Jazz on the Fly!, a two-concert mini-fest, takes place April 8-9 at Old Cabell Hall.
Supplied photo.
Letting it fly: Jazz on the Fly! is a two-concert mini-fest that promises to be a “celebration of the return of live jazz to UVA.” Friday’s Free Bridge & Faculty show features the quintet of Jeff Decker (sax), John D’earth (trumpet), Peter Spaar (bass), and Robert Jospe (drums and percussion), along with “old friend” Calvin Brown (piano). On Saturday, the UVA Jazz Ensemble presents “Contingencies and Resiliencies,” a program of originals from Infernal Resilience, the group’s double album, which was recorded during lockdown.
Friday 4/8 & Saturday 4/9. Free-$15, 8pm. Old Cabell Hall, UVA Grounds, and live on YouTube. virginia.edu
Love is in the air: Looking for a perfect date night? You bring the chocolate and roses, and the Charlottesville Symphony Orchestra will provide the romantic melodies. Conducted by Music Director Benjamin Rous, the string orchestra kicks things off with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major. The four-movement homage to Mozart begins with a rich sonata, followed by an elegant waltz, a wistful elegy, two Russian folk melodies, and an epic finale. Next is American composer Aaron Copland’s folk-inspired Appalachian Spring, which first premiered at the Library of Congress in 1944 as a modern ballet.
Saturday 2/12 & Sunday 2/13. $8-45. 8pm Saturday, Old Cabell Hall, UVA Grounds; 3:30pm Sunday, Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center, 1400 Melbourne Rd. cvillesymphony.org
Charlottesville Symphony Music Director Benjamin Rous. Photo: Michael Bailey
Ace of bass: Feeling strung out? Relax with some strings: This weekend, you can bask in the mellow, sultry, resonant reverberations of the double bass with soloist Peter Spaar and the Charlottesville Symphony in Bass and Beethoven. The performance features Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli’s twisting and timeless Dark with Excessive Bright, George Gershwin’s bluesy and jazzy Lullaby, and a healthy dose of Beethoven.
Saturday 11/6 & Sunday 11/7. $10-45, 8pm Saturday, Old Cabell Hall, UVA Grounds; 3:30pm Sunday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center, 1400 Melbourne Rd. cvillesymphony.org.
The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia performed the second of two annual holiday concerts at Old Cabell Hall on Sunday, December 2. Photo by Martyn Kyle
As Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture.
When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began transforming the sounds we were used to hearing, 250 years ago, people said it was the death of classical music,” says Benjamin Rous, music director of the Charlottesville Symphony. “And they have been saying that, for one reason or another, ever since. But classical music is still very much alive.”
Classical music is easy to find around Charlottesville, especially during the holidays. In fact, for classical music devotees, Charlottesville is an all-year-round kind of town, with choices from instrumental to vocal, large-scale to chamber, medieval to modern. “Whether for performers or audience members, this broad category of music we refer to by the sometimes narrow term ‘classical music’ has something for everyone,” says Michael Slon, music director of The Oratorio Society of Virginia and associate professor and director of choral music at the University of Virginia. “And for a town our size, there’s a tremendous array of offerings.”
A symphony orchestra, an opera company, and a large-scale symphonic chorus—Charlottesville has had all of them for decades. Being a university town helps, but as Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture.
Major players
The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia, while based at UVA, has been run by the nonprofit Charlottesville Symphony Society since 1976. Fifteen of the orchestra’s 16 principals teach music in some capacity. The rest of the musicians are other faculty, UVA students, and members of the Charlottesville community; Executive Director Janet Kaltenbach notes “most of our musicians are well qualified to play in any professional orchestra in the country.” The Symphony presents five concerts a year, scheduled around the academic calendar—and around home football games, which shut down access and parking around UVA’s Old Cabell Hall, one of its two performance venues.
