Our three-concert summer series celebrates women in all aspects of musical creation, performance, and experience by delving into how women were influential as patrons, how women historically seized the spotlight as performers (both as singers and instrumentalists), and how women made strides in the still-male dominated world of music composition.

Our final concert of the summer series in 2019 will focus on female composition; there are a number of women composers from the early modern era, but perhaps the most well-known today is Barbara Strozzi, who was born in August 1619 and whose 400^th birthday we will celebrate in August 2019. We will also perform music by other female composers of the Baroque period such as Francesca Caccini, Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, and others. In celebration of these historical female composers, we will also premiere a commissioned contemporary work for Baroque ensemble composed by Ingrid Stölzel, Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Kansas. Her work will be paired with Strozzi’s cantata “Che si può fare”; this pairing, between a work written in the seventeenth century and one written in 2019 will highlight the presence of women in music composition over the past four hundred years.