Music Department Hosts Three Concerts November 15-17

The Cottey College Department of Music is pleased to present three great events the weekend of November 15-17. Mark your calendars for the following concerts:

• Cottey College Chamber Singers, Friday, November 15, 7:30 p.m.
• Violet and the Undercurrents, Saturday, November 16, 7 p.m.
• Women of Note, Kansas City Baroque Consortium, Sunday, November 17, 3 p.m.

All three events take place in the Missouri Recital Hall, and all are free to the public.

The Chamber Singers fall concert will be under the direction of Professor Theresa Spencer. The featured music will represent a wide variety of styles and eras.

Violet and the Undercurrents, an all-female band out of Columbia, Missouri, is a true marriage of equals between Vonder Haar, guitarist Lizzy Weiland, bassist Linda Bott and ace drummer Phylshawn Johnson. The quartet can do rock and folk, groove-oriented tunes and guitar-driven ones. The band’s flexibility allows it to express an uncommonly deep and wide emotional range and follow Vonder Haar’s peculiar, magnetic vocal melodies like rivers to the sea.

Kansas City Baroque Consortium will present a program of works by female composers of the baroque era. The program will also include a new commission from Ingrid Stölzel, “But a Day,” as part of KC Baroque’s composers’ initiative, New Music for Old Instruments.

The opportunities for women in the 17th and 18th centuries were most often limited to traditional roles of family life or the convent. Within the convent, women were free to compose, sing, and play, and much of their writing is for the church. Outside the convent, a few fortunate women received support from fathers or other supportive male figures that helped elevate their voice and their music. But even contemporary musicology, nearly 400 hundred years later, has only just begun to lift the veil of obscurity that rests over the works of these female composers.

The Women of Note concert will celebrate the 400th Anniversary of the birth of Barbara Strozzi, recognized as the most prolific composer – man or woman – of printed secular vocal music in Venice in the middle of the 17th century. Soprano, Victoria Botero, who has specialized in the study of music of Barbara Strozzi, will be a featured guest artist. The program will also include works by other important composers of the era: Isabella Leonarda, Elizabeth -Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, and Mademoiselle Duval.

The Recital Hall is inside the Haidee and Allen Wild Center for the Arts on the northeast corner of Austin and Tower streets in Nevada, Missouri.