MARIE BARKER NELSON BENNET - USA
BORN 15 JUNE
BORN 15 JUNE
Marie Barker Nelson Bennet was born in 1926. When she was five or six years old, she began to hear original music in her head. At the time, she didn’t know how to capture it. A few years passed before she learned how to notate her ideas as music. Her mother was a professional soprano, and there was always music in her home. Additionally, Marie was lucky to fall under the guidance of some exceptional music teachers early on, Becky Almond, Gladys Gladstone and Helen Taylor Johannesen (who was her 5th grade teacher). By the age of 14, she was accompanying her mother in public performances.
When she was studying music composition at the University of Utah in the 1940s, Marie attended a seminar featuring an invited music critic from Washington, D.C. As he addressed the students, he surveyed the room, noticed her and other students, and said, boldly, “There will never be a woman composer that’s worth anything.”
Before 1950, there were few serious composers in America who were women. At the time, Barker was preparing to enter a competition for new music, and she submitted her music under a male pseudonym, David Rose, to avoid potential bias. Although she felt accepted in her local community, she was intimidated as a woman composer. But the politics of gender were not her principal motivations; she simply yearned to write the highest quality music that she could.
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MODESTA BOR - VENEZUELA
BORN 15 JUNE
Modesta Bor was born in Juan Griego, Isla de Margarita. She studied in Caracas with Elena Arrarte, Juan Bautista Plaza, Antonio Estévez, Maria de Lourdes Rotundo and Vicente Emilio Sojo, graduating with a degree in composition in 1959. She continued her studies at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Aram Khachaturian. In 1960 she won her first National Music Prize with Sonata for violin and piano.
After completing her studies, Bor returned to Venezuela to work as a composer, teacher and choir director, becoming head of the music department in the Central University of Venezuela Culture Department. She also served as director of the musicology section of Folklore Research of the National Service. Bor composed for orchestra, chamber ensemble, piano and vocal performance, writing more than 95 choral works for mixed and 130 for equal-voice choir.
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