When: Sunday, January 27 at 3:30

Where: Slosberg Auditorium, Brandeis University

Admission: Pay What You Decide

Contact: Dana Maiben, danamaiben@gmail.com

The 2019 Alfredo and Demitra DiLuzio Concert, “Composing Women,” will be performed on Sunday, January 27 at 3:30 at Brandeis University’s Slosberg Music Center, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA. The concert is curated by composer, violinist and conductor Dana Maiben, winner of the 2018 Miriam Gideon Prize for her composition The Green House. The concert will feature the Mockingbird Trio – Elizabeth Anker, Contralto, Scott Woolweaver, viola, and John McDonald, piano – and guests Deborah Boldin, flute, and Tracy McGinnis, bassoon, performing the prize-winning composition and Rebecca Clarke’s viola sonata, as well Concerto Incognito and La Donna Musicale performing earlier works. 

Dana Maiben is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University, where The Green House was premiered in 2013.  The work is scored for Contralto, flute, bassoon, viola, and piano, and sets a group of poems by Cambridge-based poet Martha Collins. Woolweaver and McDonald will perform the monumental early 20th century Viola Sonata by Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) in its 100th anniversary year. A concertizing violist herself, Clarke entered the Sonata in a contest sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1919. It tied for first place (with a work by Ernest Bloch) but the judges found it hard to believe it was written by a woman. The concert will also feature members of two other notable Boston-based ensembles, Concerto Incognito and La Donna Musicale, performing works by two 17th-century nuns, the Violin Sonata by Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) and poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). Sor Juana was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and polymath of New Spain whose criticisms of the misogyny of the Church brought her great troubles. A substantial body of her poetry and prose but no musical compositions survive; Maiben’s Canciones de Amor, new settings of some of Sor Juana’s love poetry, will be premiered by Soprano Camila Paria and viola da gambist and WSRC Resident Scholar Laury Gutierrez on January 27. Maiben herself will take the stage alongside cellist Christien Beeuwkes and harpsichordist Frances Conover Fitch to perform the Violin Sonata by Isabella Leonarda. Leonarda rose to the position of Superiore in the Ursuline Convent in Novarre, and composed prolifically at least from age 50. The Violin Sonata has the distinction of being the first of its genre to be published by a woman. 

Admission to the concert is by donation to support the Music Programs of the WSRC: pay what you decide, no-one will be turned away. This concert, presented by the Women and Music Mix of the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, is made possible thanks to the generous support of WSRC board co-chair Rosalie Ripaldi Shane, ’66, in honor of her uncle and aunt, Alfredo and Demitra DiLuzio. The Women and Music Mix was founded at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center to study the contributions of women to the field of music as composers, performers, conductors, teachers, scholars, and sponsors. The Women and Music Mix consists of acclaimed music Scholars who have committed themselves to advancing and advocating for women in music. Members bring their pioneering work to the University and the wider public through lectures, concerts, conferences, publications, and recordings that highlight and explore issues of women and gender.

Composer, conductor, medieval fiddler, keyboardist, violinist and violist Dana Maiben, winner of the 2018 Miriam Gideon Prize, is a Resident Scholar of the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University, where her prize-winning composition The Green House was premiered in 2013. Her compositions include a chamber opera, Look and Long, based on the play by Gertrude Stein, instrumental chamber music, and music for dance and theater, for solo voice(s) and instrument(s), and for a capella voices. Maiben holds degrees from Smith College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, with additional studies at Oberlin College Conservatory and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. She counts medievalist Thomas Binkley, violinist Jaap Schroeder, choreographer Paula Josa Jones, and composers Ron Perera and Lou Harrison as important mentors. Hailed by the Boston Globe for her “supremely joyous artistry,” Maiben performs music from the 12th century to the 21st, conducts opera and oratorio, and has earned international recognition for her performances of 17th-century music. Her discography as a violinist includes sonatas by Francesca Danzi Lebrun (Dorian) and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (forthcoming). A dedicated teacher, Maiben serves on the faculty of the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is Artistic Director of the ensemble for 17th century music, Concerto Incognito.