Meet the ComposHER: Jodie Blackshaw

Jodie Blackshaw is an Australian composer and advocates for diversity. She started her connections with music by learning the clarinet in the school band  when she was young and, from that on, she became an educator and a musician.

She is an extremely dedicated teacher and in her profession "my ultimate goal was to foster self-esteem and love of self through music".

Learn more about her and her awesome work in the Meet the ComposHer of this week!

 

At the age of 15 I knew I wanted to make music my life, but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I decided to pursue composition. I was recently in the house where I grew up, and discovered so many little sketches on manuscript paper – they were throughout all of my old school books. I had forgotten how much I was always musical scribbling ideas down, so perhaps I had always been a composer, just didn’t realise it until a little later.

Larry Sitsky. Larry was my undergraduate composition teacher and he teaches composition from a very romantic perspective. Larry never once asked me to “write in the style of”, instead, he was able to draw out my own compositional voice through a series of personal, musical explorations. I will be forever grateful for his approach.

I have found myself to be a female, Australian wind band composer. THIS is my greatest challenge. I am alienated in my own country for writing for wind band, and I am often alienated in wind band circles because of my gender and my nationality. I also offer a unique voice to the wind band genre and don’t follow all of the “expected” orchestration “rules”. I also stem from a different pedagogical works approach when writing works for children, which is not the mainstream. In many ways, every aspect of my composing life is a challenge, but what do we live for?

I am a ‘colour-first’ composer. That is, I conceive music in clouds of tone colour before anything else. To unearth these colours and transform them into musical ideas, I create drawings and mind-maps. From here, these are transformed into harmonies and melodic fragments.

Peace Dancer:

Sarah Hopkins “Past Life Melodies”

Save up and buy a house/apartment earlier than you think!

Don’t try and be anyone else, but you.

Keep looking for the beauty inside each and every person, regardless of their skin or gender.

FOLLOW JODIE:
WEBSITE

11 FEBRUARY

LOÏSA PUGET - FRANCE
Born 11 February


More about her here

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OLGA RAYEVA - RUSSIA
Born 11 February

More about her here

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 Check here last year's composers of the day

11 FEBRUARY 2019

REENA ESMAIL - USA
BORN 11 FEBRUARY

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. 

In recent seasons, Esmail has worked with the Kronos Quartet, Albany Symphony, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, Salastina Music Society, SOLI, and American Composers Orchestra. Her work is performed regularly throughout the US and abroad, and has been programmed at Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Centre in London, Schloss Esterhazy in Hungary, and throughout India. She has served as Composer in Residence for Albany Symphony (2016-17), Street Symphony (2016-present) in downtown Los Angeles, Concerts on the Slope (2015-16) in Brooklyn, NY and the Pasadena Master Chorale (2014-16) in Pasadena, CA. 

Esmail received a 2011-12 Fulbright-Nehru to study Hindustani music in India, where she was also a 2011 INK Fellow (in association with TED). In 2010, Esmail co-founded of Yale’s Hindi a cappella group, Sur et Veritaal. Esmail’s doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers. Her teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Saili Oak.

♫ LISTEN

Even after all this time by Reena Esmail 

►REENA ESMAIL's WEBSITE

ADELE AUS DER OHE - GERMANY

BORN 11 FEBRUARY

Adele aus der Ohe was a German concert pianist and composer. Her compositions, including the Suite No. 2 in E major, Op. 8, were published by G. Schirmer Inc. 

Adele aus der Ohe was highly endowed and had a distinctive degree of temperament as a pianist. As already mentioned by magazines and music journals of her time, she was successful not only as such, but also as a composer, as appropriately described in a concert review from Hamburg in January 1910, where she was also honoured by the work she had performed.

Between 1895 and 1906, her name appeared regularly in the renowned publishers catalogue of G. Schirmer (New York) and Ries & Erler (Berlin). Among her compositions are numerous songs, some with words by Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909), several piano works, and duets for violin and piano. And although further prints after 1906 are not available, a note in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik suggests that after her retreat from the American musical life, she continued her composing work.

Aus der Ohe's repertory was large and included both Brahms concertos, the second of which she played as early as 1899 in Boston. She specialized in large-scale works; a typical program she played in Boston consisted of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, Schumann's Fantasie in C and Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan.

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►FIND SCORES BY ADELE AUS DER OHE