Janet Kaltenbach is the executive director of the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia. Photo by Martyn Kyle
The Charlottesville Opera began 40 years ago as the Ash Lawn Opera, offering summer open-air performances at James Monroe’s home. In 2009, the company moved its base of operations to the Paramount Theater, where it could offer larger-scale productions and draw bigger audiences. Two years ago, the company became the Charlottesville Opera. Martha Redinger, a current board member active with the organization since 2004, is proud of the Opera’s record of showcasing young singers who have gone on to become top-notch opera stars; its recent fundraiser featured nationally known bass-baritone Eric Owens, whose first paid professional gig was at Ash Lawn in 1992.
The Oratorio Society of Virginia celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with a commissioned choral work by Virginia composer Adolphus Hailstork, based on a poem by UVA professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove. The chorus is made up of about 90 auditioned amateurs who range from recent UVA voice majors to retirees. (Full disclosure: this writer is a member.) The Oratorio Society is affiliated with UVA’s McIntire School of Music (music director Slon also leads UVA’s choral groups), but its driving force is community volunteers.
The Virginia Consort, now in its 29th season, grew out of the Oratorio Society; building on the first group of 25 singers, Consort founder and music director/conductor Judith Gary has created a constellation of chorales. The Chamber Ensemble, about 40 voices, performs twice a year; additional singers are auditioned each year to create the larger Festival Chorus, which presents one large choral work with orchestra. The Youth Chorale program includes the High School Chorus and the Treble Chorus (both directed by Gary) and the Prelude and First Step Choirs (directed by local music and vocal teacher Donna Rehorn).
The Virginia Consort’s Festival Chorus performs a large choral work with an orchestra each season. Photo courtesy Virginia Consort
Chamber music and more
Charlottesville also has a long-standing and rich chamber music scene. The two major players, the Tuesday Evening Concert Series (called TECS, and started in 1948) and the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival (begun in 1999), are by design complementary: from October through April, TECS offers a season featuring touring national and international stars, while the Festival’s September performances highlight emerging artists and edgier works. “We push the boundary of what chamber music is,” says Festival founder and board member Elsie Thompson, “and our audiences are willing to come along.” (All the classical groups in Charlottesville agree the audiences here are knowledgeable, enthusiastic and loyal; “the ecosystem here is exceptional,” says Rous, who took up the Symphony’s leadership in 2017.)
For chamber music fans willing to travel a bit, Staunton presents a top-notch music festival in August; Wintergreen stages a music festival in July-August; and Harrisonburg hosts the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival every June (not to be confused with the non-classical Shenandoah Music Festival held in Orkney Springs).
Bringing the Paramount Theater back to life—an effort which Thompson helped steer—has given the Chamber Music Festival and other classical groups a larger performance space (in addition to popular venues Old Cabell Hall, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center at Charlottesville High School, and First Presbyterian Church). The Oratorio Society holds its annual December concert at the Paramount, performing large-scale choral works with orchestra members. The Opera holds its two annual performances there (one a classical opera, the other a musical theater work), hiring local players for its orchestra and building its own sets. Fingers are crossed for spring 2019, with music supporters hoping that the UVA working group on university-community relationships might include the building of a top-class performing arts venue in its recommendations to President Jim Ryan. “We’re the only state university in Virginia that doesn’t have one,” says Kaltenbach.
Trevor Scheunemann (right), who has sung with the San Francisco Opera, the Washington National Opera, and the Opéra National de Bordeaux, rehearses for last summer’s production of Charlottesville Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro. Photo by Amy Jackson Smith
Victory Hall Opera, on the other hand, believes small is beautiful. This newcomer was launched three years ago by international opera singers Brenda Patterson and Miriam Gordon-Stewart, along with opera director and Charlottesville resident Maggie Bell. Patterson says, “We saw Charlottesville as a place that would support a newer, more innovative concept of opera, led by singers and based around singers.” Rather than the opera industry’s model of freelancing a production’s star roles, Victory Hall’s troupe of 12 singers fashions a season of small works—some classic, some contemporary, some original. The group has staged productions in PVCC’s Dickinson Theater, Alderman Library, Vinegar Hill Theatre, and (a groundbreaker) Monticello.
