Charles Petzold

This is the fourth in a series of blog entries featuring YouTube videos of (mostly) live performances of the music of women composers. The first three blog entries were imaginatively titled:

All blog entries on women composers have now been consolidated in the new web site Women Composing.

This entry — expanded somewhat from my daily Facebook posts features 30 women born from 1958 through 1972 with performances of a variety of amazing music. Many of these composers have their own websites, and I have provided links to those sites.

The total is now 120 composers, but since there are many women composers under the age of 50, this project is not quite complete.

Adriana Verdié (born 1958)

Adriana Verdié (born 1958) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. She holds degrees from the University of Cuyo in Argentina and a PhD in composition from the University of California, Berkeley. Her music has been performed in the United States and Canada as well as her native Argentina.

This 2018 song cycle is entitled de mujeres y elementos ("of women and elements"):

This is a recent composition entitled Esperanza Rota (“Broken Hope”) for a particularly forlorn oboe and piano.

Suzanne Giraud (born 1958)

Suzanne Giraud was born in Metz, France, and grew up in Strasbourg. She studied piano, violin, viola, and music theory at the Strasbourg Conservatory, and then continued at the Paris Conservatoire.

Suzanne Giraud has composed music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments. Here’s a 1997 work for flute and marimba entitled Envoûtements II:

This is her 1999 piano composition Zephyr:

She has also composed several operas of various lengths, including Caravaggio (2008 – 2012) about the painter that she wrote for the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. Here is a little clip from an unstaged concert performance of Caravaggio. In this scene, the painter brings a prostitute named Anna to his studio and paints her portrait. (I believe that she was the model for Martha in Caravaggio’s painting of Martha and Mary Magdalene.)

Miya Masaoka (born 1958)

Miya Masaoka was born in Washington, DC. She grew up playing piano but became exposed to Japanese music and instruments such as the koto through family members.

Besides composing music for western instruments, Miya Masaoka has also explored Japanese traditions, including Noh opera. She’s done installations as well as performative lectures and demonstrations of her interactive work with the biological response of plants.

Her website states that

her work operates at the intersection of spatialized sound, frequency and perception, performance, social and historical references. Whether recording inside physical objects or inside a plant or the human body, within architecturally resonant spaces or outdoor resonant canyons, she creates incongruencies that feed the paradox of the contemporary condition.

One of her interests is the one string koto or ichigenkin, a type of monochord, which she has studied within a tradition founded by her great great grandfather. She describes the ichigenkin as “very illustrative in the frequencies, harmonic nodes and harmonic spectrum, and the mathematical relationships and proportions of music and sound.”

Here is Miya Masaoka performing on a one string koto.

Julia Wolfe (born 1958)

Julia Wolfe is one of America’s most prominent living composers. She was born in Philadelphia and learned piano at a teenager but became more involved with music while attending the University of Michigan. She received a master’s degree in music from Yale in 1986 and a Ph.D. in composition from Princeton in 2012. She teaches at New York University.

With Michael Gordon (her husband) and David Lang, Julia Wolfe is a founder of Bang on a Can, the renowned new music ensemble.

Julia Wolfe has composed music for solo instruments, for chamber ensembles, for orchestras, and for voice in combination with various ensembles. Her music tends to have a driving, sometimes raucous, intensity that is influenced by Appalachian traditions, folk music, and rock.

In recent years, Julia Wolfe has been interested in labor history. Her work Steel Hammer (2009) combined numerous versions of the John Henry legend into a stunning theatrical work. This was followed a composition about Pennsylvania coal miners, Anthracite Fields (2014), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. More recently, the emotional power of Fire in my mouth (2018), about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, blew away those of us lucky to see the performance by the New York Philharmonic. Here’s a too-short excerpt:

Her composition With a blue dress on (2010, rev. 2014) was inspired by a field recording of a woman singing “Pretty little girl with a blue dress on / Stole my heart and away she’s gone.” The five violinists sing as well as play, and the boots they are wearing are essential for the performance.

