Role: Media Director

Vocalists and instrumentalists from Kaufman Music School’s Special Music School High School give an exclusive work-in-progress performance of Centuries in the Hours: From Home, an opera by composer and 2020-21 KMC Artist-in-Residence Lisa Bielawa. Based on women’s diaries spanning three centuries, discovered during Bielawa’s extensive research as a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2018, Bielawa and librettist Claire Solomon adapted to the global pandemic, using the isolation women have historically faced as a formal constraint.

This innovative film by acclaimed media artist Jess Medenbach features the student cast filmed at the historic Morris-Jumel Mansion and in Merkin Hall. The stories of the women represented include an isolated teen genius (1901), a missionary (1823), a college student (1860), a Revolutionary War evacuee (1778), a Colorado housekeeper (1890s), a Philadelphia abolitionist (1860s), and a depressed Southern woman (1861). We will also hear from the ghost of Eliza Jumel, former owner of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, played by renowned professional mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin.