Premiere of new work by Julia Werntz

On Sunday, October 19 at 2:00 pm the Tapestry of Voices poets group will hold their annual Cummings celebration as part of the poetry reading and concert series in the chapel at Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain (where Cummings is buried). This year, along with readings of Cummings's and their own poetry, a new set of songs by Julia Werntz, “but also nowhere”, for unaccompanied soprano and countertenor, will be performed by Jennifer Ashe and Martin Near, for whom they were written. The texts are taken from Cummings’s book “95 Poems”, which was published exactly fifty years ago. This will be the premiere performance.

Admission is $9/$5 for members of the Forest Hills Trust.

More information on the event can be seen at the following link, but please note that since Julia’s songs are a very recent addition to the program, they are not listed on the site. http://www.foresthillstrust.org/calendar.html

Julia earned her Bachelor's Degree in Performance on the oboe from the New England Conservatory in 1988, studied composition privately with Joe Maneri, and in 2000 earned a Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, where she studied with Yehudi Wyner, Martin Boykan and David Rakowski. She has taught Music Theory and Composition at Northeastern University in Boston, and, since the retirement of Joe Maneri, has been teaching the course in Microtonal Composition and Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. As Director of the Boston Microtonal Society since 1992, she has led workshops, taught classes, co-published a newsletter, and produced concerts.

Werntz’s doctoral thesis on microtonality was published in the Summer 2000 issue of Perspectives of New Music. She has also published articles in the Sonneck Society Bulletin and ParisTransAtlantic web magazine, and for several years wrote a monthly column for NewMusicBox, the web magazine of the American Music Center. In May 2008 she was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts, and she has been invited to a composing and lecturing residency at the Centre de Création Musicale de Iannis Xenaksi (CCMIX) in Lyon, France in the spring of 2009.

Since the mid-1990s, Werntz’s compositions have been almost exclusively microtonal. They have been performed by the Auros Group for New Music and the Firebird Ensemble, and by prominent performers including violinist Curt Macomber, cellist Ted Mook, and trombonist Chris Washburn, and have been featured at festivals and concerts including the Darmstadt Akademie für Tonkunst, the festival Stockholm New Music, EarPort in Duisburg, June in Buffalo, New York’s Vision Festival, and the Boston Microtonal Society concert series. A CD with three of her compositions was released in the spring of 2003 on the Capstone label; a second CD of her work is in progress.