WoCo Fest 2024: Evolve
Saturday at The Mansion
Sat, April 13 beginning at 1pm in the Mansion at Strathmore
Fulfill your wanderlust by immersing yourself in a day of music exploration at the second day of WoCo Fest 2024: Evolve at The Mansion at Strathmore! Be enthralled by a mesmerizing, interactive sound installation, live composer workshops, and engaging events from artists, composers, and scholars. Explore exhibitor booths from Ebony Music, Women in Music DC, Washington Women in Jazz, Key of She Jazz, Sleepy Puppy Press, Aubrey Bergauer’s Run It Like a Business, and more, get free headshots with M3 Mitchell Media & Marketing, and enjoy dining and shopping opportunities. Food trucks will be on site during the day and there will be a public food and wine reception after the final performance by Sarah Cahill.
Your ticket grants you access to all events in the Mansion, starting at just $10.
Same-day passes available in person. Online ticketing has been closed.
Scroll down to learn more about each event.
The Music Room at The Mansion
1:30pm - Musica Spira:
Forth From Her Pen
“Forth From Her Pen” features music by seventeenth-century Italian women whose works would come to define some of the most important genres of the Baroque period. These women’s careers flourished in a variety of settings, including courts, convents, and academies. Join Musica Spira for a program of resplendent works for two sopranos, viola da gamba, and harpsichord by Isabella Leonarda, Maria Perucona, Francesca Caccini, Antonia Bembo, and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.
3pm - Casarrubios Plays: Casarrubios and Boulanger
Praised by The New York Times for having "traversed the palette of emotions" with "gorgeous tone and an edge-of-seat intensity," Spanish cellist and composer Andrea Casarrubios performs her own works alongside music by Nadia Boulanger. The program will include SEVEN, a piece for solo cello conceived as a tribute to healthcare workers in 2020; Mensajes del Agua, inspired by the perfect shapes found in crystals from unpolluted frozen water, as well as Silbo, a piece influenced by the fascinating world of whistling languages. The program includes works for cello and piano as well as four pieces by Casarrubios for cello quartet.
4:30pm - Ghost Ensemble
This concert celebrates the rich 12-year collaboration between Ghost Ensemble and composer/oboist/installation artist Sky Macklay. Now a composition professor at Peabody, Sky has been the oboist with Ghost Ensemble since their founding in 2012, and her music for the group runs the gamut from noisy and raucous to sublimely harmonious. Inspired by the unique timbres and theatrical talents of Ghost Ensemble, Sky's music for Ghost is playful and virtuosic, asking the players to duet with her kinetic inflatable sculptures and converse with a sexy-voiced A.I.
6pm - Sarah Cahill: The Future is Female
Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, an investigation and reframing of the piano literature featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, from the Baroque to the present day, including new commissioned works. This program takes you on a journey through the evolution of piano literature, with works by Baroque composer Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Romantic composer Louise Farrenc, 20th century composer Margaret Bonds, contemporary composer Theresa Wong, and more.
First Floor at The Mansion
EXHIBITOR TABLES
M3 | Mitchell Media & Marketing - FREE HEADSHOTS
In 2016, Dr. Mitchell founded “M3 | Music Media & Marketing” as a musician helping other musicians leverage digital media for brand storytelling. Today, Dr. Mitchell supports creatives, arts organizations, and beyond with personalized multimedia production and digital marketing consulting as the co-founder, chief executive officer, and principal consultant of M3 | Mitchell Media & Marketing, LLC.
A paid ticket is required to sign up for headshots. Sign up for a time here.
1-1 Consultations with Aubrey Bergauer
Hailed as “the Steve Jobs of classical music” (Observer) and “the Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony” (LA Review of Books), Aubrey Bergauer is known for her results-driven, customer-centric, data-obsessed pursuit of changing the narrative for the performing arts. A “dynamic administrator” with an “unquenchable drive for canny innovation” (San Francisco Chronicle), she’s held offstage roles managing millions in revenue at major institutions including the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As chief executive of the California Symphony, Bergauer propelled the organization to double the size of its audience and nearly quadrupled the donor base.
Bergauer helps organizations and individuals transform from scarcity to opportunity, make money, and grow the base of fans and supporters. Her ability to cast and communicate vision moves large teams forward and brings stakeholders together, earning “a reputation for coming up with great ideas and then realizing them” (San Francisco Classical Voice). With a track record for strategically increasing revenue and relevance, leveraging digital content and technology, and prioritizing diversity and inclusion on stage and off, Bergauer sees a better way forward for classical music and knows how to achieve it.
A paid ticket is required to sign up for free one-on-one consultations. 1-1 Consultations are now fully booked.
Ebony Music
Ebony Music Inc. promotes and advocates for the inclusion of piano music by Black composers while celebrating the contributions of Black Classical pianists in the industry.
Women in Music DC
Established in 2015, Women in Music DC is a chapter of WIM that is dedicated to fostering equality in the music industry through the support and advancement of women. We aim to serve the creative and professional DMV community through meaningful programming and networking.
