for tickets, go here.
Women In Classical Music
Tuesday TunesHey, Framers! Since it’s March, Women’s History Month, we’ve been thinking about women in music.
You may think of women as being very prevalent in music today, but that is not the case, as shown in an article written by Dr. Christina Scharff. Her report, “Equality and Diversity in the Classical Music Profession,” shows some surprising statistics.
- Women and people of color are underrepresented in classical music jobs and leadership roles.
- Composers are overwhelmingly white men.
- Women are over-represented in teaching professions.
- Women make 83.7% of the average male classical musician’s salary.
- Orchestra instrument assignments split along gender lines. (Harp players are mostly women. Tuba & percussion players, men.)
Dr. Scharff’s report also includes information about other inequalities within the music profession that are separating men and women.
This year, Frame Dance welcomes our first female winner of the Frame Dance Music Competition, Leah Reid.
Read the full report here.
Frame Dance Performance!
Performances/Screenings
About Frame Dance’s next performance: Bayou Greenway Day on April 4
We hope you will join us at an exciting new community event from the Houston Parks Board: Bayou Greenway Day 2015 presented by Noble Energy! This free, day-long event will offer families the chance to walk, bike, run, stroll, play and paddle between park sites along Brays Bayou Greenway in the East End.
Event “hubs” in Mason Park, Spurlock Park, Gragg Park and Fonde Park – and the Brays Bayou Greenway trail in-between – will host fun activities for all ages. You will be able to start at any of these locations, enjoying activities and exploring the trails that connect the parks.
Activities will include 5K fun run/walk; bike rides, rentals and decorating; Zumba classes and dance performances; an interactive campsite; kayaking (for a small fee); giveaways and more!
Frame Dance will perform a work that travels along the bayou with elaborate time-lapse costumes by Ashley Horn.
Come experience the transformation happening along Houston’s bayous as part of Bayou Greenways 2020! Visit www.bayougreenwayday.org for additional information and an event map. Most activities free; April 4, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Framers perform at noon starting at Mason Park.
Bayou Greenway Day 2015 is a project of the Houston Parks Board in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, and the office of Council Member Robert Gallegos.
I hate the term accompanist
Tuesday Tunes
I hate the term accompanist,” continues Burnside. “You can’t deny there are connotations that it’s a secondary entity. But unfortunately I can’t think of a better one. If you insist on being called a pianist then people think that you’re comparing yourself to Sviatoslav Richter. That’s not what it’s about: you’re just asking to be taken seriously in your own right.'”
Who are Roger Vignoles and Anna Tillbrook? I didn’t know either. They are musical accompanists– unsung heroes. Read the stories of famous accompanists in this article here.
Tilbrook says there are times when she has saved singers from embarrassment. “The real art is to have that sixth sense, knowing when they are going to have a memory lapse, when they’re going to come in a bar early or even skip a whole verse. You have to be able to cover all that in your playing, so smoothly that no one notices.”
Circus Act: The Art of Job Juggling
MFA Mondays
Entering the workforce in Houston in 2011 was a daunting task, but I was gung-ho and determined to make a living that made use of my major. I had friends who had graduated and had ended up working in retail or waitressing. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with these professions, but they were not what I had in mind for a dream job after earning my MFA. I wanted to be a vital artist and educator in the Houston community. My first goal in getting involved in the Houston dance scene was to get into class, so my first “job” was actually an unpaid internship that provided me with free dance classes. Secondly, I wanted to perform, so, through auditioning and networking, I found myself dancing with two small modern dance companies my first year out. Thirdly, I wanted to teach dance at the college level, so I applied at all the colleges and universities in the surrounding area, and was hired as an adjunct instructor to teach a single class at San Jacinto College.
So can we just take a moment to talk about the adjunct hustle for a little bit?
