The NEIU Department of Music offered a concert featuring “Women Composers” Tuesday, Mar. 10 during activity hour at Recital Hall. The concert featured faculty and student artists (both male and female), all performing music composed by notable women of the music world in honor of “Women’s Day” (Mar. 8).
This included “Artistry in Viola”, a piece by faculty artist Shelley Foster Gurin. The piece, a crowd favorite, showcased the beautifully rich sounds of the viola as well as its versatility, an exploration of the varied sounds the instrument can produce. Guest artist Loretta Gillespie bowed, plucked, strummed, and struck her viola expertly.
The concert opened with “Kokopelli”, a piece for solo flute by Katherine Hoover, performed by Trent Santonastaso. This seemed an apt choice for the occasion as Kokopelli is a fertility deity presiding over childbirth agriculture and music in some Native American culture of the Southwestern U.S. Santonasto’s flute soared in this stirring performance.
Faculty members Lydia Snow and Jeff Kowalkowski on piano performed two beautiful lieder by Alma Schindler Mahler and a chanson by Nadia Bounlanger. These songs are essentially poems set to music, the words of a poet inspiring the composer. Though Snow offered translations of the poems before singing each song (first two in German, the last in French), the meaning came through loud and clear through the artistry of the composers, matching tone, subject and emotion in the original poems.
The third piece, “Interlude from Piano Sonata #3” by Emma Lou Diemer proved remarkable both for its simple musicality and the skill with which Kiyona Ohshika performed it. The second movement of Diemer’s third sonata is short but features interesting achievements in harmonic color.
Jane Kenas-Heller sang a medley of songs by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, accompanied by Michael Melton on piano. Both of them are faculty artists. “The Half-minute Songs” (though some were shorter than 30 seconds) were funny and provided a light-hearted source of enjoyment for the audience (as well as the performers), showing Jacobs-Bond’s great skill at combining music with lyrics and a bit of social commentary.
The last piece was a clarinet quartet by Yvonne Desportes, performed by Matthew Bordoshuk, Jason Thomson, Miguel Hernandez and Konrad Pawelek. This piece, titled “French Suite” really showed the extensive range of the clarinet and provided a lovely finale for the concert.
Music composition seems to still be a predominately male-dominated field and it was certainly enlightening to listen to very skilled performances of music composed by some remarkably talented women.