The Matilda Effect & Highlighting Overlooked Works of Female Composers: A Salon Discussion at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation
Join the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation founder and Co-Executive Director, Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner, and Dr. Theresa Chen, Instructor of Applied Jazz Piano at Syracuse University, for a salon discussion on the Matilda Effect and the rediscovering and performance of works by female composers. Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826 –1898) was a 19th-century women’s suffragist, a Native American rights activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author. The Matilda effect is a bias against acknowledging the achievements of women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues. This discussion will be interactive and highlight many of the works featured throughout this Symphoria season including works by Ethyl Smyth, Florence Price, Marian McPartland, Clara Schumann, and Alma Mahler.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Awarded one of the first doctorates in the country for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz) and a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States (CSU Sacramento), Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner has taught women’s studies courses for 51 years. The ...
Awarded one of the first doctorates in the country for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz) and a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States (CSU Sacramento), Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner has taught women’s studies courses for 51 years. The Founder/Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, she teaches in Syracuse University’s Honors Program and California State University, Sacramento’s Women and Gender Studies department.
A major historian of the suffrage movement, Dr. Wagner is active on the national scene. She appeared on the CNN Special Report: Women Represented and CNN’s Quest’s World of Wonder. She has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Nation and Time Magazine, among others. Her recent articles appeared in the New York Daily News, Ms. Magazine, the National Women’s History Alliance newsletter and National Suffrage Centennial Commission blog. In March 2021, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian featured the film, Without a Whisper which traces Dr. Wagner’s research demonstrating the Haudenosaunee influence on the suffrage movement through her friendship with Wakerakats:te, the Mohawk Bear Clan Mother. She appeared in and wrote the faculty guide for the Ken Burns’ documentary, “Not for Ourselves Alone.”
A prolific author, Dr. Wagner’s anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, with a Forward by Gloria Steinem (Penguin Classics, 2019), unfolds a new intersectional look at the 19th century woman’s rights movement. Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (Native Voices, 2001) documents the surprisingly unrecognized authority of Native women, who inspired the suffrage movement. It was followed by her young reader’s book, We Want Equal Rights: How Suffragists Were Influenced by Native American Women (Native Voices, 2020).
Among her awards, Dr. Wagner was selected as a 2020 New York State Senate Woman of Distinction, one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s E-News in 2015 and she received the Katherine Coffey Award for outstanding service to museology from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums in 2012.
Theresa Chen, D.M.A., is an active, well-rounded musician. She is an improvising keyboardist, accompanist, composer/arranger, pedagogue, and Catholic music minister.
Dr. Chen is an instructor of applied jazz piano, songwriting, history of jazz, and director/co-director of jazz/funk combo and Orange Juice jazz ...
Theresa Chen, D.M.A., is an active, well-rounded musician. She is an improvising keyboardist, accompanist, composer/arranger, pedagogue, and Catholic music minister.
Dr. Chen is an instructor of applied jazz piano, songwriting, history of jazz, and director/co-director of jazz/funk combo and Orange Juice jazz combo at Syracuse University. She is the first Taiwanese-American who teaches jazz at the college of music in the United States. She has previously taught Functional Jazz Piano courses and secondary jazz piano lessons from 2013-2018 when she was a teaching assistant at the Eastman School of Music. She also has given a diverse series of clinics, lectures, and masterclasses around Taiwan and America. Her first jazz album, Whispering to God, was released digitally in December 2021 and physically in July 2022.
Dr. Chen has shared the stage with famous jazz artists such as Gary Smulyan, Ingrid Jensen, Dave Liebmann, Bria Skonberg, Boris Kozlov, Victor Provost, and Scott Wendholt. She also performed at the Rochester International Jazz Festival, WGMC-Jazz90.1 Radio Station, Civic Morning Musicals, Syracuse Opera, and many other prominent jazz venues in Taiwan and Central New York.
Dr. Chen never stops promoting the music of her own culture. In November 2013, she was involved in the composer’s project held by the Ethnomusicology Department at NTNU. Her two arrangements of two Taiwanese folk songs, “Latin Ferry” and “Fantasy on a Theme of Flowers in the Rainy Night”, were recorded on an album “The Sound of Antique,” performed by Taiwanese flutist Dr. Chia-Fen Tsai and published. Her other two works, “The Song of Taibalang” and her arrangement of Mary Lou Williams’ “Lonely Moments,” won the Outstanding Composition and Outstanding Arrangement–Small Ensemble at Graduate College category of the 2017-18 Downbeat Student Music Awards.
Dr. Chen is devoted to a series of performance projects on women jazz instrumentalists, historical improvisations, jazz in Asia, pedagogical methods of jazz/commercial music theory/history, and jazz music applied in Christian liturgies. Invited by the Jazz Education Network(JEN) in January 2016 and 2020, she presented her research about Marian McPartland’s solo piano ballad playing and free improvisation style. In January 2022, she was invited again to the same conference in Dallas to give a clinic on teaching college-level songwriting classes on the subject of jazz standards. The same year in summer, she was invited to create jazz/commercial music teaching materials for high school students in collaboration with the National Taiwan Normal University(NTNU) and the Department of Teacher and Art Education from Ministry of Education. In the beginning of 2023, she will publish her two papers on teaching jazz standards writing and stride piano playing in the latest issue of Jazz Education in Research and Practice.
Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in Chiayi, Taiwan, Dr. Chen received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in classical piano at National Taiwan Normal University(NTNU) in 2013 with the Certificate of Digital Visual and Sound Arts and minors in flute and voice. In 2015 and 2018, she earned Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in jazz piano performance at Eastman School Music, with a minor in Music Theory and a Certificate of Advanced Achievement in the Art of Improvisation. She has studied jazz and historical improvisations with the legendary jazz pianist Harold Danko, Gary Versace, Bill Dobbins, Dr. Dariusz Terefenko, Vincent Lenti, and organist/harpsichordist Edoardo Bellotti.
Dr. Chen is also passionate about organ and sacred music. So far, she has served at many Catholic churches in both Taiwan and America including St John’s Cathedral in Chiayi City, Sacred Heart Church at Guting, Immaculate Conception Church at Fu-Ren University, St. Paul’s Church at Xinchuang, and St Anne Church in Rochester, New York. She now serves as the music director and organist at the Most Holy Rosary Church in Syracuse, New York, and the sub-dean of the American Guild of Organists-Syracuse Chapter. She has hosted many workshops in organ improvisations, hymn accompanying, and transcribing.
Thanks to the pandemic, Dr. Chen enjoys other interests besides art such as American and Taiwanese cultures, meteorology, ornithology, psychology, feminism, French, herpetology, interpersonal relationship and communications, geology, geography, and geometry.