Spring Show: Working to Transcend
~Live Music and Dance~
Join us for our spring show, Working to Transcend, which celebrates women composing against the current. We are honored to have local professional musicians performing Rebecca Clarke’s “Sonata for Viola and Piano” (1919), choreographed by Madeleine Bonn and Mikayla Archambeau, and Florence Price’s “Piano Quintet in A-minor” (1936), choregraphed by Mikayla Archambeau.
the music
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) was something of a maverick 100 years ago: a working female musician. Initially, she released her compositions under a male pseudonym to give them a better chance at reception during a time when women musicians were frowned upon.
At the beginning of her score to the sonata for viola and piano, she inscribed the words of Alfred de Musset (“La Nuit de Mai”): Poet, take your lute, the wine of youth ferments this night in the veins of God. This epigraph paraphrases the torrid drama of the piece. It is emotional, passionate, and turbulent throughout; one wonders at what the composer must have been feeling when she wrote it.
Florence Price (1887-1953) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to the only Black dentist in town. She graduated from the New England Conservatory in Boston, studying piano and organ. Price could not find work in Little Rock due to segregation, so moved to Chicago with her husband and two daughters in 1927.
In 1932 when her Symphony in e minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it the first performance by a major symphony orchestra of a piece by a Black composer. Price’s piano quintet is an example of a gifted composer at the height of her powers.
the musicians
Robyn Quinnett, violin
Hillary Dumond, violin
Geoffrey Archambeau, viola
Ignacy Gaydamovich, cello
Corbin Beisner, piano
