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The Maud Powell Project celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and Women's Suffrage with five new works for solo violin inspired by and dedicated to violinist Maud Powell. The works, commissioned by violinist Megan Healy and written by American composers Lauren Bernofsky, Elisabeth Blair, Stephanie Ann Boyd, Jessica Meyer, and Hilary Purrington, were recorded at the University of Denver in August 2020 and will be premiered in Chicago in May 2021. The works will subsequently be performed in a variety of contexts, including solo violin recitals, lecture recitals, and outreach performances with dancers from Life/Art Dance ensemble for children and for senior citizens living in low-income housing communities in the Denver Metro area.
The album, Aurora: A Tribute to Maud Powell, is available here.
PROGRAM.
Sonata for Violin Solo —Dr. Lauren Bernofsky
Esse Quam Videri—Elisabeth Blair
Minnie—Stephanie Ann Boyd
Maud—Jessica Meyer
Something Fierce—Hilary Purrington
Program Note.
MINNIE| SOLO VIOLIN, Op. 65
commissioned by Megan Healy
Writing for violinist Megan Healy and discovering the work of Maud Powell through the process has been a joy to my violinist heart - the pain of knowing that I lived most of my life without knowing Maud’s work is tempered, however, but the pleasure of having been able to spend a great deal of time with her biography and recordings while writing a piece that traces her interaction with and inspiration from the places in which she lived throughout her brief life.
The first movement, AURORA, is a fantasia that seeks to convey the magic of a childhood spent on the plains of the midwest and of her growing skill and prowess as a young violinist. The second movement, BERLIN, is an elegia/lullaby that takes into account her lonely years in Europe with her mother and their shared Hungarian heritage. The third movement, ANTHEM, is a perpetuum moto that uses Americana and fiddling references to bring forth echoes of her triumph and confidence throughout her life as she broke barriers and created an entirely new paradigm for violin soloists.
My deep thanks to Megan for bringing me in on this project and to everyone who has contributed efforts towards keeping Maud’s light alive and her work present all these years after she graced the earth with her wisdom, tenacity, and unimaginable musicianship.
Megan Healy
Michigan-based violinist Megan Healy is an active pedagogue, recitalist, and performer of orchestral and chamber music. Megan enjoys a multifaceted career as a freelance performing artist and teacher. Megan has held positions with the Kalamazoo, Southwest Michigan, Cheyenne (WY), Holland (MI), and Southeast Iowa symphony orchestras. Additionally, she has performed with the West Michigan Symphony, Battle Creek Symphony, Boulder Philharmonic, Fort Collins Symphony, Greeley Philharmonic, and the Boulder Chamber Orchestra. Recent special engagements have included a performance as guest soloist with the Elgin (IL) Youth Symphony, interdisciplinary collaborations with Life/Art Dance Ensemble, and the live premiere of Julián Brijaldo's Atravesa'o for violin and delay pedal. Her debut album, Aurora: A Tribute to Maud Powell, features five new commissions for solo violin written by American women and was released on March 12, 2021.
Megan maintains a thriving private studio of students between ages 5 and 75. Inspired by her adult students, her doctoral research focused on engaging the adult learner in beginning violin lessons. In addition, Megan is currently a violin and viola instructor for Kalamazoo Kids In Tune. A partnership between the Kalamazoo Symphony and the Kalamazoo Public Schools, KKIT is an innovative after-school orchestra and youth development program. Students from early elementary through high school study instruments and chamber music and participate in daily lessons and orchestra rehearsals. After-school meals and busing make the program widely accessible. Inspired in part by the El Sistema movement, Kids in Tune combines elements of Social Justice, Social and Emotional Learning, and traditional music instruction to create conscientious global citizens first and skilled musicians second.
As an avid chamber musician, Megan has been coached by members of the Tackács, Pacifica, American, Cavani, Daedalus, JACK, Jupiter, Fry Street, Avalon, and Kontras quartets, as well as members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Boston Chamber Music Society, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony. As a soloist, she has appeared in masterclasses presented by Joel Smirnoff, Ilya Kaler, Frank Almond, Blair Milton, Kevork Mardirossian, James Buswell, Lucie Robert, Mimi Zweig, Janet Sung, Lauren Roth, Michael Jinsoo Lim, Hal Grossman, Kimberly Fisher, and more.
Megan earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Violin Performance from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. She is a student of Károly Schranz and Harumi Rhodes, the former and current second violinists in the world-renowned Takács quartet. Dr. Healy also holds Master of Music and Artist Diploma degrees from Western Michigan University, where she served as graduate teaching assistant to Professor Renata Artman Knific, as well as a Bachelor of Music degree in Violin Performance from the University of Iowa under the tutelage of Dr. Scott Conklin. She has studied viola performance with Professor Igor Fedotov and Dr. Megan Gray.
More about Megan at meganhealymusic.com
MAUD POWELL
America’s first great master of the violin, Maud Powell (1867-1920), was born in Peru, Illinois, on the western frontier of the American heartland. Her mother was a pianist and composer whose gender precluded her from a career in music. She began her violin studies in nearby Aurora before studying with William Lewis in Chicago for four years. She completed her training with the European masters: Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin. At the time, classical music in America was scoffed at by Europeans, but Maud Powell became the first American-born violinist to win over European audiences. In America, appreciation for classical music was in its infancy and a female soloist was unheard-of. Maud Powell toured North America, Europe, and South Africa to great acclaim, appearing with the great orchestras of the time.