A very recent emerging-from-pandemic composition is Oxygen for 12 flutes:

Jocelyn Pook (born 1960)

Jocelyn Pook was born in Birmingham England and studied viola and piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She spent some years recording and performing with musicians such as Peter Gabriel and PJ Harvey, and she wrote scores for plays and ballets.

In recent years Jocelyn Pook has been composing film scores, starting with 4 tracks (about 24 minutes) of some of the creepiest music in Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Here is the music for the “Masked Ball” sequence from that movie performed live. The music is based on Jocelyn Pook’s earlier composition Backwards Priests, which uses a recording of a service from the Romanian Orthodox church played backwards. Jocelyn Pook is the musician playing the viola.

Andrea Clearfield (born 1960)

Andrea Clearfield was born into an artistic family in Philadelphia that encouraged her early education in music. She played piano, flute, and tympani, and at an early age began arranging pop songs from the radio for different instruments. She earned a master’s in music in piano from the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, and a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from Temple University. She is founder and host of the Salon concert series in Philadelphia.

Andrea Clearfield has composed over 160 works for orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensembles. In recent years, she has done fieldwork in Nepal studying Tibetan music. This has influenced her own music, including her 2019 opera MILA, Great Sorcerer about the life of the Tibetan yogi, Milarepa.

This is a performance of her 2016 cantata Rabsong Shar for soprano, chamber orchestra, and digital audio based on her Nepal fieldwork. The video takes some time to get started: The musicians don’t enter until about the 1-minute mark. At about the 2.5-minute mark, Andrea Clearfield discusses the composition a bit. The music begins at about 7:20.

This is Women of Cyprus, a 2002 composition for string quintet:

Rachel Portman (born 1960)

Rachel Portman is one of the world’s most prominent film composers. She has been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original Score for Emma (1996), The Cider House Rules (1999), and Chocolat (2000), and won for Emma.

She was born in Haslemere, Surrey, England, and began composing at the age of 14. She studied music at Oxford where she started composing music for student films. The 1982 film Privileged that she scored was the first theatrical release from the Oxford Film Foundation and featured the screen debuts of Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs.

This is a suite of her film scores, including Bel Ami (2012), The Cider House Rules (1999), Chocolat (2000), Never Let Me Go (2010), and The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001).

Dawn Avery (born 1961)

Dawn Avery is an American cellist and composer of Mohawk descent. She has appeared on dozens of albums classified variously as contemporary classical, jazz, folk, rock, theatre, and spiritual.

Her website states:

Grammy nominated world music artist Dawn Avery creates a contemporary soundscape from contemplative, folk, pop and classical elements. Her calmly passionate vocals and soaring cello lines reflect a deep spirituality rooted in her Native American heritage and love of sacred traditions around the world.

For Dawn Avery, the last phrase refers primarily to Sufi traditions.

This is Dawn Avery’s 2012 composition Hohonkweta’ka:ionse (the Mohawk word for “ancestry”) for native flute and string quartet. I believe the complete quintet has three movements; this video has only first two. Dawn Avery is on the cello.

This 2020 composition for violin and piano is entitled Ohnekha’shòna Yakònkwe ("waters women"):

The description on the video says:

This chamber work honors the lives and families of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), and explores the symbiotic relationship of women and water, both life-givers, through various soundscapes in the hope of raising awareness and action about the necessity to protect both the waters and women.

Each movement begins with a blessing in the Mohawk language.

This is apparently the world premiere of the three of the four movements of Dawn Avery’s suite for piano Owentsia:

Dawn Avery’s description of the music is included in the description section of the video. The third section, in which the pianist plays the piano strings like a hammered dulcimer, is particularly entrancing.

Unsuk Chin (born 1961)

Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul, South Korea, and discovered piano at the age of 2 or 3. By the time she was 8 she was already earning money by playing piano at weddings. Around the age of 13, she decided she wanted to be a composer.

In her early 20’s Unsuk Chin moved to Hamburg and studied with György Ligeti. She has also cited Bartók, Debussy, Stravinsky, Webern, and Xenakis as influences. She worked with electronic music early in her career and has taken inspiration from Balinese gamelan music.

