Choral festival will honor Harriet Tubman
A new, trailblazing composition will have its premiere Saturday in San Jose when Bay Area choruses gather to pay tribute to abolitionist Harriet Tubman as part of the New Music for Treble Voices Festival, now in its ninth year..
Under the auspices of the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, contemporary composer Julia Adolphe has set to music “Child of Impossibles,” a poem dedicated to the life of Tubman that was commissioned from Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair. It’s the first year of a multi-year Trailblazers Project, a joint venture between the chorus and Stanford University faculty in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.
One of the iconic women honored by the project, Tubman will be represented by a great-great-grandniece, Judith Bryant, who will participate in a panel discussion that precedes Saturday’s musical festivities. Artistic director Martín Benvenuto will moderate the talk.
Guest choirs participating will include the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir Ancora, the i Sing Silicon Valley Girlchoir and the Musae Women’s Vocal Ensemble of San Francisco.
Members of the public may attend the noon panel discussion for free; that event will run until 1:30 p.m. Tickets for the 4 p.m. concert, $25 general admission or $10 for students 18 and under, are available at www.pwchorus.org and will also be sold at the door. The event will be held at the Trianon Theatre, 72 N. Fifth St., San Jose.
More than 50 years old, the Peninsula Women’s Chorus was formed under founding director Marge Rawlins, who brought together five sections of the American Association of University Women from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Menlo-Atherton and other cities. Rawlins called it the University Women’s Chorus but soon opened it up to women without college degrees. Under Patricia Hennings, the longest serving director from 1975 to 2001, the group became the Peninsula Women’s Chorus.