BETTY ROE - UK
BORN 30 JULY
Betty Roe was born in North Kensington, London, England. Her father was a fishmonger at the Shepherd's Bush Market, and her mother was a bookkeeper. Roe took piano lessons from the age of six with Madam Dorina and began writing music and arrangements in her teens during World War II when she assisted with choirs at the local church. She studied piano with Fiona Addie, Muriel Dale, and Sadie MacCormack, and cello with Alison Dalrymple at the Royal Academy of Music, but left school in 1947 and took a job as a filing clerk. She continued at the Royal Academy in 1949, studying piano with York Bowen, cello with Alison Dalrymple, and voice with Jean McKenzie-Grieve. She continued her study of singing with Clive Carey, Roy Hickman, Peter van der Stolk, and Margaret Field-Hyde, and studied composition with Lennox Berkeley. In the 1950s she became involved with a drama group where she began writing for musicals. She also worked as a sessions singer with London ensembles.
Roe married John Bishop and had three children. She was Director of Music at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1968–78, and founded Thames Publishing with her husband in 1970. After his death in 2000 Thames Publishing became a division of William Elkin Music Services.
BORN 30 JULY
Betty Roe was born in North Kensington, London, England. Her father was a fishmonger at the Shepherd's Bush Market, and her mother was a bookkeeper. Roe took piano lessons from the age of six with Madam Dorina and began writing music and arrangements in her teens during World War II when she assisted with choirs at the local church. She studied piano with Fiona Addie, Muriel Dale, and Sadie MacCormack, and cello with Alison Dalrymple at the Royal Academy of Music, but left school in 1947 and took a job as a filing clerk. She continued at the Royal Academy in 1949, studying piano with York Bowen, cello with Alison Dalrymple, and voice with Jean McKenzie-Grieve. She continued her study of singing with Clive Carey, Roy Hickman, Peter van der Stolk, and Margaret Field-Hyde, and studied composition with Lennox Berkeley. In the 1950s she became involved with a drama group where she began writing for musicals. She also worked as a sessions singer with London ensembles.
Roe married John Bishop and had three children. She was Director of Music at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1968–78, and founded Thames Publishing with her husband in 1970. After his death in 2000 Thames Publishing became a division of William Elkin Music Services.
♫ LISTEN
The Fair Singer bt Betty Roe
ELISENDA FÁBREGAS - SPAIN
BORN 30 JULY
BORN 30 JULY
Spanish/American composer Elisenda Fábregas has been praised for writing with an “imaginatively colored … idiom” (The New York Times) and for possessing an “individuality [which] shows through in yearning dissonances, quirky juxtapositions of thematic material and a pervasive sensuality not unlike that of her native Barcelona” (San Antonio Express News). Fabregas’s music has been described as “complex and haunting” (The Washington Post) with abundant “expressive long lines and gorgeous lyricism”(NATS Journal), and for having “an emotionally compelling aura” (The New Mexican News) and a “marvelous sense of progression and development” (American Music Teacher Magazine). In occasion of winning the MTNA Shepherd Distinguished Composer Award in the year 2000, the American Teacher Magazine praised Fábregas for writing with a unique perspective comparing her to the “The Man with a Blue Guitar” (1937) in the Wallace Stevens’s poem:“Fabregas is one gifted with a blue guitar. Her tunes are beyond us, yet ourselves. Indeed they are tunes of things exactly as they are.” Fábregas music covers a wide range of states, from “dreamlike images … and illusive rhythms and harmonies that permeate misty settings” [as in the piano solo ‘Hommage a Mozart,‘] to music described as “notable in its sturdy and arresting generative themes” with “motoric, muscular, exciting fast movements” (San Antonio Express News.).
In the last five years, Elisenda has focused her energies on writing for orchestra. Accents Catalans (2016) for orchestra, commissioned by the Bucheon Philharmonic and premiered by maestro Youngmin Park at the Seoul Arts Center Concert Hall as part of the Orchestra Festival at SAC on April 10 of 2016; an additional performance took place at Bucheon’s Citizen Hall in Bucheon, South Korea, on September 30, 2016. Elisenda’s working relationship with the Bucheon Philharmonic continues with a new commission to write an orchestral song cycle, Somnis desperts, based on Catalan poetry by J.V. Foix.
♫ LISTEN
Voces de mi Terra by Elisenda Fábregas
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