Join pianist and Artistic Director Daniel Weiser on this four-part exploration of the role of women as composers over the past few hundred years.   This course will explore the often difficult cultural barriers that kept their voices from being heard as they should.  Using live performances of both solo piano music and chamber music, Dr. Weiser will showcase the incredible variety, beauty, lyricism, passion, and energy of composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Louise Farrenc, Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade, and many more.  Despite the long odds of their success and a society that tended to limit their access to good musical education, all of these women composers produced soulful and distinct music that compares very well to many of the great male composers of the same period.   Weiser will perform works that are seldom heard (many unpublished) that reveal the intensity of longing that many of these women shared for some critical approbation.  As Fanny Mendelssohn once wrote: “When one never encounters either objective criticism or goodwill, one eventually loses the critical sense needed to judge one’s work, while at the same time losing the wish to create it…I am thus more or less alone with my music.”