SHE Festival Vignette Series Features Musicians From Campus and Community

The U of A's Department of Music and its Community Music School present a vignette concert series for the 2021 SHE Festival of Women in Music.

Throughout the month of March, the department will share short videos of performances via YouTube and social media. Each performance features music written by women from numerous time periods and includes works by Florence Price, Thea Musgrave and Shelley Washington, to name but a few.

The partnership between the department and the Community Music School highlights the possibilities for professional and developing musicians to go beyond standard repertoires. Many of the composers featured in this series continue to be underrepresented in programming and this is one small part that the SHE Festival strives to remedy. Through this varied programming, the festival brings new and old works to new audiences via social media.

A full list of the vignette concerts can be found at fulbright.uark.edu/shefestival and on the Department's YouTube channel SHE Festival playlist.

Some highlights of the already released vignettes include performances by Sakura Rieck, Michael Lindsey, Moon-Sook Park and Catalina Ortega.

Sakura Rieck is a violin student in the Suzuki Music School of Arkansas housed at the U of A Community Music School. Rieck is a senior at Fayetteville High School and studies with Suzuki instructor Miho Oda Sakon. In this video, Rieck and Sakon perform "The Puppet Show" by Josephine Trott.

Michael Lindsey is an oboe student of Theresa Delaplain in the Department of Music. Lindsey performs a piece first performed in 1987 for solo oboe and tape. This piece, "Niobe" by Thea Musgrave, is an intriguing piece inspired by the myth of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, who was turned to stone. Lindsey's performance in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall is an experience for listeners in the continued growth of mixed-media performance.

Moon-Sook Park is associate professor of voice at the U of A. She is a noted scholar and performer of Korean Art Songs in addition to a fruitful career as a teacher and performer in Europe in arts song and opera. Her contribution to the 2021 SHE Festival was recorded in late 2020 in an international collaboration. Park improvised on a Korean folksong for "Kashiri 2020," which expresses feelings of loss, and collaborated with live art by Sukjin Kim filmed in Edinburgh, Scotland, a reflective collaboration to reflect on 2020.

Catalina Ortega is instructor of flute and experiencing music at the U of A. She works hard to incorporate a variety of repertories, including newly written music, into her teaching practice and encourages her students to seek out new expressions in their musical journeys. Ortega performs a piece by Chinese-American composer Chen Yi for solo flute. Ortega performs this introspective piece called "Memory," in remembrance of her father who died in 2020.

Over two dozen more videos will be shared this month, so please us follow on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. For more information on the festival, its guests, and the vignette series, visit Fulbright.uark.edu/shefestival.