The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.    From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.    Day 13: "The Ramazanis"    One of the goals of this project was to immerse ourselves in and learn from all of the different types of music we came in contact with along our journey. These little musical glimpses into other cultures served as the inspiration for the project's commissioned work Novel Voices by our project's composer, Fernando Arroyo Lascurain (coming out soon on our Novel Voices album!).    Please enjoy this clip of our new friends, the Ramazanis, singing a song from their native country: Congo. We had a blast breaking apart the rhythms in this song during our musical workshop, in order to build an entirely new rhythmic piece by overlapping and clapping the different rhythms simultaneously and polyphonically. (And let it be known: the Ramazanis put these conservatory-trained musicians to shame with their complex rhythmic abilities!!)  (LAUGHING/CRYING EMOJI) 

The Ramazanis

 

Sharon Fendrich's debut new age/neo-classical album Red Sky Prairie has been submitted by a member of the Recording Academy for consideration for the New Age Grammy 2020. With deep roots in Portland's Jewish community, Sharon was profiled in Oregon Jewish Life's January 2016 issue 2016. Her children Talia and Max attend religious school at Neveh Shalom, where the family are members. Sharon serves on the steering committee of Chevra Kavod haMet. Her in-laws, Mimi and Bob Epstein, are long time members of Havurah Shalom. "Since I was a child it has been the music and song in a Jewish service that has given me the strongest sense of connection with my community," says Sharon. "I can always feel the strength, hope and healing that chanting together brings to the sacred space. This power of music is what inspires me to compose and share my music." Sharon released her self-produced debut album, Red Sky Prairie, on Aug. 1, 2019. Grounded in classical and inspired by new age, the 11 tracks are full of lush, passionate melodies. The album features Sharon on piano, along with four Dutch soloists: violinist Wilfred Sassen, cellist Joep Willems, flautists Helen Hendriks and Ies Muller, and Russian vocalist Anna Emelyanova. Within the five tracks containing lyrics, Sharon uses five languages including Esperanto. READ THE FULL OREGON JEWISH LIFE 

 

In this Classiclectic Connection, we crack open an educational recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, brilliantly performed by seventeen year old violinist Amelia Piscitelli and Camerata Chicago conducted by Drostan Hall. This Double CD set is replete with poetry written by Vivaldi himself and incorporates more than twenty musical examples of seasonal elements and characters cleverly depicted in the music - all beautifully narrated by Steve Robinson of WFMT radio station fame. PublicRadio90: Michigan's Kurt Hauswirth had an opportunity to speak with Drostan about the experience of putting together this first-ever education recording of The Four Seasons. LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px}

Interview with Public Radio 90's Kurt Hauswirth

 

The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.    From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.    Day 12: "The United Nations"   The path of bringing this project to life ended up being a unique mixture of blood, sweat and tears - often feeling like every fiber of the world around us was resisting any tiny step ahead, relentlessly attempting to hold us back - together with shockingly uplifting moments of almost absurd amounts of support just dropped on us out of the blue.    One of these absurd moments came when we received a call from the Assistant General Secretary at the United Nations and International Affairs asking if we would like to come speak about our Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project and perform a concert inspired by the 10 Acts for the Global Compact on Refugees and Migrants, in celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights in NYC (to which we said - YES!!!!!!). Having the chance to perform for and later speak with and get to know an audience filled with NGO's from around the world - all doing much-needed work in the world of refugees - lifted our hearts and spirits, and proved also to be very useful in connecting us with a support system for the various unexpected needs that popped up throughout the remainder of our year of travels (such as calling up HER ROYAL HIGHNESS Elizabeth of the Danish-German royalty to help us find a Danish-Arabic-English translator last-minute from her castle on the Baltic Sea… - Whaaaaaaa????!!! YUP! That really happened!!!! We're still picking our jaws up off the ground a year later after that one!). (SURPRISE EMOJI) It was quite heartening and encouraging to know that we were connected to a network of humans doing beautiful things all around the world every moment of every day - ready at a moment's notice to jump to one another's aid.    Today's clip is taken from our closing selection from that evening's performance at the United Nations: a meditative excerpt taken from the "Quartet for the End of Time" - a piece written by Olivier Messaien while he was imprisoned in a German POW camp during the Second World War. Rather than close this concert with a standard and expected rousing or virtuosic final selection, we instead chose to end with a contemplative musical prayer which blended both Messaien's dreams of a more just society in a time after the end of Time, together with the injunction of the 10th Act in the Global Compact on Refugees and Migrants - which seeks to one day build a rights-based world which eliminates the reasons behind humans becoming refugees, and one which offers the possibility of free, voluntary, protected, transparent, and accountable global migration.   

The United Nations

 

American composer Anita Owen wrote her biggest hit song, "Sweet Bunch of Daisies," in 1894. She was 20 at the time, a student at a convent outside Terre Haute, Ind. According to a 1910 article on female composers in the San Francisco Call, Owen self-published the song for less than $50. That investment paid off when the song became a hit, selling more than a million copies. According to the San Francisco Call, a "practically penniless convent girl" was transformed into a woman with "fame and fortune" whose bank account "fell only a little short of the hundred-thousand-dollar mark." If you've never heard of Owen or any of the 200-plus songs she composed during her successful career, you're not alone. "I don't want to call it a conspiracy, because I don't think it's done on purpose, but there is this falling away of women artists and artists of color that needs to stop and be corrected," says composer Laura Karpman. History may have forgotten many of them, she says, but women and people of color have always composed music. In what she calls a "small little act of course correction," Karpman is premiering an overture Thursday night at the Hollywood Bowl that incorporates melodic snippets from patriotic songs by Owen and two other early 20th century American female composers, Mildred Hill and Emily Wood Bower. The new orchestral piece, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and titled "All American," features percussion instruments crafted out of kitchen tools like baking sheets and meat tenderizers, a nod to the domestic work that historically defined so many women's lives. "It's about amplifying women," composer Laura Karpman says of her new piece "All American," a Los Angeles Philharmonic commission to be performed Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl.   PHOTO: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times READ THE FULL Los Angeles Times ARTICLE

 

John Coltrane recorded at least three albums in 1964. Two of them were released and are now considered masterpieces, while one of them never saw the light of day. The LPs that hit store shelves were the late jazz saxophonist's "Crescent" and "A Love Supreme," and the unreleased album called "Blue World" will now be available to consumers for the first time. John Coltrane's album "Blue World" will be released for the very first time. The album was recorded in June of 1964 in engineer Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio, in between the "Crescent" and "A Love Supreme" sessions. The 37-minute offering was made to be a soundtrack for Canadian filmmaker Gilles Groulx's film "d Le chat dans le sac" "(The Cat in the Bag)." But only 10 minutes of the session was used in the film toward the end, and it's never been put on an album. The new release is said to be mastered directly from the original analog tape as well. "Blue World" will be released by Coltrane's label Impulse!/UME, and it'll also feature the classic quartet, which consists of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} READ THE FULL Atlanta Black Star ARTICLE

 

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.    From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.    Day 11: "Novel Voices in Denmark: The Journey Continues…"   Although we were in the Jelling Refugee Center for only two days, we collected more stories, pictures, and footage than we could possibly share in just a few days of posts. Although we will be moving on to our next locations (New York & New Jersey) tomorrow, feel free to peruse our entire Denmark album to get more peeks into our activities while we were there and meet a few more of our new friends.  p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px}

Novel Voices in Denmark: The Journey Continues