The Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, Massachusetts sponsors an Emily Dickinson weekend every other year. This evening's concert is part of the eighth edition of "Emily Dickinson's World." The program also includes tours, lectures, and visits to the Dickinson home and Emily's gravesite. In addition to tonight's performance two outstanding speakers are featured: Alfred Habegger, author of the recently published biography of Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, and Prof. Christopher Benfey of Mount Holyoke College, one of the authors of The Dickinsons of Amherst. Carolyn Holstein is the event coordinator for this evening's concert, and Helene Lambert is project coordinator for the weekend.

Cantabile consists of eight professional singers who live in the Pioneer Valley and environs: Catherine Bowers, Laura Doughty, Sudie Marcuse-Blatz, David Olsson, Peter W. Shea, Jack Tozzi, Kayla Werlin, and Marc Winer. The ensemble was founded in 2001, and last season presented an a cappella program of Venetian Renaissance music to enthusiastic audiences in Holyoke, Wendell, New Salem and Amherst, Massachusetts, and in Warwick, New York.

Gregory Hayes performs often as pianist and harpsichordist in western Massachusetts and New England. In past seasons he has been heard regularly in Boston, New York, and often in the Five College area. He has been soloist with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, and has also participated in the New England Bach Festival and the Mohawk Trail Concerts series, and performed with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. A graduate of Amherst College and the Manhattan School of Music, Mr. Hayes has taught on the piano faculties of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and currently is a Senior Lecturer in the music department of Dartmouth College. He is director of music for the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, and conducts Da Camera Singers, a 30-voice choir based in Amherst. He is also on the faculty of the Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, MA. The author of numerous reviews, articles, and liner notes for recordings, he lives in Goshen, Massachusetts.

Doris Abramson grew up in Amherst and both her parents worked at what was then Massachusetts Agricultural College. She earned her bachelor's degree from the University in 1949 and a master's degree from Smith College in 1951. After a year teaching at Wheaton College, Abramson returned to UMass where she taught theater history and the oral interpretation of literature as a member of the English, speech, and theater departments. She earned a Ph.D. in theater history from Columbia University in 1967. Abramson retired in 1987 and is now professor emeritus of theater at UMass. For several years she was co-owner of the Common Reader Bookshop in New Salem, and she remains a well-known figure in the local arts community. In 1999 Abramson published her first book of poems, It's Time, and also recorded a compact disc of the poems of Emily Dickinson to benefit the Dickinson Homestead.

Emma Lou Diemer (1927-) is a keyboard performer whose music has been published since 1957 and encompasses many mediums from hymns to concertos. She has fulfilled numerous commissions and received many awards, including a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for her 1991 piano concerto. Diemer studied composition at the Yale School of Music and received her Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, with further study on a Fulbright scholarship in Brussels and at Tanglewood. She currently resides in Santa Barbara, California, where she is Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written for both professional and amateur choirs, aiming for accessibility through her use of simple vocal lines (often in unison or canon) with more challenging keyboard accompaniments.

Philadelphia-born Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987) established himself as a leading figure in contemporary music. He was a virtuoso keyboard performer, scholar, author, and energetic teacher. To his credit are more than eighty compositions, including major works in almost every genre. Dr. Persichetti was graduated from Combs College, Philadelphia Conservatory, and Curtis Institute. He was head of the composition department of the Philadelphia Conservatory (1942-62) and joined the faculty of the Juilliard School of

Music in 1947. The influence of his musical mind is widely felt, thanks to his expert teaching and his book on harmonic practices of this century. He favored the gentle lyricism and deeply contemplative elements of Dickinson's poetry, and his delicate and introspective musical settings mirror this.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) began composing at the age of seven. Among his first pieces was a short opera, early evidence of his lifelong inclination toward vocal music. He entered the Curtis Institute as a member of its first class when he was 14, and spent eight years there studying composition, voice, and conducting. A number of his compositions from this period have become standards in the repertoire. He won a Rome Prize in 1935, and during his stay in that city he wrote Let down the bars, O Death. In 1971, Barber made this statement which appears to have been equally true throughout his life: "[When] I'm writing music for words, then I immerse myself in those words, and I let the music flow out of them."

Born and raised in New York City, Alfred Heller (1931-) is a composer, conductor, pianist, and was a protégé of the famous Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. He studied composition and piano with Ernst Bacon at Syracuse University, received a masters degree in piano from Manhattan School of Music, and a doctorate in conducting from Indiana University. He has conducted and recorded with several orchestras in the U.S. and abroad, and he has been very active as a coach, accompanist and in many other capacities in the world of musical theater. Heller's style ranges from expressionist to popularesque and folkloric. The cycle For Arleen was written in 1990 for the late American soprano Arleen Auger.

Betty Roe is the only non-American composer on this program, having been born in 1930 in London, England. She has built a versatile, successful musical career in many spheres, with extensive experience as singer, composer, conductor, teacher, examiner, adjudicator, and music publisher. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music. As a composer Betty is best known for her solo songs, church and choral music, revue songs, musicals, and music for schools. She writes "my musical style is not way-out, although I can do that very easily, and sometimes do so as a point of humour ... In the case of setting words I read the poems very quickly, and let the natural rhythm of the spoken words directly influence the musical rhythm."

For the better part of four decades Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was considered one of America's premier composers. During his early career he was strongly influenced by jazz rhythms and Stravinsky's neoclassicism. In 1936 he began cultivating a simpler style, feeling this made his music more meaningful to audiences. Interestingly, his Emily Dickinson songs of 1950 don't reflect this shift. Vivian Perlis has described them as "unusual in style with irregular meters and stanzas, wide jumps in the vocal lines, and difficult passages for the pianist that present special challenges...not an immediately accessible style." Copland seems especially drawn to the dramatic potential of Dickinson's verses.

Born in Chicago in 1929, Robert Muczynski has lived for more than forty years in Tucson, where he was composer-in-residence at the University of Arizona. Muczynski has concentrated largely on music for piano solo and for small chamber combinations. Although his name rarely appears in discussions of major contemporary composers, many of his works are performed regularly all over the world. Muczynski's music is earnest and unpretentious in character, and his style has been called "friendly modernism." I never saw a moor is one of only three choral works in his output.

Robert Baksa, born in New York City in 1938 of Hungarian parentage, is one of America's most prolific composers, having written more than 500 pieces of music since his first efforts as a teenager. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona and eventually earned a BA in Composition at the University of Arizona. He returned to live in New York City in the early 60s, and now makes his home in Columbia County in the Mid Hudson Valley where he serves as New Music Coordinator for the Pleshakov Music Center. Since his earliest New York reviews critics have noted his melodic gifts, the structural clarity and harmonious nature of his music. His songs have been featured in two recent studies of the American art song.

Born in New York City in 1908, Elliott Carter began to be seriously interested in music in high school and was encouraged at that time by Charles Ives. He studied with Walter Piston at Harvard, then went to Paris where for three years he studied with Nadia Boulanger. He then returned to New York to devote his time to composing and teaching. Carter remains one of America's most celebrated and accomplished composers, and is recognized as one of the prime innovators of 20th-century music. Both of his relatively early Dickinson choral settings are very tonal compared with later works, but are quite characteristic in their explorations of tempo relationships and texture, with great rhythmic vitality and intense dramatic contrast.

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