The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) recently announced winners of their Search for New Music by Women Composers 2007. It is particularly gratifying to see in the list three composers with whom we have worked this season, or are looking forward to working with soon:
Tamar Muskal, who won the Theodore Front Prize (for chamber and orchestral works) for her Yellow Wind for orchestra and narrator, is currently writing us a new composition in collaboration with her wonderful visual artist husband, Danny Rozin (you can read more about this project here).
Heather Stebbins, a talented composition student at our second home, the University of Richmond, won the Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize (for women 21 and under) for a work that we played in a composer reading session just two months ago, Confessions, Reactions. Good onya Heather! (Aussie for “well done!”)
eighth blackbird commissioned Oberlin alum and current Harvard student Ashley Fure to write a short work, inescapable, for the ensemble’s tenth anniversary season in 2005/06. We worked with her again in November of last year, at Richmond’s wonderful Third Practice Electroacoustic Festival, unleashing her volcanic Susurrus on an unsuspecting but enthusiastic audience (you can read more about this here and here). This work won the Pauline Oliveros Prize (works for electro-acoustic media).
Congratulations to all, especially to the IAWM for advancing the cause of women’s music. As an ensemble, we consider ourselves to have no gender bias of any sort, yet our main touring concert program for the 2006/07 season contains no works by female composers. This is hardly exceptional in the world of new music. Despite this, we look forward to working with many unique and profound female compositional voices in the years to come.
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