The money problem
Large or small, every organization faces the issue of funding—calling on volunteer board members, staff, and members to seek grant money and work on fundraising, in addition to selling tickets (which cover only around 25 percent of costs). Common grant sources are the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Maurice Amado Foundation, the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, and the Bama Works Fund of the Dave Matthews Band. Charlottesville isn’t home to many large corporations (i.e., potential donors), but local banks—Union Bank, Virginia National Bank, and Wells Fargo—are frequent contributors. In addition, each group has its base of loyal individual donors who love classical music, want to see it performed, and believe in its value for the community.
Every classical music group makes an effort to keep ticket prices reasonable, and offers subscriber discounts as well as cut-price or free student tickets. “We’re a university town, and people who live here—or move here, or retire here—expect a vital cultural scene,” says Karen Pellón, long-time executive director of TECS. “But people here also expect the concerts to be affordable, even though we are often bringing in the same artists they would pay far more to hear at Washington’s Kennedy Center.”
The Paramount’s director of operations and programming, Matthew Simon, faces the same challenge. The Paramount can bring in national names like this season’s big star, world-renowned pianist Murray Perahia. But top artists charge top fees, so Simon has to balance that cost with what he feels the Charlottesville audience will bear. In the meantime, the Paramount’s broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” programs offers a higher-quality screen and space than most of the Met’s national network—“a better Met Live experience than you’d get in most big cities,” Simon notes.
Three Notch’d Road’s Simon Martyn-Ellis plays the theorbo during the baroque ensemble’s recording session at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood. Photo by Mathias Reed
Early music
The smaller groups, which often perform more intimate works, rely on the area’s churches, which make wonderful settings for the early music (medieval, Renaissance and baroque) that Charlottesville is particularly rich in.
Three Notch’d Road, founded in 2011 by local musicians Fiona Hughes, Anne Timberlake, and David McCormick, presents baroque music played on instruments of the period. Concerts have included “Bach Comes to America,” and a recent program on Polish baroque music that was inspired by a sonata found in violinist Thomas Jefferson’s collection. The ensemble’s 20 professional musicians live and perform around the country. Hughes, now the group’s artistic director as well as a baroque violinist, says one of her goals is “introducing the music of the past in ways that overcome our assumptions about the past—for example, people are often surprised at how bright and active medieval music can be.”
Since 1991, Zephyrus has presented works of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods, primarily vocal, although their performances will occasionally include professional instrumentalists. Its 16 to 20 singers are all local and nonprofessional. Megan Sharp, the group’s music director, says its music is well-suited to a church space such as St. Paul’s Memorial, Holy Comforter, or Emmanuel in Greenwood. Zephyrus has “quite a committed following” for the three or four performances it gives each season, says Sharp; the group is increasingly drawing young people and, especially this time of year, “people who want something that’s not the commercial stuff.”
Members of Zephyrus, which performs primarily vocal works of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods, rehearse for their December 7 concert. Photo by Martyn Kyle
MIRA was begun in 2005 by local singer Raven Hunter, with an informal group singing Renaissance polyphonic vocal music that grew into an ensemble of 12 to 18 performers. “Our singers are professional, or semi-professional, or could be,” says Hunter. “I audition to keep the group small; the music we perform is usually six to eight voices [choral parts], and their sound has to blend well.” MIRA’s repertoire may extend back to medieval works, or forward into the 20th century for composers like Benjamin Britten who incorporate earlier styles.
The newest addition, Fire, is a small women’s a cappella group started by retired church musician and singer Linda Hanson as “a birthday present to myself.” Fire’s repertoire is sacred music from medieval to modern, “from what you would hear in a worship service to broadly spiritual,” says Hanson. Its public performances, held on the fourth Sunday in October and on Mother’s Day each year, benefit PACEM, a local organization that coordinates space and volunteers to provide shelter to the homeless.
Making it happen
“If you love music, make it happen” is a recurring theme. All of Charlottesville’s classical music groups are community-driven, from boards to donors to performers. Thompson—who, in addition to sitting on the board of the Chamber Music Festival, is also on the boards of the Oratorio Society and the Opera—says, “I’m not a musician, I can’t sing or play an instrument,” but she believes “music is a gathering place for the community.” Most small cities don’t have their own baroque ensemble, says Three Notch’d Road’s Hughes, but “I live here, and I really wanted to bring this wonderful music to our area.” The Consort’s Gary recalls that when her small group began meeting to sing together, “We didn’t intend to perform, but we had so much fun we incorporated.”