Washington Women in Jazz
Key of She Jazz
Key of She Jazz is a nonprofit organization devoted to supporting and encouraging girls and nonbinary students in jazz, starting in the middle school years through high school, college, and beyond so that we inspire change and ultimately help equalize the ratio of girls to guys in jazz, starting in schools.
Sleepy Puppy Press
Sleepy Puppy Press specializes in string music for pedagogy and playing. As the home publisher of Violin Music by Women: A Graded Anthology, we feature music off the beaten path for students, teachers, and professionals, celebrating and encouraging diversity in performance and teaching.
Dulcamara Press
Dulcamara Press was founded in April 2022. We are passionate about music by underrepresented composers from all historical eras, new music by living composers, and early music that has been previously unpublished or only available in scholarly editions with limited accessibility to performers. Our goal is to facilitate the performance and awareness of music that has been overlooked, neglected, or otherwise unavailable.
Every edition from Dulcamara Press is researched with scholarly rigor and edited with meticulous care. Our scores are thoughtfully designed for clarity, readability, and practical performance use. Each score is printed on high-quality paper and hand-sewn in a durable, lay-flat binding that is made to last. Our beautiful designs, high quality printing and binding, and careful attention to notational nuance, page-turns, and readability make Dulcamara editions a pleasure to use for both performance and study.
Invitational Gallery at The Mansion
PANELS & PRESENTATIONS
1:45pm - Aubrey Bergauer: Run It Like A Business
If you hate that phrase, you’re not alone. But the arts are a business, a sector worth billions whose institutions serve almost every region in the country. Today, arts organizations are trying to rebuild audiences, reclaim relevance, and confront centuries of systemic discrimination.
The solutions are right before our eyes though. Volumes of data, research, and case studies from the for-profit sector demonstrate how to achieve success across creating places of belonging for our customers, places of psychological safety for our artists and administrators, and places that live their values internally and externally.
Just because arts organizations are non-profits doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make money; it means the money we make goes back to fund the mission. And it means a sustainable model is still necessary. Running it like a business isn’t unwitting board speak; it’s essential to revitalize this critical, massive economic engine and ultimately better serve the art and its consumers in the new normal ahead.
Based on book of the same name published February 2024 by BenBella Books.
3pm - Dr. Paula Maust: Seventeenth-Century Italian Women Composers in the Court, Convent, and Academy
The prioritization of women’s literacy and the rich musical traditions of cloistered life on the Italian peninsula contributed to a proliferation of women’s musical creation across the seventeenth century. This talk focuses on the variety of venues in which Italian women flourished as composers, including the court, convent, and academy.
4:45pm - Honest Commissioning: Composer Panel Discussion
Commissioning is about more than raising money to pay for a new work. At its core, commissioning is about honest and open communication from start to finish. Having commissioned 18 works by women and gender-marginalized composers through her Forward Music Project, cellist and entrepreneur Amanda Gookin will engage composers Jasmine Barnes, Andrea Casarrubios, and inti figgis-vizueta in a discussion about best practices to achieve an enjoyable and respectful commissioning process from the very beginning through the world premiere and beyond.
Panelists: Amanda Gookin (Moderator), Jasmine Barnes, Andrea Casarrubios, inti figgis-vizueta
Same-day passes available in person. Online ticketing has been closed.
Second Floor Gallery II at The Mansion
LIVE WORKSHOPS WITH THALEA QUARTET
1:30pm - 5:30pm
WoCo Fest 2024: Evolve features our inaugural Composer Workshops which are process-based, exploratory music workshops offering women and gender-marginalized composers the extraordinary opportunity to workshop their ideas in real time in front of a live audience and hear their works-in-progress performed by the incredible musicians of Thalea String Quartet. These workshops are a safe space for composers to try out ideas which may or may not work and to take artistic risks that could lead them in an exciting new direction. It's also a thrilling opportunity for the audience to watch the creative process, so often behind-the-scenes, at work in real time.
2nd Floor Galleries III & IV at The Mansion
HARMONITREES BY SKY MACKLAY
“As a musician and sound-obsessed person, I am constantly thinking about the physical properties of sound and the infinite possible ways that vibrating bodies can be manipulated to create different pitches, timbres, and shapes. The sonic image I had in mind as I conceived my harmonica sculptures was this: what would it sound like to be surrounded by harmonica players who could each play ten pitches at once without ever needing to breathe? My first germ of inspiration came from watching the flexible plastic wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube people sometimes seen along the highway advertising car dealerships. I wondered, what would it sound like if the air blowing through the wacky creature’s limbs was channeled through a harmonica? It could create an otherworldly harmonica sound that no human player could make. Many of them “playing” together could create rich and continuous walls of sound. Harmonitrees uses vinyl, fans, and deconstructed harmonicas to create an interactive environment that is whimsical yet intense.” -Sky Macklay
Boulanger Initiative and WoCo Fest 2024: Evolve is supported in part by funding from the Maryland State Arts Council, Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
