los Angeles, and for three years she sat on review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. She has produced concerts with the LoCal Composers’ Ensemble and is at present the Director and Chief Executive Officer of Music & Conversations, Inc.
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outbach® FESTIVAL INFO
The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] Womens’ Music
Tuesday 22, Thursday 24, and Saturday 26 October 2019
San Miguel Chapel, Santa Fe NM
featuring
The Emerson Trio
Donna Coleman, pianist
Endre Balogh, violinist
Antony Cooke, cellist
with composers-in-residence
Jane Brockman (Los Angeles CA)
Laura Clayton (Hancock NH)
Following the tremendous success of The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] American Music (November 2018), the 2019 festival celebrates the two hundredth birthday of Clara Wieck (Schumann) in three concerts of music by her, by other women composers, and by the two beloved men in her life. The festival is honored to welcome the Women’s International Study Center as a partner.
All concerts at 7:00pm at the San Miguel Chapel. Ticket sales (individual concerts and a discounted three-concert Series Pass) at Brown Paper Tickets: https://www.
The 2019 Festival is honored to welcome the Women’s International Study Center as a partner. Yamaha C7X piano courtesy of Piano Werkes, Albuquerque. Festival Piano Technician: Douglas Parsons. Other sponsors: Rio Chama Steakhouse, Image Ratio Printers, Road Runner Shuttle and Charter. Festival Patrons: Martha Benson, Betsy Foree and Ralph Hensen, Nancy Murray and Israel Sushman, Carol Albrecht and Roc Curry.
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WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM MANAGER’S NOTE WISC brings incredible scholars, artists and others to Santa Fe as fellows-in-residence. We hope you will attend their presentations, meet our fellows and support this important work by becoming a member.
Sincerely,
Jordan Young
Executive Director
Women’s International StudyCenter
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