Karen Pellón, executive director of the Tuesday Evening Concert Series, says “we’re a university town, and people who live here expect a vital cultural scene.” Photo by Eze Amos
Another success factor: synergy. The groups informally network to avoid performing the same works, or on the same dates. Each group has its own niche, so they aren’t competing for audiences (or donors). And the groups cross-fertilize, which expands their offerings and audiences. The Symphony performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Oratorio Society and UVA’s leading choral group, the University Singers. The Opera has staged concert performances with the Oratorio Society as chorus. The Oratorio Society has appeared with the Wintergreen Music Festival and the Roanoke Symphony, and included the University Singers as well as local church and high school ensembles in its concerts. Both the Symphony and Three Notch’d Road have performed with UVA’s Chamber Singers, its smaller chorus.
To misquote Mark Twain, it seems recent reports of the death of classical music are greatly exaggerated. “It’s a wonderful thing for people to be making and experiencing music on a regular basis,” says Slon. “The Oratorio Society’s programming is geared to the singers, to our audiences, to possibilities for creative collaborations, and to a belief in the music itself.That’s part of our role, to be an advocate for the music.”
Now hear this
As you can see from our roundup of upcoming performances, there’s something for every music-lover this month, from performances to WTJU’s Classical Marathon.
The Calidore String Quartet performs on Tuesday. Photo: Marco Borggreve.
In 2016, the Calidore String Quartet electrified its career by entering the inaugural M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition and walking away with the largest prize for chamber music in the world. From there, the accolades piled up: The New York Times heralded the group’s “deep reserves of virtuosity,” the Los Angeles Times recognized its “balance of intellect and expression.” On its new album, Resilience, CSQ seeks to soothe cultural anxieties, offering “performances of quartets by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Golijov and Janáek as a message of hope because they illuminate the human potential to create beauty, even in the darkest of circumstances.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and trumpeter Leo Wadada Smith appears with his Golden Quintet at Old Cabell Hall in Impulse Festival Concert #4 on Saturday. Photo by Michael Jackson
Heralded as a pioneering figure in the field of music for more than five decades, composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s artistic vision knows no bounds. Throughout his prolific career—which boasts upwards of 50 albums—Smith has delved deep into the power of sound, language and even color, to discover what art can tell us about ourselves and our relationships with the world around us.
Smith is visiting Charlottesville for the first time, joined by his Golden Quintet, comprised of pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, cellist Ashley Walters and video artist Jesse Gilbert. The group will participate in workshops, public talks, a gallery exhibition and a performance at Old Cabell Hall as part of the Impulse Festival, where Smith’s acclaimed six movement suite, America’s National Parks (released in 2016), will be performed.
After watching Ken Burns’ 12-hour documentary series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Smith began conducting his own research—and while his National Parks begins with Yellowstone and includes other sites like Yosemite—he goes further, fleshing out the concept of a national park by incorporating cultural figures and touchstones outside of the official landscapes.
“Ken Burns made his documentary around the idea of natural cathedrals and a natural religion and he kind of canonized all those early guys involved in discovery,” says Smith. “I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to make a national park that could be defined on the same ground as our national parks are defined, but I wanted to expand it. …I made Dr. Eileen Southern—who wrote a very comprehensive book on African-American music—I made her a national park, like a national literary park. So the idea of a national park becomes far greater than just the common geographical grounds that are allocated for common use.”
Smith also sanctioned the Mississippi River. “I was born 28 miles east of the Mississippi River in a town called Leland, Mississippi, and I crossed that bridge often,” says Smith. “Most of the most dramatic stories about the Mississippi came in relationship to conflict of race and rights and privileges. African-Americans were often dumped in that river because it [is] one of the longest rivers in the world. And so I saw it as a memorial river that concealed and revealed at the same time, because whatever is dumped…ends up popping up somewhere up coast and people are going to find out what’s in it.”
