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Canadian women composers honoured in special project

Clarisse Tonigussi pays tribute to vocal music repertoire in national tour

The Canadian Women Composers Project, St. Francis–in–the–Wood Church, Sunday, Jan. 21 at 2 p.m. Tickets $15/$10.

Where are all the women?

That thought struck Clarisse Tonigussi a few years ago when it dawned on her that female representation in the world of composing was sorely lacking.

The names of female composers from throughout history, she explains, are rarely known – and their pieces are seldom performed. 

For her final project at grad school, where she was studying vocal performance at the University of Toronto, she decided to shine a spotlight on several generations of female composers who never got the exposure afforded to their male counterparts.

“I created the project in order to celebrate Canadian women because, especially in my time at U of T, I didn’t hear too many Canadian women’s works and I felt that it was important to bring them to light, especially in this time,” Tonigussi tells the North Shore News from her home in Toronto.

Tonigussi will be singing a recital alongside a local Vancouver pianist at St. Francis-in-the-Wood Church in West Vancouver Jan. 21 in order to deliver that message.

Since completing grad school in June of 2017, she has started up the Canadian Women Composers Project with the goal of performing the work of Canadian women’s composers and artists all throughout the country.

Attendees at the upcoming West Vancouver recital can look forward to hearing works composed by Gena Branscombe, Jean Coulthard, Jean Ethridge, Carol Ann Weaver, Mary Gardiner, Ana Sokolovic, Jana Skarecky, Martha Hill Duncan, and Rebekah Cummings.

If many of these names are unrecognizable to the average music lover or fan of classical composition, Tonigussi would argue that’s exactly the point of her one-hour recital.

“It might be because for a long-time women were not really accepted as composers in the composing world,” she says when asked why women have been largely ignored when it comes to discussing Canada’s major players in composing.

Tonigussi tapped the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, an institution that exists to promote the work of composers in Canada and around the world, for help with curating her list of female composers whose works she’d perform.

The works are sung in historical order, starting with the music of Gena Branscombe from the early 1900s and ending with a contemporary piece created by Rebekah Cummings who wrote her composition specifically for the Canadian Women Composers Project.

“Even when Gena Branscombe was writing in the early 1900s, I don’t think she was taken as seriously as her male colleagues. It hasn’t been that long that being a composer was an acceptable career for a woman to have,” she says. “We were performers, and even before that in Europe women weren’t even allowed to perform at times – they would have men dress up as women to perform the roles of women in operas.”

Originally from Burlington, Ont., Tonigussi says she was encouraged from a young age to take up music. Her initial passion was for the piano, before begging her parents for singing lessons at age 13. When she got her wish, studying the voice was what she looked forward to most.

“I remember going to school and just bouncing around the whole day because I knew I had my singing lesson,” she says.

Tonigussi has already performed as part of the Canadian Women Composers Project in Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan and throughout much of the Maritimes. A performance in Yellowknife is scheduled following her stint performing in B.C.

She says she hopes audiences are entertained when they hear her perform the work of esteemed female composers, ultimately leaving the venue with the satisfaction and knowledge that “they supported Canadian women’s music and Canadian women composers.”