JANE BROCKMAN- USA
BORN 17 MARCH
Jane Brockman’s concert music is influenced by her experience composing for dance and film, as well as the formal structure of academia.
Raised in upstate New York, Brockman was the first woman to earn a Doctorate in Music Composition in the 150-year history of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also studied in Paris with Max Deutsch on a Fulbright/ Alliance Française fellowship and in Vienna on a Rackham Prize fellowship. She has been awarded honors and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (3 years), the State of Connecticut, Meet the Composer, and the Composers Conference (directed by Mario Davidovsky). Her first orchestra piece won the Sigvald Thompson Prize for orchestral composition. Brockman’s mentors include Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett and Ross Lee Finney, as well as George Balch Wilson, Wallace Berry and Eugene Kurtz.
Brockman taught music theory and composition at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she founded the University’s Computer Music Studio and produced electronic music concerts. She has also been on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music/the University of Hartford, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Michigan. She was one of four composers selected nationally for a Sundance Institute Film Composers’ Lab fellowship, working with Henry Mancini, Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, David Newman and the Utah Symphony.
She has served on the Boards of Directors of New York’s Composers Concordance, as well as Women in Film, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists in Los Angeles. She also served for three years on review panels for the National Endowment for the arts, Washington, D.C. and produced concerts with the LoCal Composers Ensemble. She is the director/CEO of Music & Conversations, Inc.
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ELISABETH JACQUES DE LA GUERRE - FRANCE
BORN 17 MARCH
Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre was a French musician, harpsichordist and composer. She was born into a family of musicians and master instrument-makers in the parish of Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, Paris. A child prodigy, she received her initial musical education from her father and performed on the harpsichord at a young age before King Louis XIV. As a teenager she was accepted into the French court where her education was supervised by the king’s mistress, Françoise-Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan. She stayed with the royal court until it moved to Versailles and in 1684 she married the organist Marin de La Guerre, son of the late organist at the Sainte-Chapelle, Michel de La Guerre. After her marriage she taught, composed, and gave concerts at home and throughout Paris, to great acclaim.
Jacquet de La Guerre was one of the few well-known female composers of her time, and unlike many of her contemporaries, she composed in a wide variety of forms. Her talent and achievements were acknowledged by Titon du Tillet, who accorded her a place on his Mount Parnassus when she was only 26 years old, next to Lalande and Marais and directly below Lully.
Her first published work was her Premier livre de pièces de clavecin which includes unmeasured preludes and was printed in 1687. It was one of the few collections of harpsichord pieces printed in France in the 17th Century, along with those of Chambonnières, Lebègue and d'Anglebert. During the 1690s she composed a ballet, Les Jeux à l'honneur de la victoire (c. 1691), which has subsequently been lost. On 15 March 1694, the production of her opera Céphale et Procris at the Académie Royale de Musique was the first of an opera written by a woman in France. The five-act tragédie lyrique was set to a libretto by Duché de Vancy. Like her contemporaries, she also experimented with Italian genres: principally the sonata and the cantata. In 1695 she composed a set of trio sonatas which, with those of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, François Couperin, Jean-Féry Rebel and Sébastien de Brossard, are among the earliest French examples of the sonata.
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Sonata No 2 for Violin & Continuo by Elizabeth Jacques de la Guerre
Sonata No 2 for Violin & Continuo by Elizabeth Jacques de la Guerre
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