Hello Friends!

 

This gofundme page funds a professional recording of new music for piano, cello, and narrator. This music honors two visionary women in history.

 

I’ve composed music to celebrate two heroes of mine: authors and social campaigners Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (biographical information below). This tribute is a series of original works for piano, cello, and narrator. As part of the presentation, a reading of select poems by the authors accompanies each of the seven movements of music.

 

The first piece in this collection debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2018 featuring Hannah Holman on cello and Michelle Alvarado on piano.

 

 

We also toured the project in the American Midwest last October. Among other venues, we performed at Iowa City's beautiful Voxman Music Hall.

 

 

There are many steps to making a recording. We've begun tracking the music in NYC but have yet to complete our work.

 

 

I am looking to raise money to cover additional costs. We still need to record the poetry in the UK plus edit, mix, and master the entire project.

 

To learn more about this project and watch rehearsal videos see:

https://www.ericstarrmusic.com/featured-project

 

Who were Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby?

 

 

Vera Brittain (1893-1970) and Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) were groundbreaking British authors and social reformers. Brittain, a nurse during WWI, was the only woman to chronicle the Great War in depth. Together, Brittain and Holtby campaigned for peace, women's rights, and more. Brittain summed up their work in three words: "peace, justice, compassion."

 

For most of the interwar era, they were strong believers in the internationalism promised by the League of Nations. Their collective message is a cautionary tale, informed by a keen understanding of the horrors of war, and an unwavering desire to promote gender and racial equality.

 

Working near the front lines, Brittain witnessed the devastation of war while caring for both British and German soldiers. Among others, she lost her only brother and a fiancé to the war. Later, her grief-stricken father committed suicide. Brittain wrote and lectured with searing passion about her powerful experiences, and is best known for her memoir Testament of Youth (1933).

 

In addition to her ambitions as a novelist, Holtby also focused directly on women's rights, as well as racial justice in South Africa. Among other achievements, she established the Society of Friends of Africa (1934), which promoted the unionization of Black workers. In 1940, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Library was built in Johannesburg in her honor. The first library of its kind in South Africa, it was ‘equipped solely for the use of non-Europeans...and intended to serve native women as well as men.’

 

Holtby died at age 37 from renal failure, but not before completing her landmark feminist novel, South Riding (1936).

 

 

I hope you'll consider donating. Every dollar helps! Thank you!