Between 2004 and 2007 Unsuk Chin composed an opera of Alice in Wonderland, collaborating on the English-language libretto with playwright David Henry Hwang. A production by the Bavarian State Opera conducted by Kent Nagano is available on DVD and Blu-ray.

She has said:

My music is a reflection of my dreams. I try to render into music the visions of immense light and of an incredible magnificence of colours that I see in all my dreams, a play of light and colours floating through the room and at the same time forming a fluid sound sculpture. Its beauty is very abstract and remote, but it is for these very qualities that it addresses the emotions and can communicate joy and warmth.

She has composed concertos for piano, violin, cello, clarinet, percussion, and the sheng, a Chinese polyphonic free-reed instrument. This is her Sheng Concerto from 2009. Following the performance, the soloist Wu Wei plays an encore further demonstrating the sounds of the instrument.

This is a work for chamber orchestra entitled Gougalōn and was composed between 2009 – 2011:

The French titles of the movements indicate that it is a a portrayal of street theatre scenes, including a lamentation of a bald dancer, and a dance around the barracks.

Shih-Hui Chen (born 1962)

Shih-Hui Chen was born in Taipei but has lived in the United States since 1982. She earned a master’s degree from Northern Illinois University and a doctoral degree in music composition from Boston University. She later returned to Taiwan for two years to study indigenous music and the style of Chinese classical music known as Nanguan.

Shih-Hui Chen is currently a Professor of Music at Rice University. In 2015 she founded the performing arts festival in Houston, Texas called Common Practice 21C: Classical, Contemporary, and Cross-Cultural Music to explore the fusion of traditional Asian and western musical cultures.

Shih-Hui Chen has composed music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and soloists. Her website states:

In her works, she seeks to cross boundaries between music and society, between the music of distinct cultures, and between music and other art forms.

This is her three-movement string quartet composed from 2007 to 2009 entitled Fantasia on the Theme of Plum Blossoms, using as musical material a popular Nankuan melody:

Jennifer Higdon (born 1962)

Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn but spent her early years in Atlanta and then Seymour, Tennessee. She did not have much exposure to classical music in her youth but played percussion in high school band and taught herself flute. It was only at Bowling Green State University that she began exploring music theory and composition. She studied at Curtis Institute of Music (where she later taught) and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Her composition teachers included Ned Rorem and George Crumb.

Jennifer Higdon’s music doesn’t stray too far from traditional structure and harmony, but it ranges widely in colors and mood. She can write intricate melodic lines that surge with an exhilarating pace and bravura, but also quite lyrical slow passages. A sense of joy often pervades her music, as well as suggestions of the American experience similar to the music of Aaron Copland.

Jennifer Higdon’s early 1992 virtuoso piece rapid*fire for solo flute ends with an explosive popper being thrown to the floor:

Here is one of her early orchestral compositions, blue cathedral from 1999, written in memory of her brother (whose middle name was Blue) who died of cancer. Although it begins and ends slowly and sparsely, the middle section has quite a driving rhythmic intensity to it. This is a performance by the Portland Youth Philharmonic.

Based on live performances on YouTube, one of her most popular works is her Percussion Concerto from 2005. Here’s a performance by the Eastman Wind Ensemble:

Jennifer Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto composed in 2008 for one of her former students at Curtis, violinist Hillary Hahn. Her opera based on the novel Cold Mountain was premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2015 and then performed by Opera Philadelphia (where I saw it) in 2016.

Also premiered in 2015 was Jennifer Higdon’s Viola Concerto, which won a 2018 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contempory Composition. Here it is performed by violist Kimberly Starr:

Debbie Wiseman (born 1963)

Debbie Wiseman was born in London. She studied at the Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Debbie Wiseman is the composer of numerous soundtracks for movies and television, most notably the movie Wilde and the television series Wolf Hall. She is the Composer in Residence for the UK radio station Classic FM, and most recently was the official composer and music director of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Celebration.

Classic FM commissioned a twelve-movement work The Musical Zodiac which was recorded in 2016. Here is the studio performance of the “Virgo” movement conducted by the composer:

Debbie Wiseman can also be seen conducting a studio orchestra for The Traveler that she composed in 2017 for the 20th anniversary of Viking Ocean Cruises.

Augusta Read Thomas (born 1964)

Augusta Read Thomas was born in Glen Cove, New York. She began piano at the age of 4 and trumpet in 3rd grade. Her piano teacher persuaded her to try her hand at composing. She later studied composition at Yale, Northwestern University, and the Royal Academy of Music.

She has composed music for choruses, orchestras, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, particularly violin, cello, and piano. Her music is informed by an eclectic array of influences, including Bach, Mahler, Debussy, Berg, Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.

Her music can sound austere on first encounter, but within the gloriously dissonant textures are quite lyrical underpinnings making for compositions that are consistently fascinating.

This four-movement string quartet from 1997 is called Sun Threads. At the end, the composer appears on stage with the musicians.

This video of Augusta Read Thomas’s 2017 work Plea for Peace for soprano and string quartet begins with some remarks by the composer and a few words from the soprano. The music begins around 2:55.

Su Lian Tan (born 1964)

Su Lian Tan was born in Malaysia and studied at Julliard, Bennington, and Princeton. As a flutist, she often performed new music of other composers and herself. She has been teaching composition at Middlebury College since 1994.

Although two albums of Su Lian Tan’s music are available on Spotify (Revelations and Jamaica’s Songs, U-Don Rock & River of the Trunk) and excerpts are available on YouTube, not much is available on YouTube in the form of live performances. But here is the raucous Moo Shu Wrap-Rap (1995) for brass quintet and percussion.

The first 12 or so minutes of this video is Su Lian Tan’s 2001 composition for solo cello, Langkawi Mythology II:

Gabriela Ortiz (born 1964)

Gabriela Ortiz was born in Mexico City to a family of folk musicians. She continued a more formal education at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, and the Guildhall School in London. In 1996 she received her PhD from the University of London.

Gabriela Ortiz has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, solo instruments (including piano, clarinet, flute, piccolo, guitar, recorder, harp, and trumpet), and electronics. Although her music generally employs a modernist vocabulary, it is often highly rhythmic and colorful, incorporating a synthesis of various influences, including Mexican folk music and jazz.

This is a 1996 composition Atlas-Pumas for the unusual combination of violin and marimba:

Here are excerpts of another 1996 composition, Altar de Muertos (“altar of the dead”) for string quartet and tape:

This is a recent composition from 2020, Fractalis for piano and orchestra, with a lot of percussion as well:

Anna Weesner (born 1965)

Anna Weesner was born in Iowa City and grew up in New Hampshire. She studied flute and composition as an undergraduate at Yale and received a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell. She currently lives in Philadelphia where she is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Only a few of Anna Weesner’s works are available in performance on YouTube, and some of those (for example, We Shall Overcome and Where Songs Go at Night) aren’t listed among her works on her website.

This composition, Sudden, Unbidden is listed as a string quartet on her website with a composition date of 1998. I don’t know when this version for violin and cello came about, but I like the mix of the stark driving rhythms and more ethereal and lyrical passages. (Is that the contrast between “sudden” and “unbidden” in the title?)

This video of Where Songs Go at Night indicates that it was composed in 2021. The instrumentation is flute, oboe, clarinet, tenor sax, horn and bassoon:

The description on the website includes this note by the composer:

I am fascinated by the familiarity of song structure and by the presence of songs in our lives. Where Songs Go at Night makes use of elements of songs, including a repeating harmonic progression, a repeating bass line, some folk-like melodies, though it imagines these elements in a context that is not as focused or clear as a single song. It’s something more like a community of song parts, or a set of backstage locations where those elements gather when they’re not busy doing their jobs in their respective songs. Some elements are found wandering, some are singing, some are lost, and some found. They mingle, chat, argue, and finally come together.

Kui Dong (born 1966)

Kui Dong was born in Beijing and studied composition at the Central Conservatory of Music, where she was exposed to a mix of backgrounds in western music and Chinese folk music and opera. She continued her studies at Stanford, where she was able to experiment with electronic music and explore compositional philosophy with György Ligeti.

Kui Dong’s music is a complex mix of western influences, Chinese music, jazz, and other ethnic music. She has composed music for orchestras and chamber ensembles, as well as opera and ballet. She has also written a novel.

