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 2nd 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.
