Instead of receiving a gift for the 20th anniversary of the Women’s Voices choral group, members received a community.
The Women’s Voices chorus group will perform its 20th anniversary concerts Saturday and Sunday. The shows will highlight the 65 diverse women who make up the group. The women, who range in age and profession, are united by their ties to the Triangle community.
The group works to highlight the strengths of women in all aspects of music.
“Part of the mission of the choir is to make sure that we’re singing music written for women, but also music that has been composed for women because for a very long time women were discouraged from composing,” said artistic director Allan Friedman.
“Really, only until the last century were they allowed to do that due to social restrictions. It’s important to sing music, both written in the previous century by women who found a way to do that, and also by contemporary women.”
Mary Lycan, the founder of Women’s Voices, spent some time in Europe in the 1990s searching for historical compositions by women that had never before been brought to life. After moving from California to Chapel Hill, Lycan was in search for a new chorus group to replace the one she left back home. She founded Women’s Voices and began producing historic European songs through the Treble Clef Music Press.
Shelley Hedtke, Women’s Voices’ current president, is keeping that tradition alive 20 years later.
“There’s this wonderful library out in the world of music that we have never heard in the United States, and let’s bring this music back to the United States because it’s wonderful,” Hedtke said. “We’ve really stuck to this vision, and that’s what makes us really special.”
Women’s Voices also commissions new music from female composers written especially for concerts.
