Thank you so much.

Whoop, there it is.

Hi!

I thank you so much.

It is such a pleasure to be here today with you.

And I really like to thank Dr. Jeanie Darnell and the entire faculty and students of FGCU for such a wild moment that I have.

It's been such a warm welcome this week, and it's such a privilege to be sharing music with you today, especially during a time when there is so many challenges in your community.

Thank you for welcoming me so warmly.

I am so delighted and honored to present a program of American female music with you today with the amazing Dr. Navarro and so delighted to meet and work with her.

And I wanted to give you a little information about how this program came to be.

So when given a wide open slate to present any music that one might want, it's kind of an overwhelming task.

But it was really in my heart lately to present the music of female composers.

So as I was doing some research about who I might want to sing and why, I realized that there is such an overwhelming body of American female music that I was not actually very familiar with and that I hadn't heard, in fact, what I learned about some composers.

I was searching for recordings and was even having some trouble finding recordings of music.

For example, this first piece I performed for you by Catherine Earner.

It doesn't seem to have been recorded pretty much anywhere, so I thought it'd be important to share that music with you today and inspire you to do the same little bit of research into maybe somebody that you've never heard of and never know.

Catherine Earner who I just saying she was an American female composer who hails from Indiana and turns out she went and studied in France for quite some time and made her singing here in the United States, teaching and singing in California, but wrote numerous compositions, quite beautiful things like that.

The entire first set of three songs that we're going to perform for you today.

We are trying to find a unifying factor among them when trying to narrow down all this great repertoire to choose from and decided to sing three songs about Night for You.

So the next selection is by Eleanor Everest Freer, who I won't give you all the biographical information.

You can do that on your own, too.

But she has a rich history from Philadelphia, but spent many years studying in Paris and studied voice even with the famous composer Massenet.

She came back to the United States, taught and wrote prolifically.

11 chamber operas, hundreds of pieces of music, including lots of local music.

And the last piece in this set about night is by a more well known American female composer named Amy Beach.

And the reason I narrowed it down and chose her is personal.

My friend and colleague and former professor Patrick Leeson is a connoisseur of art songs, and he in 2005 made a recording of Amy Beach songs that won a Grammy, and this song was on the album.

It's always been one of my favorites, so I thought I would honor him with that today and just to give you a little insight as to what will come next, the next set of music is by the composer Florence Price, who is also a turn of the century 19th 20th century composer, a black American composer of great fame for symphonic works.

However, Florence Price did more than write symphonies.

She wrote an amazing amount of vocal and piano music and was actually quite well-known for her time.

She graduated from the New England Conservatory in 1906 and went on to make her home in Chicago, where she became quite well known across the country.

The works were performed across the United States and in England, which was quite a feat for an American female black composer at the time.

She really made her mark.

Those pieces were hard to choose because of her prolific body of work, but I chose three that to me reflect some important aspects of womanhood.

One is loss, one is motherhood, one is confinement.

And then the last set of four little pieces is humor, which I think we can all agree is very important in life.

Thank you.

I wanted to now introduce the second half of our program, which is our 21st century music, and give you just a tiny bit of information about what you're going to hear.

So I thought I would choose a couple of different female composers of the 21st century who have slightly different styles.

Compositionally, the first is Missy Mazzoli, who calls herself a millennial composer.

So I think I can call her that too.

And she lives in New York City, but she has become quite a well known, contemporary, innovative composer of our time.

In fact, she is one of two composers, two female composers to be first, the first females to be commissioned by the Met's to premiere an opera.

She was commissioned in 2018.

She's written quite a few orchestral pieces as well as operas.

The song we're going to perform for you today is from one of her operas called The Sound of the Four Lives and Deaths of Isobel Everhart and these texts were something that listeners only found in a journal and decided to set into an opera.

Musings on this amazing Swedish female who essentially left her her life to go be living a nomadic lifestyle in the deserts of North Africa and kept journals as she did so.

And at age 27, she died in a flash flood in the desert.

And she has these very prolific journals about her thoughts and feelings along the way.

This aria from the opera is when she is making the decision to leave her home and go live a nomadic lifestyle in Northern Africa.

And then the second set of music that we're going to perform is a song cycle by the composer Laurie Lieberman, who I know has a nice connection and history here at the University.

She has made appearances here in the past, and I know your students have sung some of her music as well.

This cycle was actually one of her earlier song cycles written in 1998.

She took the poems of Sara Teasdale, who it appealed to me because actually that very first song I sang today is also a poem by Sara Teasdale.

It seems as if her poetry has lived throughout the centuries and then very inspirational to other female composers.

This cycle is about love and its enigmas five pieces on love and is to make was and it shows these two because you'll hear the difference in their compositional styles.

Receive.

Azoulay writes this aria for example, was set for chamber orchestra.

She writes a lot of electronic music.

The composer herself created this piano production.

Part of the reason I chose it.

So we can really hear Dr. Navarro's amazing skills at this.

That's something about which is really complex and intricate and while equally difficult and interesting harmonically, Slager's music follows a more traditional classical of forms and structures which are a little bit more familiar to our ears.

And I will also perform another piece by Late Lightman Head, and we'll welcome Professor Dr. Jeanie Darnell to the stage to join me in duet for that.

Thank you so very much for being here today and for your generous applause and warm welcome and attention for all of this.

I know new to you mostly music.

The last couple of songs I would like to perform for you today are also by female American composers.

The last one that Dr. Darnell and I performed as well as the next one, are from the Secret Garden, one of my very favorite musicals by Lucy Simon, who you might know she was the sister of Carly Simon, the famous singer.

And she actually just passed away one month ago today at the age of 82.

And she's best known for her Tony nominated musical, The Secret Garden.

And lastly, I don't think that song needs any introduction, but it's also by a female lyricist and female composer.

You can see him on your program.

Thank you so much for having me.

And have a great weekend.