Smith’s focus on the importance of history and culture is what led to his inclusion of New Orleans.
“New Orleans…produced the first authentic American music,” he says. “So right there, that’s enough to claim it as such, but also it’s the birthplace of very important artists. [After] John Lennon and The Beatles, Louis Armstrong was the second most known person on Earth. That’s an important icon. You’ve got Joseph Oliver; a ton of people who actually cultivated music philosophy that eventually would spread throughout the United States. And as a way of understanding how the world works, it became the most known music on the planet.”
The music Smith is referring to is commonly known as jazz. But, he explains, the term jazz is a misnomer.
“[It] was erroneously named jazz. It should have been named like the participants named it; they called it creative music,” says Smith. “But because no one respects African-American views, it was misnamed by writers and music buffs and journalists and people like that and also the industry, you know, they had to classify it and so they accepted that name. But that early music that they called jazz should be called creative music. No one at that time during the formation of that music was calling it jazz.”
While America’s National Parks was named album of the year in NPR’s Jazz Critics Poll, and Smith was honored as artist of the year in the 2016 JazzTimes’ Critics Poll, he does not consider his music to be jazz. Like the early innovators, he prefers the term creative music.
“Creative music means that any artist that puts some of their own self, that is their own consciousness, their own ideas, into the performance—though they didn’t create the work—they simply supplied their ideas to it, they are co-creating that work as well,” Smith says. “And the other definition is that if that music has a 5 percent composition form and a 15 or 20 percent improvisational form—which, I don’t even use that word any more, but I’m using that word to describe it—then that piece of work is termed creative music.”
Charlottesville will experience the ever-changing beauty of creative music firsthand at Saturday’s performance.
“America’s National Parks has 30 pages of written material and it takes 90 minutes thereabouts to perform all six suites…and of course it’s going to be entirely different when the musicians respond to it in a live situation,” explains Smith. “They have the opportunity to experience the audience, to experience the resonance quality of the building that they’re playing in, and the excitement of recreating the National Parks—a new version of it that no one has ever heard.”
The Tallis Scholars give voice to the Renaissance at Old Cabell Hall. Publicity photo
Hailed as “rock stars of Renaissance vocal music” by the New York Times, The Tallis Scholars are a British ensemble dedicated to the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance. Founded by famed choral conductor and musicologist Peter Phillips in 1973, the group has gained international acclaim by bringing fresh interpretation to historic pieces. Through Phillips’ guidance, the scholars blend their voices into a soaring soundscape as part of the Tuesday Evening Concert Series.
Tuesday, November 28. $12-39, 7:30pm. Old Cabell Hall, UVA. 924-3376.
London’s Orlando Consort (Donald Greig, Robert Macdonald, Angus Smith, Matthew Venner and Mark Dobell) performs a live vocal score of medieval music to accompany the 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc on Thursday. Publicity photo
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc caused quite a commotion when it was released in 1928. French nationalists were wary of a non-Catholic Danish director’s interpretation of a revered French icon; the Archbishop of Paris ordered Dreyer’s final version censored and cut. The film was banned in Britain for its unfavorable portrayal of the English soldiers who ridicule and torment the movie’s heroine. Some critics deemed it boring while others found its tight shots and decidedly unglamorous style disturbing.
Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times praised the film. In a March 31, 1929, review, Hall hailed actress Maria Falconetti’s turn as Joan of Arc “unequaled” and declared that the film “makes worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams. It fills one with such intense admiration that other pictures appear but trivial in comparison.”
Voices Appeared: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the Orlando Consort March 30 Old Cabell Hall, UVA
Dreyer based his film, which depicts the imprisonment, trial and death of Joan of Arc, on detailed transcripts from the 1431 trial that condemned Joan to be burned at the stake as a heretic when she was 19 years old. And while Dreyer is said to have controlled many aspects of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc—from the elaborate (and barely visible) sets to the emotional output of his actors—he never selected a definitive score for it. Which seems odd, really, given that Joan of Arc didn’t just have visions of saints—she heard their voices, too.