Maud Powell performed the American premieres of the Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Sibelius concerti and introduced fifteen violin concertos to the American public, including those by Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Coleridge-Taylor, Arensky, Aulin, Huss, Shelley, Conus, Bruch and Rimsky-Korsakov. Powell championed works by American composers Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Victor Herbert, Cecil Burleigh, Edwin Grasse, John Alden Carpenter, Henry Holden Huss, Henry Rowe Shelley Arthur Foote, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Grace White. She performed works by female composers and composers of color, which was unheard-of at the time.
In a time where women rarely performed in public, Maud Powell revolutionized the violin recital. She performed concerts across the United States, including venues in the Wild West where people had never heard a formal concert before. Through innovative recital programming and by writing her own program notes, Powell strove to elevate American audiences’ appreciation for classical music. She performed special programs for children and for soldiers during World War I. Powell stated: “I do not play to them as an artist to the public, but as one human being to another.” Theodore Thomas chose Powell to represent America’s achievement in violin performance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Powell was the only woman violin soloist. During the exposition, Powell presented a paper to the Women’s Musical Congress titled “Women and the Violin,” which encouraged young women to take up the violin seriously.
Maud Powell had proven to the world that a woman could play the violin as well as a man, fulfilling the shared dreams of her mother and family friends, woman suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Maud Powell’s life ended in the same year that the Nineteenth Amendment granting national suffrage to women was ratified. Internationally recognized as America’s greatest violinist, she ranked with the supreme violinists of the time, including Joseph Joachim, Eugène Ysaÿe, and Fritz Kreisler. Maud Powell was missing from the history books until she was resurrected by Karen Shaffer and the Maud Powell Society. The Maud Powell Society for Music and Education has created the Maud Powell Signature, an online magazine featuring the contributions and achievements of women in classical music, to document the work and stories of other women whose stories have previously not been told. Maud Powell was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, 94 years after her death. Rachel Barton Pine writes of Maud Powell’s legacy: "It was a real revelation — not just because of how she was the greatest woman violinist in the world during her lifetime, and playing the works of black composers when white instrumentalists just didn't do that. It was the values by which she lived her life, playing concerts for communities that had never before had a classical concert, and using the recording technology as a further way to spread great music all over the place to people who had not yet had a chance to fall in love with it."
Learn more about Maud Powell at The Maud Powell Society.
STEPHANIE ANN BOYD, COMPOSER
Michigan-born, Manhattan-based American composer Stephanie Ann Boyd (b. 1990) writes melodic music about women’s memoirs and the natural world for symphonic and chamber ensembles. Her work has been performed in nearly all 50 states and has been commissioned by musicians and organizations in 37 countries. Boyd’s five ballets include works choreographed by New York City Ballet principal dancers Lauren Lovette, Ashley Bouder, NYCB soloist Peter Walker, and XAOC Contemporary Ballet’s Eryn Renee Young. Eero, a ballet commissioned by Access Contemporary Music and Open House New York, was written for the grand opening of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. Her music has been praised as “attractive lyricism” (Gramophone), “[with] ethereal dissonances” (Boston Globe), “[music that] didn’t let itself be eclipsed” (Texas Classical Review), “arrestingly poetic” (BMOP), and “wide ranging, imaginative” (Portland Press Herald).
Boyd’s music has been commissioned and performed by concertmasters of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, the Des Moines Symphony, the Faroe Islands Symphony, the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, the Fort Smith Symphony, the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, and principal players in the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been commissioned and/or played by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the New England Conservatory Philharmonic, the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, the New York Jazzharmonic, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Roosevelt University Orchestra, the Eureka Ensemble, the JVL Festival Orchestra, the Texas State University Symphony, the Cremona International Academy Orchestra, the UW La Crosse Symphony, the Detroit Civic Orchestra, and the El Paso Youth Symphony. Her work has been presented by the Thalia and her Sisters concert series, the Moirae Ensemble, and Sandcastle New Music in New York City; Æpex Contemporary Music in Michigan; Juventas New Music, Collage New Music, and the New Gallery Concert Series in Boston; Cincinnati Soundbox, and others. Stephanie has worked with conductors such as Andrew Litton, Lina Gonzales, Earl Lee, Nathan Aspinall, Cliff Colnot, Gill Rose, Julian Benichou, Kristo Kondakci, and Kevin Fitzgerald.
The 2020/2021 season includes commissions from the Wyoming Symphony, Astral Artists with cellist Tommy Mesa, violinist Megan Healy, pianists Lara Downes, Lise de la Salle, Marta Aznavoorian, Lucille Chung, Susie Maddocks, Adrienne Park, Diane Kaztenburg Braun and Music Street, Sarah Bob and the New Gallery Concert Series, Holly Roadfeldt, Marianne Parker, Eunbi Kim, the Kurganov-Finehouse Duo, and others. This season also includes performances by the Lincoln Trio, Juventas New Music, Jennifer Reason, Lisa Pegher, Shouthouse, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, including concerts at the Kaufman Center, the Boston New Music Festival, the Festival of New American Music, Pianoforte in Chicago, live on Chicago’s WFMT radio station, and elsewhere.
Stephanie holds degrees from Roosevelt University and New England Conservatory, and she was one of the last violin students of renowned pedagogue John Kendall.