Arts

Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Grants 2019

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The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation announced its 2019 grants in The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation’s Orchestra Commissioning Program for Emerging Female Composers.

These grants fund commissions for emerging female composers at selected orchestras nationwide.

The 2019 recipients are:

  • Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Dallas, TX – Composer Angelica Negron
  • Philadelphia Orchestra, Philadelphia, PA – Composer Xi Wang

The 2019 awards are part of a series of annual awards for female composers that the Foundation has made since 2013. Past grants have been made to, among others, the New York Philharmonic for Ashley Fure, Los Angeles Philharmonic for Natacha Diels and Chicago Symphony Orchestra for Amy Beth Kirsten. The Foundation also funds awards to emerging female composers through the Earshot Program, a partnership of the League of American Orchestras, the American Composers Orchestra, American Composers Forum and New Music USA, as well as awards to composers via the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and National Sawdust.

The Foundation has made numerous grants to support commissions for female composers, focusing its grantmaking on a broad diversity of voices that need to be heard. The Foundation makes similar awards to emerging female playwrights and choreographers in the fields of theater, opera, and ballet. The Foundation carries on the principles of its founder, Virginia B. Toulmin, a long-time patron of the arts, who believed in equal access and opportunity for women.

Toulmin Foundation Ballet Grants 2019

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The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation announced its 2019 grants in The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation’s Ballet Commissioning Program for Emerging Female Choreographers.

These grants fund commissions for emerging female choreographers at selected ballet companies nationwide.

The 2019 recipients are:

  • Boston Ballet, Boston, MA – for Choreographer Lauren Flower
  • Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle, WA – for Choreographer Eva Stone
  • Ballet West, Salt Lake City, UT – for Choreographer Jennifer Archibald

These grants are in addition to grants previously awarded in 2019 to New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater for their new ballets by emerging female choreographers. The 2019 awards are part of a series of annual awards for female choreographers that the Foundation has made since 2013, including to New York City Ballet for Lauren Lovett and Gianna Reisen, Dance Theater of Harlem for Claudia Schreier and Atlanta Ballet for Gemma Bond.

The Foundation has made numerous grants to support commissions for emerging female choreographers, focusing its grantmaking on a broad diversity of voices that need to be heard. The Foundation makes similar awards to emerging female playwrights and composers in the fields of theater, symphonic music and opera. The Foundation carries on the principles of its founder, Virginia B. Toulmin, a long-time patron of the arts, who believed in equal access and opportunity for women.

Toulmin Foundation Ballet School Grants 2019

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The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation announced its 2019 grants in The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation’s Ballet Schools’ Training Program for Female Student Choreographers.

These grants fund the training of female student choreographers at selected ballet schools nationwide.

The 2019 recipients are:

  • Boston Ballet School, Boston, MA — Student Choreographic Project for the 2019/2020 Academic Year
  • Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle, WA – New Voices: Choreography and Process for Young Women in Dance

In past years, the Foundation has supported the schools of both Boston and Pacific Northwest Ballets for their programs to encourage, mentor and train emerging female choreographers among their students. The Foundation has also supported, and continues to support, a similar program at the School of American Ballet in New York City. The Foundation also supports commissions for female choreographers via Dance USA and at the Fall for Dance Festival at New York City Center, the Joyce Theater Ballet Festival and the Vail Dance Festival.

The Foundation has made numerous grants to support commissions for female choreographers, focusing its grant-making on a broad diversity of voices that need to be heard. The Foundation makes similar awards to emerging female playwrights and composers in the fields of theater, symphonic music and opera. The Foundation carries on the principles of its founder, Virginia B. Toulmin, a long-time patron of the arts, who believed in equal access and opportunity for women.

Toulmin Foundation Theater Grants 2019

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The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Announced 2019 grants For Its Women Playwrights Commissioning Program.

The 2019 recipients are:

Atlantic Theater, New York, NY – Playwright Sanaz Toossi

New York Theater Workshop, New York, NY – Playwright Mfoniso Udofia

Primary Stages, New York, NY – Playwright Sarah Mantell

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, New York, NY – Playwright Stacey Rose

The Public Theater, New York, NY – Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza

The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA – Playwright Mary Tuomanen

Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago, IL – Playwright Masi Asare

The 2019 awards are the seventh in a series of annual awards for female playwrights that the foundation has made since 2013. Past recipients include: The Public Theater for Patricia lone Lloyd for Eve’s Song, Soho Rep for Jackie Sibblies Drury for Fairview and Culture Project for Staceyann Chin for MotherStruck!

The Foundation has made over 50 grants to support commissions for emerging female playwrights, focusing its grantmaking on a broad diversity of voices that need to be heard. The Foundation makes similar awards to emerging female composers and choreographers in the fields of opera, symphonic music and ballet. The Foundation carries on the principles of its founder, Virginia B. Toulmin, a long-time patron of the arts, who believed in equal access and opportunity for women.

NYU Center for Ballet Announcement

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NEWS RELEASE

Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Doubles Funding of Fellowship for Women Leaders in Dance at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU

Apr 17, 2018

The Center Will Expand Its Toulmin Fellowship to Support Choreographers and Composers Year-round.

The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (CBA) has received a two-year gift from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation that will more than double its current level of annual support for the Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Leaders in Dance, a unique fellowship designed to support the work of women in dance and promote broader equity in the field.

With this gift, the fellowship—formerly known as the Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Choreographers—will expand its applicant pool to include both women choreographers and women composers for dance. Additionally, it will support up to four fellows each year, allowing CBA to host Toulmin Fellows year-round.

