Florence Louise Pettitt
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Florence Louise Pettitt
Louise Pettitt (1918 – March 25, 2006), born Florence Louise Staples, was one of the first American female opera conductors. For over forty years, she simultaneously served as orchestral conductor, dramatic director, and vocal director for the Chaminade Opera Group, which she founded in 1959.Records of the Chaminade Opera Group She promoted the growth of opera, and the advancement of many performers ranging from amateur enthusiasts to internationally known professionals. Biography Florence Louise Staples Pettitt was born in Massachusetts in 1918. Her father—Charles Albert Staples—was a classical cellist who played in various New England orchestras. He took Louise to countless rehearsals during her childhood. The two also performed in local theaters. She was a high school valedictorian and mastered the cello, like her father. She was lucky to come from a school with a very strong music program. Opera star Robert Rounseville and BSO violinist Sheldon Rotenberg and compos ...
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Massachusetts
Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut [Massachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət],'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Maine to the east, Connecticut and Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north, and New York (state), New York to the west. The state's capital and List of municipalities in Massachusetts, most populous city, as well as its cultural and financial center, is Boston. Massachusetts is also home to the urban area, urban core of Greater Boston, the largest metropolitan area in New England and a region profoundly influential upon American History of the United States, history, academia, and the Economy of the United States, research economy. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing, and trade. Massachusetts was transformed into a manuf ...
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Wheaton College (Massachusetts)
Wheaton College is a private liberal arts college in Norton, Massachusetts. Wheaton was founded in 1834 as a female seminary. The trustees officially changed the name of the Wheaton Female Seminary to Wheaton College in 1912 after receiving a college charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It remained one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States until men began to be admitted in 1988. It enrolls 1,669 undergraduate students. History In 1834, Eliza Wheaton Strong, the daughter of Judge Laban Wheaton, died at the age of thirty-nine. Eliza Baylies Chapin Wheaton, the judge's daughter-in-law and a founder of the Trinitarian Congregational Church of Norton, persuaded him to memorialize his daughter by founding a female seminary. The family called upon noted women's educator Mary Lyon for assistance in establishing the seminary. Lyon created the first curriculum with the goal that it be equal in quality to those of men's colleges. She a ...
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Boris Goldovsky
Boris Goldovsky (Борис Анисимович Голдовский; June 7, 1908 - February 15, 2001) was a Russian Empire-born conductor and broadcast commentator, active in the United States. He has been called an important "popularizer" of opera in America. As an opera producer, conductor, impresario, and broadcaster he was prominent within the American operatic community between 1946 and 1985. Early life He was born in Moscow to a well established Jewish musical family. His father was lawyer Onissim Goldovsky, his mother the well-known concert violinist Lea Luboshutz, and several relatives were accomplished musicians, including his pianist uncle, Pierre Luboshutz, his first teacher. After the Russian Revolution, his family lost their wealth and he became, at the age of nine, his mother's accompanist, to secure more food for the family. Career In the Bolshevik era, he and his mother travelled to Europe, leaving the Soviet Union. Goldovsky studied with Artur Schnabel in Berli ...
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Opera Company Of Boston
The Opera Company of Boston was an American opera company located in Boston, Massachusetts, that was active from the late 1950s through the 1980s. The company was founded by American conductor Sarah Caldwell in 1958 under the name Boston Opera Group. At one time, the touring arm of the company was called Opera New England. Caldwell served as both director and conductor for most of the company's productions throughout its more than three decade-long history. Under her leadership, the company presented a repertoire of more than 75 operas that came from a wide array of musical periods and styles, including many works previously unheard in the United States, and a significant number of contemporary operas. This focus on distinctive repertoire, along with Caldwell's innovative stage direction, garnered the group wide acclaim and earned it a place among the leading opera companies in the U.S. In 1990, after 32 seasons, the company was forced to close due to financial difficulties. His ...
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Carol Fox (Chicago Opera)
Carol Fox (Chicago, June 15, 1926 – July 21, 1981) was, at the age of 28, the first impresario of the Chicago Lyric Opera and credited with restoring Chicago's pre-Depression operatic glory. Carol was the only child of a wealthy Chicago furniture manufacturer. Her enthusiasm for opera showed itself when she returned home from study in Europe in 1950. With Lawrence Kelly, also aged 28, a real estate agent and insurance broker, and the conductor Nicola Rescigno she organized the rebirth of a resident opera company at the Chicago Civic Opera building. In 1958 she engaged Pino Donati Pino Donati (9 May 1907 – 24 February 1975) was an Italian composer and for many years artistic director of the Chicago Lyric Opera. Donati was born in Verona. From 1936 he was superintendent of the Arena di Verona and then from 1950 the Teatro ... from Italy as her assistant and artistic director - a function in which he continued till his death in 1975.''Theatre arts'', Volume 43, 1959: "She engaged ...