There is no typical Kui Dong composition. This 2017 composition A Night at Tanglewood for string quartet, water glasses, and music box was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center, and has elements of ritual as well as fascinating sonic contrasts:

Liza Lim (born 1966)

Liza Lim was born in Perth, Western Australia, to Chinese parents. She has degrees from the Victoria College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, and a PhD from the University of Queensland. She currently lives in Melbourne.

Her website says that her

music focuses on collaborative and transcultural practices. The roots of beauty (in noise), time effects in the Antropocene and the sensoria of ecological connection are ongoing concerns in her compositional work.

Liza Lim’s stage works include installations and five operas. She has written music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, voice with accompaniment, and solo instruments.

It is not unusual for the instrumentalists in Liza Lim compositions to vocalise. This is true of her 2021 piano concerto World as Lover, World as Self, which takes as its title a 1991 book by Buddhist and environmental activist Joanna Macy. The four movements are titled “Gratitude"; “Heirlooms (of sorrow and protest)"; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"; and “The Great Turning".

More information about this composition can be found on Liza Lim’s website

This is a 2019 composition Bioluminescence for solo flute:

Roxanna Panufnik (born 1968)

Roxanna Panufnik was born in London, the daughter of Polish conductor and composer Andrzej Panufnik. She became attracted to the violin when she was 3 years old and also studied piano and flute as a child. When she was 12, she was encouraged to begin writing down her improvisations by composer Oliver Knussen, and she cites that as the beginning of her career as a composer.

Roxanna Panufnik studied at the Royal Academy of Music but shied away from more modernist influences to forge her own path. Her compositions mix the modern and the traditional, with influences of world music. Consequently, her music can take surprising and unexpected turns. She writes a lot of choral music of various languages, and her music is often informed by a spiritual impulse.

The title of her 2008 orchestral composition Three Paths to Peace refers to the three Abrahamic religions:

She has said:

I’m on a mission to shout from the rooftops the beauty of all these different faiths’ music. It’s about bringing us together. Too often we don’t think about what we have in common, but instead about our tiny fraction of difference from each other.

I believe this next video is a rehearsal of Zen Love Song, one of the tracks on her album Love Abide, described as a celebration of multicultural spiritual devotion:

Roxanna Panufnik’s 2019 string quartet Heartfelt begins with toe tapping and strumming:

The description on the video states that the first movement suggests the court musicians of 17th century Uzbekistan. “I imagined a grand and regal caravan of camels and carriages, travelling down the Silk Road. The second movement is titled “Lament for a Bulgarian Dancing Bear.”

Lisa Bielawa (born 1968)

Lisa Bielawa was born in San Francisco, the daughter of composer and music professor Herbert Bielawa. She studied piano, voice, and violin beginning in childhood, and majored in English literature at Yale. She is currently based in New York City.

Lisa Bielawa has composed music for orchestras, choruses, chamber ensembles, digital audio, and solo instruments. Reflecting her interest in English literature, many of her works are inspired by literary sources, even those that don’t involve sung texts. She often incorporates community-making in her work. She has created music for public spaces and large-scale participatory works.

Her 2019 work Centuries in the Hours for mezzo-soprano and orchestra reveals much about Lisa Bielawa’s sensibility and approach to music. It consists of five songs, and is described in this program note (which also includes the texts) :

Each song is a setting of a diary excerpt by an American woman whose life circumstances rendered her historically invisible. The project meditates on the theme of invisibility: How do we, through performance, make visible the invisible, make things vivid in unexpected ways? To that end, it brings to light written words of women who were “invisible” in their social milieu, while it celebrates heightened non-visual communication and shared leadership in performance.

Lisa Bielawa wrote Centuries in the Hours for blind mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin, who in this performance is reading from a Braille score:

The Trojan Women was originally composed in 1999 for a performance of the play by Euripedes, and then revised in 2001 for string quartet and 2003 for string orchestra, which is the version performed here:

Olga Neuwirth (born 1968)

Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz, Austria, the daughter of pianist Harald Heuwirth. She took trumpet lessons at an early age but then gravitated to composition after high school workshops with composers Hans Werner Henze and Gerd Kurz. She studied music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and art at San Francisco Art College and was later influenced by composer Luigi Nono.

