Replay: Anne Midgette shares Five Things She's Learned about the Women Who Shaped Classical Music
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“Think of classical music, and you think of great masterworks written by men: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and the list goes on. The conventional wisdom is that women, for various historical and cultural reasons, were largely prevented from getting onto the playing field during classical music’s heyday, and now, in the 21st century, we’re working to make up for lost time. The real picture, however, is more nuanced than that.”
– Anne Midgette, Five Things I've Learned about the Women Who Shaped Classical Music
Anne Midgette is a celebrated classical music critic and journalist. She has written extensively on classical music and opera, and her work has been featured in prominent publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Here’s the first five minutes of Anne’s 90-minute class in which she shares the Five Things She’s Learned about the women whose important work provides new ways to understand and enjoy the pleasures of classical music.
Five Things I’ve Learned about the Women Who Shaped Classical Music offers a new perspective on classical music, specifically focusing on the contributions of women throughout its history. Anne sheds light on the obstacles women faced in the field and the significant roles they played as composers and performers. She shares her deep knowledge of the many challenges faced that have been faced by female conductors, and introduces a quintet of female composers from different periods, in a way that enthusiastically documents this important, but still too-little-known component of classical music history.
If you’re eager to know more about the important, too-often overlooked, role women that have played in the history of classical music, this class is for you.
Anne Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post for 11 years, from 2008 to 2019. Before that, she was for seven years a regular contributor of classical music and theater reviews to The New York Times. She has also written about music, the visual arts, dance, theater and film for The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, The Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and many other publications, reviewing and interviewing everyone from Spike Lee to Twyla Tharp, Marina Abramovic to Luciano Pavarotti. At the Post, she oversaw every aspect of classical music coverage, offset her music writing with occasional visual art reviews, and posted online as The Classical Beat. She is currently working on a historical novel about the woman who built pianos for Beethoven.
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