Next Thing You Know, They'll Let Women Vote...

Via Daniel Felsenfeld's awesome new blog :

"Finally, at long last, and to much hoo-hah in the press, a woman will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, a famously stubborn all-male holdout organization which had the grace, a few years back, to finally admit a female to their orchestral ranks--a harpist, of course. But hell, this is progress!"

Please join me as I shamelessly plug the Women In Music Festival (WMF) at the Eastman School of Music. Designed to celebrate and promote women involved in all aspects of music, including composition, performance, teaching, scholarship, and administration, it was a great hit last year - its inaugural season.

It was much fun co-founding the festival - from creating the logo and image*, to formulating the mission statement, and formatting the layout of the concerts, etc. It will be nice to focus more on programming and Libby Larsen's visit, among other things, this time around. I'm thrilled to serve as the assistant director of the festival again this year; the director, Dr. Sylvie Beaudette, is one of the most amazing women I have ever met.

*I really had a blast with the festival's logo. My seed ideas consisted of doing something along the lines of MU[women]SIC (get it? women in the word "music"?!). Finally, I designed the concept of a half note combined with the female sign. I picked orange and grey because I think those colors look nice together, and we wanted to dispel the idea that anything related to women had to be pink. Nathan, my amazing graphic designer friend, saw the potential desperately trying to peek out of my feeble attempts forged in the deep dark files of Microsoft Word, and actually made logo look cool (see above).