Friday, January 10, 2020

Clerestory to Celebrate Women Trailblazers

Poster design for the next Clerestory concert (from its Eventbrite event page)

With all the attention being given to this being the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, many have overlooked an equally significant anniversary taking place this year. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, was officially adopted on August 26, 1920. That phrase “on the basis of sex” will probably resonate with readers that saw the film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which used the phrase as its title; so it is worth observing that the wording of that phrase does not actually appear in the text of that Amendment.

The next concert to be presented by the Clerestory vocal chamber ensemble will honor the Amendment’s centennial with a program entitled Suffragette. The program will include suffrage songs that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, when giving the women the right to vote was just beginning to take root as a national issue. However, there will also be works by women composers that will acknowledge not only longtime friends of Clerestory like Minna Choi and Anne Hege but also significant figures from the past, such as Amy Beach and Alma Mahler.

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place at 4 p.m. on Sunday, February 2. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. General admission will be $30, with a $20 rate for seniors and $5 for students. Tickets are currently available online through an Eventbrite event page.

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