Ensemble Polyphonica Features Female Composers

Women of Note in concert

Research in women's studies has affected many fields, including musicology, with the emergence of many previously unknown women composers of the past. The "Women of Note" concert on April 14 featured select works by six such composers-distinguished female musicians from the twelfth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries. The concert, sponsored by the Zaki Nassif Music Program of the Fine Arts and Art History Department at AUB, was performed by the Ensemble Polyphonica, a group of new and gifted Lebanese ensemble singers, several of whom are AUB students or graduates.

Two songs by medieval composer and musical dramatist Hildegard of Bingen, celebrating light, divinity, and wisdom, set the serene atmosphere at Assembly Hall. Hildegard was a true medieval polymath, who is also known as an artist, author, philosopher, physician, and visionary leader.

Cheryl Lynn Helm, the transcriber of Hildegard's works on the program, was inspired to create an entirely new composition of one of Hildegard's works, O Virtus Sapientiae (O Strength of Wisdom). The remix, to borrow from contemporary lingo, received the listeners' approval.

Fast forward a few centuries in time, and the music at Assembly Hall was replaced by that of nineteenth-century composer Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Both of her pieces on the program used typical song structures and tonal schemes, while illustrating the romantic theme of humans in relation to nature.

The second half of the concert was devoted to twentieth-century female composers, namely Lebanese composer Joelle Khoury, Sicilian composer Nelly Lipuma, and Meredith Monk, a leader in American music, theater, and filmmaking for the past three decades. Lipuma's songs were highly chromatic and dissonant, despite their themes of beauty, peace, and serenity.

In her third work for the concert, Khoury, who is an active jazz pianist, composed "The Waves," a setting of texts by Virginia Woolf for actors, piano, and electronic sound. Finally, the singers concluded the evening with two pieces from Monk's scores. Available in print, they are from "The Games: A Science Fiction Opera," which won the American National Music Theater Award in 1986.

The Ensemble Polyphonica, which started rehearsing for the concert in August 2007, performed under the baton of conductor Paul Meers and were accompanied on the organ by Joelle Khoury. Meers said that a video of the concert will soon be uploaded on the newly created "AUB at Lebanon" branded channel on You Tube, the popular video-sharing website.