2017 Festival

The Women Composers Festival of Hartford continues its annual tradition of celebrating the diversity of women’s music with its 2017 Festival. Featuring Composer-in-Residence Paula Matthusen, Guest Ensemble forty/sixty, and Keynote Speaker Elizabeth Wood. The festival includes performances of historical and living women composers, held at the historic Charter Oak Cultural Center and across the Greater Hartford area.

2017 Composer-in-Residence: Paula Matthusen

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Read more about Paula Mattusen

2017 Guest Ensemble: forty-sixty

forty/sixty is an adventurous, young string trio dedicated to new music and founded out of a desire to perform new works, bring improvisation to the concert stage, and use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Olivia Harris, Robin Rhodes, and Angela Lamb met at the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, where late night improv sessions led to the creation of the trio. Read more about forty/sixty

2017 Keynote Speaker: Elizabeth Wood

Elizabeth Wood, a musicologist and writer educated at the University of Adelaide (M.A., Ph.D.), has lived in New York since 1977. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in New York in music, literature, women’s studies and LGBT studies, and has presented public lectures and papers at universities around the world. Among pioneer scholars since the 1970s of women, gender, and sexuality in music, her publications include a novel, a history of Australian opera, and a series of award-winning critical studies of Ethel Smyth. Read more about Elizabeth Wood

2017 Festival Schedule

Thursday, March 30, 2017
(All events at the Charter Oak Cultural Center)
7:00 pm – Keynote Presentation by Elizabeth Wood
7:30 pm – Music in the Time of Women’s Suffrage

Friday, March 31, 2017
(All events at the Charter Oak Cultural Center)
9:00 am – Women Composers Forum
1:30 pm – Anna Kijas: Documenting Teresa Carreño
2:45 pm – Panel Discussion
4:00 pm – forty/sixty Composer Workshop
7:00 pm – Pre-Concert Talk by Paula Matthusen
7:30 pm – forty/sixty Concert feat. Paula Matthusen

Saturday, April 1, 2017
9:00 am – Music Marathon
7:30 pm – Triggered: Gendered Violence in Music

Sunday, April 2, 2017
1:00 pm – Many Voices One Song
7:30 pm – WCPercussion Concert