Concert of Music by Louise Talma, Friday, October 2, 5:30PM

Louise Talma Concert to celebrate the UNCG Linda Arnold Carlisle Grant Awarded to 

Music Librarian Sarah Dorsey

Louise Talma 1945

The FREE concert will take place on Friday evening, October 2^nd at 5:30 in the Organ Recital Hall at the UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance. Performers include UNCG faculty and students. Following the performance, there will be a reception in the Harold Schiffman Music Library.

Sarah B. Dorsey, Head of UNCG’s Harold Schiffman Music Library, is the recipient of the 2014-15 Women’s and Gender Studies Linda Arnold Carlisle Faculty Research Grant Award. Dorsey’s award supports her work on a biography of composer, pianist and pedagogue, Louise Talma (1906-1996), which she will complete while on Research Assignment during the spring semester of 2016.

Talma was a pioneering American composer of the twentieth century. The second female composer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, she was the first to win two consecutively (in 1946 and ‘47). She was the first American to teach with famed French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau. Thirteen years after receiving an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for her three act grand opera (The Alcestiad, written on a libretto by Thornton Wilder), Talma was finally 

invited to join the august institution in 1974, the first female composer so honored.

Chamber music, organ and piano works, including at least one world premiere, discovered last year at the Library of Congress, will make up the program. The pieces to be performed represent over five decades of compositional output by Talma, who lived in Manhattan most of her life, taught at Hunter College for over 50 years and composed in the woods of New Hampshire at the MacDowell Colony. Pieces presented will reveal Talma’s fascination with the environment.

In addition to celebrating the Carlisle Grant, Dorsey will feature recordings from the concert as part of her book which will link to a web site enabling her readers to hear the music while reading about it.

If you have any questions, contact Sarah at sbdorsey@uncg.edu or 336.334.5610.