LARA POE - FINLAND/USA
BORN 28 JULY
BORN 28 JULY
Lara Poe is a Finnish-American composer who is currently based in London. She has collaborated with musicians such as the JACK quartet, Dal Niente, Sound Icon, Semiosis quartet, Jonathan Radford, Laura Farré Rosada, Aija Reke, and Timo Kinnunen, and her works have been performed in the US, as well as the UK, Finland, Latvia, Germany, and Taiwan. She has received recognition in several competitions. In 2017, Poe received the BMI Student Composer Award William Schuman Prize for the most outstanding score, and was the winner of the 2016 American Prize in Chamber Music composition, student division. Poe was also a participant in the 2017 Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, and her piece Mirror Rim was performed at the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival. She is currently taking part in the 2018-2019 LSO Panufnik Scheme.
Poe is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Music, where she received an Mmus with distinction. At the RCM she studied composition with Kenneth Hesketh as her principal composition professor, and she also studied electroacoustic music with Gilbert Nouno. Prior to her studies at the RCM, Poe studied with Martin Amlin, Richard Cornell, Joshua Fineberg, Paavo Korpijaakko, Rodney Lister, Alex Mincek, and Ketty Nez. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University, and studied at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School while in grade school. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree, Poe received the both the Boston University’s Wainwright prize and Department of Music Theory and Composition award in 2016, and was inducted into the music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda in April 2016.
Poe's current projects include Sonifying Noise Pollution, which is a collaboration with Royal College of Art graduate Jennifer Haugan. This project is an interactive, multimedia examination of noise pollution levels throughout the UK. Poe and Haugan presented Sonifying Noise Pollution at the 2017 IRCAM forums in April 2017, and are working to include more data points and more interactive features. Other projects include collaborations with saxophonist Jonathan Radford, the Megalopolis Saxophone orchestra, and accordion-percussion duo km2.
♫ LISTEN
Piano Concerto N.1 - II. Andante by Lara Poe
LEONORA DUARTE - BELGIUM
Leonora Duarte was a Flemish composer and musician, born in Antwerp. She belonged to a wealthy Portuguese-Jewish family who were marrano, meaning they outwardly acted as Catholics while secretly maintaining their Jewish faith and practices. She was baptized on 28 July 1610.
Having been one of the six siblings, in the well known musical family of the Duartes, Leonora composed seven sinfonias which are apparently the earliest music written for viol by a woman in the 17th century.
The Duarte home was a center for music-making and had contact with many important families in the Low Countries and England, including one of the most influential Dutchman of all time in, regards to art and culture, Constantijn Huygens. Duarte wrote for violconsort. Her surviving compositions include seven fantasies for a consort of five viols.
As a young composer, Leonora Duarte wrote a set of seven abstract fantasies (one in two parts), written for five viols. These seven short pieces are in the late Jacobean style and called ‘Symphonies’. Her brother, Diego Duarte, set to music various poems by William Cavendish (1650s) and later the psalm paraphrases of Godeau (1673–85), which he dedicated to Constantijn Huygens. None of these works, possibly all for one voice with basso continuo, has survived today.
Leonora Duarte was never commissioned by the church or the court over her lifetime, but stood out in her musical family due to her compositional talent. Her father, Gaspar, was influenced so much by her work, that he hired a professional to transcribe her work and published in on his behalf.
Leonora was capable of combining her native talent with the latest ideas and theory in Italian and French music due to the rich traffic of visitors from all parts of Europe that regularly made it to the Duarte’s house on the Meir. Historical documentation provides ample evidence that the Duarte family entertained important relations with the great Dutchman, Constantijn Huygens. Influences can be noted and applied, regarding the Duarte family and their guests which at one time included, Dirk Sweelinck, son of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the Dutch composer whose work helped mark the transition between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music.
Leonora’s seven short sinfonias reflect the creation and compositional workings of Baroque music within the domestic sphere, where it would have originally been heard and performed.
♫ LISTEN
Sinfonia N. 1 by Leonora Duarte
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