Film buff, musicologist and professional early music singer Don Greig decided to design a score for the film, and although he isn’t the first to do so (everyone from composers Leo Pouget and Victor Alix to instrumental rock band Nick Cave and the Dirty Three have scored the film), his stands out because it’s crafted entirely of medieval vocal music, music that Joan of Arc likely heard alongside a few pieces that (based on the documentation of the trials) she most certainly did hear.
The world-renowned Orlando Consort medieval and renaissance vocal ensemble, of which Greig is a member and co-founder, performs that score during a screening of Dreyer’s original cut March 30 at UVA’s Old Cabell Hall. It’s a remarkable feat of vocal athleticism—the five singers will perform for 100 minutes, and they’ll sing dozens of pieces in that time.
Greig says the music—mostly motets, hymns, chants and other sacred music—is “fascinating, intellectually stimulating, but very beautiful as well.” When you hear it, he says, you’re likely to think that you’ve never heard anything quite like it before (unless you were raised Catholic…then you might recognize some of it). Still, if the consort isn’t careful, Greig says the music can feel a bit dispassionate or uninvolved, so the singers have taken extra care to make sure it plays to and enhances the emotional experience of the film. “You know the film is going to deliver, and we’ve got to live up to that standard,” Greig says.
In the torture chamber scene, for instance, the camera pans through a rapid montage of shots of various torture instruments. “It’s meant to put the fear of God into you,” Greig explains—and it works. Joan isn’t physically tortured, but she’s so overwhelmed that she faints. In accompaniment, the consort sings Richard Loqueville’s “Sanctus,” a composition that was part of the Eucharistic ritual of the time. “This hymn of praise to God comes over much more as a scary, horror film moment…” Greig says.
Near the end of the film, Joan is led and bound to the stake; it’s a slow, painful, highly emotional scene full of extended close-ups of Falconetti’s face. At the moment of immolation, a single vocalist sings, in a falsetto, the plainchant hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” (“Come Creator Spirit”). Testimonies given in the highly documented nullification trial in the 1450s—which posthumously found Joan innocent—state that when Joan led her army to battle at Orléans in 1429, a group of priests walked before them chanting “Veni Creator Spiritus.”
“You’ve got this moment where you have the strange ambiguity of Joan, who dressed as a man; you’ve got a male singer singing in a female range; you’ve got the music, which is beautiful anyway,” says Greig. “What it suggests is her moment of greatest glory, which was when she raised the siege of Orléans, contrasted with this moment of great despair.”
Greig knows that people don’t often go to see silent films these days, nor do they go out to hear medieval music—most of his colleagues hadn’t seen a silent film before singing for this one. “Just give it a try,” he says. “You’ll be surprised—surprised by the music, surprised by the movie—and moved by both.”
Courtesy Gaumont
Carl Theodor Dreyer based his silent film, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, on detailed transcripts from the 1431 trial that condemned Joan to be burned at the stake. The original negative was thought permanently lost in a studio fire in 1928, then miraculously in 1981 a print was discovered in a janitor’s closet at a Norwegian mental institution.
In tribute to Pierre Boulez, Organized Delirium honors the French conductor, who may not be a household name, but joins a too-long list of musical pioneers who died in 2016. The 26-time Grammy Award-winner is respected for his role in the “electronic transformation of instrumental music,” as well as leading some of the world’s renowned orchestras. To explore his broad-ranging classical connections, Kelly Sulick (flute) and John Mayhood (piano) perform works from Boulez, André Jolivet, Olivier Messiaen, Elliott Carter and John Cage.
Monday, November 28. Free, 8pm. Old Cabell Hall, UVA. music.virginia.edu.
An evening of solace and reflection brings the UVA glee club, chorus and a cappella groups from the university and the surrounding community together in concert for Women Against Violence: Rise Up. The healing, uplifting musical selections include “Still I Rise,” based on the poem by poet laureate Maya Angelou, and the event features various speakers and student resources that promote awareness on the topic of sexual assault. First-year students may acquire a free ticket in advance.
Saturday, September 17, 7pm. $5-7. Old Cabell Hall, UVA.
