The Women in Global Music Network is pleased to host the launch of Clara Schumann Studies on Tuesday 1 March 2022 in association with the University of California, Irvine.
Time: 11am (PST) | 1pm (CST) | 2pm (EST) | 7pm (GMT) | 8pm (CET)
Platform: Zoom (the link for which will be circulated to registrants on Monday 28 February)
The event will feature responses by Sarah Fritz, Valerie Woodring Goertzen, and Nina Scolnik, a recorded performance by pianist Lorna Griffitt, and an open discussion with those in attendance.
To register please click here.
Further information about the book can be found here.
Biographies
Sarah Fritz is a classical music journalist, novelist, and passionate advocate for marginalized composers on social media. Her Clara Schumann dedicated Twitter account seeks to educate, inspire, and entertain the jaded social media user about the truths and myths around the infamous Madame Schumann. Sarah has written about Clara Schumann for VAN Magazine, The Schubertian, American Guild of Organists Magazine, and more with a novel forthcoming. Under her singer hat as mezzo-soprano, Sarah Sensenig, she is a member of the voice faculty of the Westminster Conservatory at Rider University. She holds an M.M. from Eastman School of Music and B.M. from Westminster Choir College. Sarah debuted with the New York Lyric Opera Theatre in the title role of Handel's Alcina, and her other operatic roles include Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosí fan tutte, Valencienne in The Merry Widow, Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro, Nancy in Albert Herring, Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, and Dido in Dido and Aeneas.
Valerie Woodring Goertzen is Mary Freeman Wisdom Professor of Music at Loyola University New Orleans. Her work on Clara Schumann’s improvisations, programming, and pianism is included in several essay collections: In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl; Beyond Notes, ed. Rudolf Rasch; and the forthcoming Schumann-Studien, ed. Thomas Synofzik and Michael Heinemann, and Clara and Robert Schumann in Context, ed. Joe Davies and Roe-Min Kok. She published Clara Schumann: Preludes, Exercises, and Fugues with Hildegard Music. Goertzen is co-editor with Robert Whitehouse Eshbach of The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim (Boydell, 2021) and has edited two volumes for the Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe containing Brahms’s arrangements for four hands, two pianos, and piano solo. She is President of the American Brahms Society and co-edits the Society’s Newsletter with William P. Horne. Currently she is completing a book about Brahms’s piano arrangements.
Pianist Lorna Griffitt began her performing career at age 16 performing the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Louisville Orchestra conducted by Robert Whitney. Working with Menahem Pressler, she received her doctorate with distinction in piano performance from Indiana University. She has since appeared on different continents around the world in solo, chamber, and concerto performances, with regular summer participations at the Orfeo International Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy, the Rio International Cello Encounter in Brazil, and the Siletz Bay Music Festival in Oregon. She has enjoyed a long career as a professor of piano and joined the faculty at the University of California in 1993. Recently, Griffitt recorded a compact disc of solo and violin duo works by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms with violinist Haroutune Bedelian to be released by Centaur Records in 2022.
Nina Scolnik is Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches piano performance, art song, chamber music, and pedagogy. She has distinguished herself internationally through her masterclasses, lectures, research, and clinical success in the rehabilitation of injured musicians, and is one of only a few specialists in the field who work with pianists afflicted with focal dystonia. As a pianist, she has concertized in the United States and in Europe as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, chamber musician, and collaborative pianist. She has performed with the American, Angeles, Lydian, and Blaeu String Quartets, with principals of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and the Boston Symphony, and with acclaimed singers and string soloists. With her decades long involvement in performing and teaching the music of Clara Schumann, she welcomes the opportunity to enter the conversation of Clara Schumann’s diverse contributions to musical culture. She is keen to further dialogue between scholars, performers, and teachers on this towering figure of nineteenth-century musical life.