The Foundation has provided three years of support to date (2015-2018). Past Toulmin Fellows include: Melissa Barak, Claudia Schreier, and current Toulmin Fellow Danielle Agami. Recipients of the 2018 – 2019 Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Leaders in Dance will be announced in May.

“In our partnership with The Center for Ballet and the Arts, we have found an ideal incubator for emerging female choreographers to learn, grow, and develop their art,” said Alexander C. Sanger, Trustee at the Foundation. “We are proud to expand the funding of the Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Leaders in Dance, giving both choreographers and composers the support needed to take risks, create new work, and collaborate as level actors in a dance landscape where leadership is historically dominated by men.”

The Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Leaders in Dance will provide fellows with a weekly stipend of $2,500. Fellows are also offered studio space, an office, access to housing, a project development fund, and the opportunity to be part of a community of artists and scholars with whom they can exchange ideas.

Applications for the 2019-2020 academic year will open in August 2018.

The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University is an international institute for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences. It exists to inspire new ideas and new ballets, expanding the way we think about ballet and bringing vitality to its history, practice and performance in the 21st century.

The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation has created a Program for Commissioning Women in the Performing Arts, through which it funds commissions of new works by women in symphonic music, opera, ballet and theater. The Foundation was created by Virginia B. Toulmin, who was passionately devoted to the performing arts and the advancement of women.

http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2018/april/virginia-b–toulmin-foundation-doubles-funding-of-fellowship-for.html

Can We Break the Mold in Classical Music?

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Is there a connection between the dire financial straits of many orchestras around the world and the mostly-traditional music they play? This question was brought home this week with news out of San Antonio, Texas, where the symphony closed its doors (though the city is trying to reopen them) and simultaneous news from Bachtrack releasing its annual classical music statistics.

 

https://bachtrack.com/classical-music-statistics-2017

 

I don’t pretend to know the inside story in San Antonio, but published reports indicate that private and public donations, and perhaps audience attendance, wasn’t enough to pay the bills. What I do know is what music the orchestra played. The spring schedule included: Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Elgar, Dvorak, Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, interspersed with assorted Pops and youth concerts. On the more modern front, the orchestra was scheduled to play Leonard Bernstein, it being his centenary, and a commendable smattering of living male composers (American, English and Russian), but no female composers, alive or dead. No composers of any ethnicity other than white were detected.

 

This tracks almost precisely the performance record of orchestras worldwide, with the exception that Bach is the most frequently performed composer around the world – Mozart and Beethoven come in 2nd and 3rd, followed by Brahms, Schubert and Tchaikovsky. 20th Century composers, all men, limp along distantly. There are no female composers in the top 100. There are 5 female conductors, up from zero a few years ago. Worldwide, Romantic Era music is the overwhelming majority, with 20th Century (mostly Russians) and Classical (Haydn, Handel, Vivaldi) vying for second.

By the way, opera and ballet are no different, with Die Zauberflote leading the opera world and Nutcracker the ballet world.

 

Perhaps audiences prefer music written a hundred years or more ago. These patrons fill the seats and make the donations.

 

Yet, I wonder what audiences are missing since many orchestras don’t give them a chance to find out. Maybe potential patrons stay at home because there is nothing new to learn at symphony hall. Other performing arts, not to mention the movies and TV, vie for their attention.

 

Orchestras need to be exciting, relevant and educational. They need to be embedded in their communities and communities in them. The shared experience of being in a concert hall has to be more than the same old same old. The experience has to be one talked about for days, or more, afterwards. I hope San Antonio doesn’t lose this precious resource. I hope the orchestra and its donors and the city take the chance to take a chance.  Music is vital in our lives; new music by new composers of every hue and gender should be given the chance to show it.

Women Can Write Ballet Music As Well as Men

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How many times have I heard at the end of a ballet performance, “Why did the choreographer select that piece of music?” Or, “I saw X choreograph that music much better.” Or, “The music didn’t fit the dance.”
While I don’t agree with Elizabeth Streb that music is the enemy of dance, some pieces of music are.
How do we help choreographers find an ally – a piece of music best suited to realize their artistic vision? Maybe by looking beyond what the herd is doing.
The country’s major ballet companies, and their choreographers, mostly male, almost universally choreograph to music composed by living and deceased men. That is the reality of the ballet world and the music world.
I reviewed the 2017 seasons of New York City Ballet, ABT, Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Pennsylvania and Joffrey Ballets The choreographers were overwhelmingly male. This is not news.
What is news is that the music was even more skewed male. The dead males – Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Chopin, Stravinsky – are heard repeatedly. The living composers are an eclectic lot – Glass, Stevens, Adams – again almost all male.
There was exactly one female composer: Fanny Mendelsohn Hensel, selected by choreographer Jessica Lang for her ballet, Her Notes, for ABT.
In the dozens and dozens of ballets performed by the nation’s major ballet companies in 2017, one ballet had music composed by a woman.
One.
Even the few female choreographers working for these major companies chose male-composed music.
No doubt there is less female-composed music to choose from now and in the past. There are few Fanny Mendelsohns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Women now are still not entering music conservatories equally with men. At Juilliard, for instance, female students comprise about 15% or less of the composition department – a situation that Juilliard is trying to rectify.
Choreography is hard. Composition is hard. No doubt. Matching the two is exponentially difficult. How can choreographers widen their radar to find music that speaks to them that inspires, that helps them realize their artistic aims?
Music publishers can help. They have libraries of composers – male and female – whom they represent. One can search for female composers on Spotify. One can talk to conservatories and their female faculty and students. Female composers of talent are out there. Looking for them may take just a bit more effort. I guarantee you will find original music that the herd won’t.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5a00d95be4b05c841816653b