Olga Neuwirth composes with a variety of modernist and post-modernist vocabularies, with influences from art, architecture, literature, history, and literature. Her works are often collaborative and theatrical in nature. Her 2019 opera Orlando (based on the Virginia Woolf novel) was the first full-length opera to be commissioned by the Vienna State Opera. It is available on DVD and Blu-ray. Here’s a little promo:

The following video is three excerpts of her Homage a Klaus Nomi — wild, over-the-top settings of nine songs associated with the late German countertenor, conceptual artist, and new wave sensation Klaus Nomi: “Simple Man,” Purcell’s “Cold Song,” and “Ding, Dong! The Witch is Dead.”

Here’s a sonically spectacular 2009 string quartet with the exceptionally appropriate title "in the realms of the unreal":

In the Realms of the Unreal is the title under which American novelist, artist, and janitor Henry Darger compiled over 15,000 pages of stories and illustrations about the adventures of the Vivian girls, and is also the title of a 2004 documentary about Henry Darger.

I’ve found five performances on YouTube of Olga Neuwirth’s 2016 solo piano romp Trurl-Tichy-Tinkle. Here is one of them:

Misato Mochizuki (born 1969)

Misato Mochizuki was born in Tokyo, and received a Masters degree in composition at the National University of Fine Arts and Music in that city. Her website indicates that her music combines “Occidental tradition and the Asiatic sense of breathing.”

This 2015 composition Le Monde des Ronds et des Careés (“The World of Rounds and Squares“) for two percussionists and two pianists begins meditatively, almost ritualistically, but then develops a rhythmic intricacy that reminds me at various times of gamelan music, of jazz, and of Bartók, concluding with a drum solo free-for-all:

At the end of the performance, the composer comes to the stage.

Jocelyn Morlock (born 1969)

Jocelyn Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, Canada. Her discovery of classical music came in late adolescence when she saw the movie Amadeus, which was released shortly before her 15th birthday. She later went on to earn a Bachelor of Music degree at Brandon University and a Masters and Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver.

Jocelyn Morlock’s website states that

Her music is inspired by birds, insomnia, nature, fear, other people’s music and art, nocturnal wandering thoughts, lucid dreaming, death, and the liminal times and experiences before and after death.

This gorgeous and moody 2008 work for string orchestra is entitled Nostalgia:

Valerie Coleman (born 1970)

Valerie Coleman was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in the West End inner-city neighborhood that gave rise to Muhammed Ali. She was fascinated with music at an early age and had composed three symphonies by the age of 14. She earned two bachelor’s degrees from Boston University and a master’s degree in flute performance from the Mannes School of Music, where she currently teaches.

Valerie Coleman lives with her family in New York City. She founded the ensemble Imani Winds (from the Swahili word for “faith”), with which she plays flute. This is Imani Winds performing one of Valerie Coleman’s more jazz- and blue-infused works, the 2006 four-movement suite Portraits of Josephine. (That’s Josephine Baker, of course.)

Two more videos of Valerie Coleman compositions are included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Gabriela Montero (born 1970)

Gabriela Montero was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Her musical self-education began with a toy piano at the age of seven months and continued with a more formal piano instruction at the age of four. She made her concert debut at eight and later studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Although Gabriela Montero has a successful career as a concert pianist, she is also a composer. Among other works she has composed a piano concerto entitled Latin. She is on piano in this performance:

But Gabriela Montero is best known for her piano improvisations based on themes chosen by members of the audience. Here she is improvising on a theme from a Cantonese opera and from Star Wars:

Here’s a concert film that includes some commentary by Gabriela Montero and several of her improvisations:

There’s been some academic and neuropsychological interest in Gabriela Montero’s improvisations. One study was conducted with her playing a “non-ferromagnetic piano keyboard” inside an fMRI scanner. In her recent book Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, violinist Natalie Hodges devotes a chapter to improvisation with much discussion of Gabriela Montero.