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Margaret Hillis
Margaret Eleanor Hillis (October 1, 1921, Kokomo, Indiana – February 5, 1998, Evanston, Illinois) was an American conductor. She was the founder and first director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Life Hillis was born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1921."Hillis, Margaret (1921–)." '' Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages'', edited by Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, vol. 1, Yorkin Publications, 2007, p. 878. ''Gale eBooks''. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021. She began to study the piano at the age of five and continued with several other instruments, including woodwinds, brass, and double bass. She made her conducting debut, while still a student, as assistant conductor of her high school orchestra. After suspending her studies for two years during World War II to become a civilian flight instructor in Muncie, Indiana, Hillis received a bachelor of music degree in composition from Indiana University in 1947 and later studied conducting privately with Julius Herford and ...
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Handel And Haydn Society
The Handel and Haydn Society is an American chorus and period instrument orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. Known colloquially as 'H+H', the organization has been in continual performance since its founding in 1815, the longest-serving such performing arts organization in the United States. Early history The Handel and Haydn Society was founded as an oratorio society in Boston on March 24, 1815, by a group of Boston merchants and musicians, "to promote the love of good music and a better performance of it". The founders, Gottlieb Graupner, Thomas Smith Webb, Amasa Winchester, and Matthew S. Parker, described their aims as "cultivating and improving a correct taste in the performance of Sacred Music, and also to introduce into more general practice, the works of Handel, Haydn, and other eminent composers." The society made its debut on Christmas Day, December 25, 1815, at King's Chapel (then Stone Chapel), with a chorus of 90 men and 10 women. The early chorus members were m ...
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Boston Conservatory
Boston Conservatory at Berklee (formerly The Boston Conservatory) is a private performing arts conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. It grants undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance, music, and theater. Boston Conservatory was founded on February 11, 1867, as a music conservatory and later expanded to include leading programs in dance, opera, and theater. It currently offers Bachelor of Fine Arts, Bachelor of Music, Master of Fine Arts, and Master of Music degrees, as well as Graduate Performance Diplomas, Artist Diplomas, and Professional Studies Certificates. In 2016, Boston Conservatory merged with Berklee College of Music to form "Berklee," an umbrella institution that includes Berklee College of Music, Berklee Online, Berklee Valencia, and Berklee NYC. With this, the conservatory's name was changed to "Boston Conservatory at Berklee." Boston Conservatory remains a disparate school within Berklee, continuing to offer its signature conservatory programs. Berkle ...
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Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 52nd–most visited art museum in the world . Founded in 1870 in Copley Square, the museum moved to its current Fenway location in 1909. It is affiliated with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. History 1870–1907 The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and was initially located on the top floor of the Boston Athenaeum. Most of its initial collection came from the Athenæum's Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet, a local artist, was instrumental in starting the art school affiliated with the museum, and in appointing Emil Otto Grundmann as its first director. In 1876, the museum moved to a h ...
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Quaintance Eaton
Quaintance Eaton (August 23, 1901 — April 12, 1992) was an American writer and arts administrator, author of several works on the history of opera. Early life Frances Quaintance Eaton was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the daughter of Dudley Ward Eaton, a lawyer, and Madge (McAlister) Eaton."Quaintance Eaton, 90, Writer on Opera, Dies"
''New York Times'' (April 15, 1992): p. 26.
The name "Quaintance" was a family name. "My Quaker grandmother was named Bathsheeba Gidley Quaintance", she explained. "Fortunately I inherited only part of her name".Claire Leeds
"She Promotes Music for the ...
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Symphony Hall, Boston
Symphony Hall is a concert hall located at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, opened in 1900. Designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, it was built for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which continues to make the hall its home. It can accommodate an audience of 2,625. The hall was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1999 and is a pending Boston Landmark. It was then noted that "Symphony Hall remains, acoustically, among the top three concert halls in the world (sharing this distinction with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Vienna's Musikvereinsaal), and is considered the finest in the United States." and   Symphony Hall, located one block from Berklee College of Music to the north and one block from the New England Conservatory to the south, also serves as home to the Boston Pops Orchestra as well as the site of many concerts of the Handel and Haydn Society. History and architecture On June 12, 1899, ground was broken and construct ...
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Jordan Hall
Jordan Hall is a 1,051-seat concert hall in Boston, Massachusetts, the principal performance space of the New England Conservatory. It is one block from Boston's Symphony Hall. It is the only conservatory building in the United States to be designated a National Historic Landmark. This building is currently under study by the Boston Landmarks Commission for landmark status. Design Its architect was Edmund M. Wheelwright of Boston's Wheelwright & Haven, who later designed nearby Horticultural Hall. The hall's unusual square floor plan reflects its underlying plot of land but despite its shape, the hall has excellent acoustics, and all seats on both the main floor and horseshoe-shaped balcony have unobstructed views of the stage. The hall's prominent organ is modeled upon one found in a church within the former hospital complex of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. History The hall opened in 1903, as a gift of Eben D. Jordan II, a Conservatory trustee and son of the founder ...
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