Being an adjunct instructor truly sucks for several reasons. First of all, there is a limit to how many classes you are allowed to teach per semester at any given college. In 201
1, I was only allowed to teach three classes, or nine credit hours per semester, not that I was offered that many. Now, it’s even less than that for most adjuncts. Three classes equals nine hours a week at about $38 per hour. This comes out to about $1,300 a month before taxes, which might cover rent and electricity. For those of us needing to be truly independent, this just doesn’t cut it, and additional jobs are necessary. Secondly, health insurance is not included in the whole adjunct deal. Unfortunately, I turned 26 very shortly after I graduated from college, so the new health insurance legislation didn’t help me at all. So, there’s another expense to add to the list. Thirdly, job security is nonexistent. In order for college classes to “make” and actually occur, there have to be enough students signed up for the courses prior to the first day of classes. The magic number seems to be ten; if ten students are not signed up for the course by the first class day, the class will likely be cancelled, and guess what? That means you don’t have a job. Add to all this that your entire paycheck practically goes to gas for you to commute to all your different jobs, and we find that it’s a ridiculous way to make a living. I am wondering why we are allowing this nonsense to continue.
Back to my story
By 2013, I felt pretty grounded in the sense that I had acquired enough jobs to financially support myself without fully sacrificing a career in dance. Most of my conversations upon meeting new people went something like this: Continue reading
Links We Like
Links We LikeYou may have heard about Lammily, the Barbie modeled after a real 19 year old girl. She’s pretty great. Check her out in this video calling out our culture’s obsession with image over accomplishments.
Wellness Wednesday
UncategorizedLet’s do a check-in with this list of habits for a healthy mind and body, found at Psychology Today. To read the whole article, go here. Which are the ones you need to work on?
7 HABITS FOR A HEALTHY MIND IN A HEALTHY BODY
- Daily Physicality: Exercise for at least 20 minutes most days of the week.
- Intellectual Curiosity: Spend some time in focused thought, exploring new ideas every day.
- Foster Creativity: Challenge your mind to connect unrelated ideas in new and useful ways.
- Human Unity: Create and maintain close-knit human bonds and a social support network.
- Spiritual Connectedness: Identify a Source of inspiration that is bigger than you.
- Energy Balance: Balance Calories in/Calories out.
- Voluntary Simplicity: Embrace the liberty that comes with wanting and needing less.
Tuesday Tunes: Micah Clark
Tuesday TunesFrame Composers…What are they doing right now?
Micah Clark
After overseeing the music program at Valley Christian School (Huntingdon Valley, PA) for 2 years, I returned to the Chicago area where I am active in the music improv scene. My piece “Do Androids Pray for Electric Sleep?” for electric guitar, cello, and soundtrack was featured on Composerscircle.com and I presented it to the composition studio at Wheaton College in a master class. Collaborations in 2015 will include acclaimed cellist Glenn Fischbach, pianists Jordan Newhouse and Jon King, and John-Wayne Tracy of Gouda Records. You can read and listen more at micahclarkmusic.com.
MFA Monday: Jamie Zahradnik
MFA Mondays
Identity Crisis
There is something about curling up with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning that is such a relief at the end of a long week. Before anyone wakes, in the stillness and the sunshine, I like to sit and ponder the effects of my week. Occasionally, I like to journal, jotting down my thoughts on conversations that never happened, dreams and imagery, and my thoughts on “grieving the loss of grad school”… wait… did I really write that? That’s a little dramatic; I mean grief? How about trauma? Nope, that’s even more intense… On this particular Sunday morning I decided to reflect on some old journal entries from my first year out of grad school, and sure enough, I had described my first year as bereavement.
It’s been four years since I have been a student of the SHSU dance program, and I am in my twenty-eighth year as a student in the school of life. I’m currently in the process of experiencing some real life grief with the recent death of my mother. So upon rediscovering this part of my life occurring directly after graduation, which, by the way, seems miniscule now, I decided not to judge myself too quickly, and to take some time to investigate the meaning of the words I had written.
I discovered that
- Bereavement can mean “suffering deprivation or loss by force.”
- Grief can be defined as “keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss.”
- Trauma can be described as “a powerful shock that can have long lasting effects on body and mind.”
This last definition rang truer to me than any of the other words. Trauma is something I can definitely relate to. I have certainly suffered mental and physical trauma with the numbing news that my mother no longer exists here on earth. It has been an event that has permanently changed my immediate environment, or kinesphere, if you will. It looks different to me, and I also don’t react to people and circumstances within in it the way that I did before. In this way, it has changed not only how I perceive my circumstances, but also who I am in relation to those circumstances, which inevitably has led to a growing loss of identity.