Tag: orchestra
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Happy Women’s History Month! As has become a March tradition in my corner of the internet, it’s time for our annual Women Composers Bingo! Here in the US, this year’s theme from the National Women’s History Alliance is “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” (Not to be confused with the UN theme for…
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I recently finished my annual update of Virtuosa Flute Solos, and also finally read the last chapter of Marcia Citron’s Gender and the Musical Canon – which has led me to a lot of reflection lately on the way I’ve set up & organized my database of flute solos by women composers. The traditional way…
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Over the past six months, I’ve seen four different women hailed by clickbait headlines as “the first woman to conduct a European orchestra”… but in taking a look at those articles, I noticed there was a 64-year range between the dates of those women’s conducting premieres. The biographical info about each conductor was factually correct…
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A while back on my Instagram stories, I posted a video about reframing anti-feminist works and why I’ve never played Debussy’s Syrinx. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to upload a video of longer than one minute to my main feed – but after I did figure it out, I realized this discussion…
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If I had a dollar for every time I attended a concert featuring music written by women or a workshop on female composers where the presenter said something along the lines of “I don’t understand why women’s compositions aren’t performed more often, there’s a lot of really great music here!” … I wouldn’t have a…
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Over the past several months, I’ve added a few books about women in music history to my to-be-read list that I’m SUPER excited about… but after a few conversations with other educators who teach about classical music by women composers, I’ve come to realize that the resources I tend to favor are very different from…
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Happy Women’s History Month!! Guess what that means? It’s also time for my annual Women Composers Bingo! The National Women’s History Alliance’s theme for 2023 is “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories” – and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with music from the Romantic era, when character pieces, programmatic…
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The Western flute used to be considered a masculine instrument, but it’s now one of the most feminine. Why is that, and when did the gender association change? I spent my first year after graduating from college working at a family-owned music shop. During rental season, my coworkers and I would sometimes try to guess…
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Women’s Orchestral Uniforms from the 1880s – 1940s While I was going through the files on my phone to delete the photos I’d used in last month’s Instagram posts about early 20th century women’s orchestras, I noticed something odd – in all but one of the pictures, the women performing were wearing white dresses! Our…
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Last month while I was researching women’s music salons, I came across a mention of ladies’ orchestra clubs in the United States. After some initial googling, I found out there was a whole movement of women’s orchestras who pioneered the way for female performers in professional ensembles. Many of these women were also active lobbyists…