Calling all women composers! The Allied Arts Foundation just launched a new grant opportunity for women composers and songwriters.
The grant, titled Listen UP! Music by Women will distribute at least $15,000 in award grants to women composers and songwriters living in Washington State. Nearly all musical genres are eligible in this cross-genre competition, including contemporary classical, electroacoustic, blues, R&B, jazz, world music, multimedia, sound installations, and more.
Across history women have been systemically disadvantaged in the fields of music composition and songwriting, often receiving far fewer opportunities and resources to create new musical work than their male peers. Listen UP! Music by Women presents an opportunity for community dialog, expression, and support for the significant female talent in Washington State.
The deadline for applications is Monday, April 30, 2018 at 8pm PST. Click here to learn more and submit an application.
As an artist whose work also moves between genres, traditions, and other boundaries, Downes feels a kinship with Bernstein. For example, of her time in the studio with beatboxer Kevin “K.O.” Olusola of Pentatonix she said, “You know, when I was in the studio with him and we were working on this beatbox version of ‘Something’s Coming,’ I just felt this freedom to try different things—both of us working together coming from vastly different ends of the American music spectrum and just having fun with it, and I thought, you know, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Leonard Bernstein.”
If I had to describe this piece in one word, it would be ice. Not only is it an icy, ethereal soundscape sculpted by an Icelandic composer, but it’s even performed by ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble). Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In the Light of Air is an iridescent sound world scored for viola, cello, harp, piano, percussion, and electronics. Infinitely varied in its timbres and textures, the piece evokes the translucent calm and quiet sparkle of an icy landscape, with gorgeous harp details, gentle piano echoes, and whispering melodies glittering above the rumbling earth below.
If you don’t have five hours to listen to John Cage’s sprawling, narrated sound art piece 
I first encountered this piece over 10 years ago in my college wind ensemble. Although this version is for orchestra, the band version is an excellent example of quality writing for winds. And beyond that, this piece is one of the best examples of onomatopoeic music anywhere; once you hear it, you can never un-hear it. Loll-a-pa-loo-za!
Admittedly, I’m a little bit of a fangirl when it comes to Missy Mazzoli and Nadia Sirota, so I may be somewhat biased in my review of this piece. I love how much is going on in it—there are things going on near and far and in between. And Mazzoli brings the electronic textures I’ve heard in some of the music from her band Victoire into this. I hear echoes of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” in the chord progressions, and the same kind of desperation in the viola as I heard in Abigail Fischer’s voice in Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar. This was my introduction to Sirota’s album Baroque, and I can’t wait to dig in to the rest of it! – 