Here’s a program that took place in 2020 at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute entitled What Choice Do I Have? Gabriela Montero Discusses Classical Improvisation, Composition, and Creative Dissent:

Arlene Sierra (born 1970)

Arlene Sierra was born in Miami. She has degrees from Oberlin College-Conservatory (a B.A. in East Asian Studies and a B.Mus in Electronic Music), Yale School of Music, and the University of Michigan. She is currently based in London and teaches composition at Cardiff University School of Music.

In an interview Arlene Sierra has described her compositional language as “Personal, flexible, rhythmic, chromatic, textured, colorful, evolving.” She takes inspiration from evolution and the natural world (as the titles of many of her compositions suggest), but she is also influenced by military strategy and game theory.

This 2013 piano trio is entitled Butterflies Remember a Mountain and the three movements are entitled “Butterflies,” “Remember,” and “A Moutain”:

Another 2013 composition, this one for violin and cello, is called Avian Mirrors:

Andreia Pinto Correia (born 1971)

Andreia Pinto Correia was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and began her musical studies at the Academia de Amadores de Música and at the Escola de Jazz Luíz Villas-Boas. She received Masters and Doctoral degrees at the New England Conservatory of Music, and currently resides in Brooklyn.

On her website, Andreia Pinto Correia describes the music in this video:

Written for solo alto flute, Pleistocene Landscapes is a reflection on deep time and the metamorphosing of landscapes through history. The work unfolds sonically and atmospherically, evoking the erosion and the geomorphology of Lake Mungo in Australia, an active and vibrant site during the Pleistocene Era. As the piece develops, layers of musical narrative rise to the surface, only to be subsequently submersed by sounds evoking wind and erosion. Pleistocene Landscapes is an homage to an extraordinary ancient historic site and its culture.

Zoë Keating (born 1972)

Zoë Keating was born in Guelph, Ontario, and began playing cello at the age of eight. She studied electronic music and composition at Sarah Lawrence College, after which she moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in information architecture and data analysis while moonlighting as a cellist in rock bands.

Zoë Keating eventually combined technology and music with an approach to composition and performance that involves live layering of her cello playing. While performing, she uses a foot controller attached to a MacBook Pro running Ableton Live, SooperLooper, MAX, and MidiPipe, patched together with some custom AppleScripts.

Here is a composition entitled Lost performed in a radio station in Sydney:

Amy Beth Kirsten (born 1972)

Amy Beth Kirsten grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and Chicago. She received an MM from Roosevelt University and a DMA from the Peabody Institute. She has taught at Bard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Her website states:

Amy Beth Kirsten’s musical and conceptual language is characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation. Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression.

Amy Beth Kirsten’s instrumental textures are often light and sparse, and her instrumentalists are often called upon the sing or vocalize. These characteristics are both evident in her 2013 work spun for cello and piano.

In the program note to the score, she calls this work a “miniature-song cycle” that uses her own texts as well as a poem by Emily Dickinson “woven together in a kind of musical web: each movement begins with material that ends the preceding movement, forming a web that eventually comes back to the beginning.”

Nkeiru Okoye (born 1972)

Nkeiru Okoye [in KEAR roo oh KOY yeh] was born in New York to an African American mother and a Nigerian father, and she has spent time in Nigeria as well as the United States. She began learning piano at the age of 8 and started composing at 13. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rutgers University, where she earned a doctorate in Music Theory and Composition.

Nkeiru Okoye is best known for her 2014 folk opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom, a video of a complete stage performance of which is included in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

This video is of a 2020 composition Black Bottom for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, bass-baritone, and orchestra, performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra:

An extensive program note includes this overview:

Grappling with the complex fabric of Detroit’s urban renewal history, composer Nkeiru Okoye’s Black Bottom crafts a bold portrayal of the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods’ musical social life in the 1920s-1960s. Black Bottom was said to have been named after the fertile topsoil on which it was established, until the neighborhood was razed to construct the Chrysler Freeway (I-375) in 1964…. This composition is meant to raise questions about the destruction of a vibrant neighborhood and the reasoning behind why Black Bottom was selected for demolition.

Ready for More?

To continue chronologically, go to Even Another Month of Women Composers.