Women’s Work

[Image: Scene in a Magdalen Laundry  |  Kitty Brazelton]

The Village Trip presents “Women's Work,” an evening of music and poetry that explores the tension between the external demands placed on women and the rich creative interior lives they have always sustained. Central to the program is a world première from Greenwich Village composer Kitty Brazelton. The program also draws on works by Liz Queler (The Edna Project), Missy Mazzoli, Shoko Suzuki, Ann Southam, and Whitney George, alongside texts by Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcella Remund, Edna St Vincent Millay and Anne Lovering Rounds.

Amid the intimate surroundings of St John's in the Village, the festival presents an important new piece that gives voice to a dark and little-known episode of Greenwich Village history. Commissioned by The Village Trip, Village resident and composer Kitty Brazelton has created a work for two singers and piano, setting poetry by Marcella Remund. The subject is the Magdalen Society which, in the early 19th century, operated from rented rooms on Carmine Street, where it confined women deemed "fallen" and put them to work in laundry servitude under the guise of moral rehabilitation. The Society eventually moved Uptown, but its American origins were here, steps from where our concert takes place. Women were sent away for being unmarried and pregnant, for being deemed too independent, for surviving sexual violence — while the perpetrators walked free. Brazelton's powerful work brings that silenced history into the concert hall.

The program also draws on works by Liz Queler (The Edna Project), Missy Mazzoli (named Musical America's Composer of the Year in 2022), Shoko Suzuki, Ann Southam, and Whitney George, with literary texts by Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Lovering Rounds, and Edna St Vincent Millay.

“Women's Work” is not a historical retrospective. It is a living argument — made in music and words — that women's creative voices have always been present, always vital, and have never needed permission to matter.

• Sharon Harms, soprano
• Curtlyn Ifill, soprano
• Joan Forsyth, piano
• Adam Tendler, piano
• Anne Lovering Rounds, words and piano