About this Event
The concert will be the culmination of the intensive 12-day Wildflower Composers Festival program where the young composers will have engaged in daily seminars, taken composition lessons, learned from experts about compositional topics like film scoring and writing with text, and workshopped their compositions with professional performers. The new pieces that they have created will be premiered and recorded at the July 19 performance. No tickets or pre-registration is required.
“Wildflower is one of the most supportive and exciting spaces that I have gotten to be a part of,” said Wildflower alum and intern Cece Olzewski, who is now studying composition at Northwestern University. “Every seminar leaves me feeling inspired to get writing.”
The 18 musicians come from around the country and have had a varying range of experience with composition. Faculty and professional musicians participating in the Wildflower Composers Festival include Maren Brehm (mezzo soprano, The Crossing), Tessa Ellis (trumpet, Arcana New Music Ensemble), Yumi Kendall (Associate Principal Cello, Philadelphia Orchestra), and Hanchien Lee (piano, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society).
Wildflower Composers was founded by Dr. Erin Busch in 2018 as the Young Women Composers Camp (YWCC) as a way to address the gender disparity in contemporary classical music. A 2023–2024 season analysis of the top 111 orchestras in the world found that 92.5% of the pieces performed were composed by men (Donne - Women in Music, June 2024). The organization brings together young, gender-marginalized composers for composition mentorship, coursework, and community-building. With the help of staff and faculty members at the Boyer College of Music at Temple University, the first season was launched in 2018 with 18 high school students from across the country.
Since then, the organization has run a summer festival each July and has facilitated more than 150 world premieres. Wildflower has also cultivated relationships with many arts presenters in Philadelphia and beyond to offer regular performances and paid commissions to their alumni pool, including Network for New Music, Penn State University Choir, the Relâche Ensemble, and the Women's Sacred Music Project, among others.
“Female and gender-expansive composers remain significantly under-represented in classical music,” says Erin Busch, Founder and Executive Director. “Wildflower provides a unique and welcoming space for these young musicians to experiment, and it’s always exciting to see how their ideas develop when they are in community with one another.”
For more information about Wildflower Composers visit https://wildflowercomposers.org or email Erin Busch at [email protected].
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rock Hall, 1715 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, United States
USD 0.00
