Pacifica Quartet performs Women's Suffrage concert

In honor of the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which allowed all U.S. women the right to vote, the Pacifica Quartet performed an especially topical program for the Schubert Club, Friend of Chamber Music (Portland), and West Cork Music Festival:

Women’s Suffrage: A Musical Retrospective
Amy Beach: String Quartet, Op. 89 (1929)
Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet (1931)
Jennifer Higdon: Voices (written for the Pacifica in 1993)
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Florence Price: Andante moderato from Quartet in G major (1929)
Fanny Mendelssohn: String Quartet in E-flat major

The program features string quartets written by prominent American female composers around the time of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, a work commissioned by the Pacifica Quartet from one of the prominent female composers of our time, and a prominent masterpiece written by a pioneering female composer during the height of the pro-suffrage sentiment. These works – representing women from Europe and the United States, living in different eras – cover a vast territory of different thoughts, styles, and opinions. In short, the differences represented here are exactly why our world needs the voices of all women heard and why granting the right to vote to all women was a tremendously important step toward equality.