Voices of the Pearl traces, in newly commissioned song cycles, the tenuous lineage of women who dared to encounter the unmediated divine; their efforts span time, religion, nation and culture. The project commissions, performs and records musical works from composers across the globe, setting text by and about female esoterics from world traditions throughout history, reclaiming these lost voices and the tradition of female spirituality. By juxtaposing and performing 4 to 5 cycles by living composers, we will create a full-length evening of portraits of female esoterics, traversing time and geography. The performance of live music will be enhanced by the avant garde and transcendent moving images created by award winning video artist Michael Pope (Tanne Foundation). His stunning and deeply intuitive visual vocabulary, described as “unforgettable” by the Boston Globe, will unite the musical portraits of women negotiating the intersection of heaven and earth, in a variety of world traditions: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Daoist, Buddhist. The female esoteric practitioner is twice marginalized in the world’s traditions: 1) the mystics’ direct contact with the divine threatens the hierarchical structures of organized religion and so they are, because of this, sometimes labeled heretical 2) women are often considered by religious traditions incapable, due to their female bodies, to attain an authentic direct mystical contact with the divine. VOICES OF THE PEARL TEAM Director and performer Anne Harley BA (Yale College); MMus, Opera Certificate, DMA (Boston University) was born in Toronto, Canada, moved to the US to study comparative literature at Yale University and then to Boston University, completing her doctorate in Historical Performance with a concentration in voice in 2006. Harley specializes in performing music from challenging and ground-breaking contemporary composers as well as music from early oral and written traditions in Europe, America and Russia. She has premiered, performed and recorded works by Evan Ziporyn, John Adams, Lee Hoiby, Louis Andriessen, Peter Eotvös and John Harbison, Jodi Goble, Christine Southworth, Moshe Shulman, Yii Kah Hoe and Chaipruck Mekara, among others. She performs in North America, Europe and Asia and has appeared as soloist with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Opera Boston, American Repertory Theatre, Handel & Haydn Society, Boston Camerata, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at the Tanglewood Festival. The Boston Globe acclaimed Anne Harley's performance in BMOP’s American première of Peter Eotvos's Angels in America as “vocally and dramatically outstanding.” The Village Voice described her solo in the Boston Camerata's American Shaker program for the Tero Saarinen Dance Company at Brooklyn Academy of Music as transmitting a “heart-wrenching purity.” In 2009-10, she premiered the role of Margaret Mead in the dance-opera A House in Bali by MIT’s Evan Ziporyn, with libretto by Paul Schick, in the Water Palace Theater in Ubud, Bali and later at CalPerformances in Berkeley, California, the BAM Next Wave Festival and in Boston. In 2013, she founded Voices Of The Pearl, which comissions, performs and records song cycles from composers around the world to texts by and about female esoteric practitioners from all world traditions. Her solo recordings are available on Hänssler Profil, Naxos, Sony Classics, Canteloupe, Musica Omnia, einKlang and BMOP/sound, among others. Jane Sheldon, performer: Praised by the New York Times for singing "sublimely” and described as “superb, with a voice of penetrating beauty, precision and variegated colours” (Sydney Morning Herald), New York-based Australian soprano Jane Sheldon has sung under the direction of William Christie, Charles Dutoit, Antony Walker, and Reinbert de Leeuw. Specializing in early music and active in the creation and performance of new works, she has performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Pinchgut Opera, Boston Camerata, Wet Ink, Talea, and Ekmeles, and appeared in New York City Opera’s 2012 Vox Festival. In 2011 Jane was awarded Performance of the Year at the Australian Art Music Awards for The Origin Cycle, with Ensemble Offspring. Her most recent album, North + South, was nominated for Best Classical Album of 2013 in Australia's ARIAs, the country's highest award for recorded music. Engagements in 2013-14 include a world premiere staging of Giya Kancheli's Exil for Sydney Chamber Opera, and performances throughout the US, Europe, and Australia of new vocal music by John Zorn. Jodi Goble, pianist Composer Jodi Goble writes text-based, character-driven music fueled by her extensive background as a vocal coach and song-specialist collaborative pianist. Her compositions are praised for their melodism, their intuitive, idiomatic vocal writing, and the clarity and deftness of their text settings, and have been performed across the United States and featured on National Public Radio. Her song cycle for coloratura soprano, The Ivory Box is Broken, was a finalist entry in the 2007-2008 National Association of Teachers of Singing Art Song Competition. More recently, she won the 2013 Commission Competition of the Iowa Music Teachers Association and premiered the resulting commission, Two Teasdale Songs, with mezzo-soprano Mary Creswell in June 2013. Goble’s choral cantata True Witness, settings of texts by African-American women from the Civil War to present day, was premiered and recorded at Scripps College in Claremont, CA by the Claremont Chamber and Concert Choirs, the Chamber Singers of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, the Crossroads Inside-Out Women’s Choir, and soloists Gwendolyn Lytle and Simon Estes in November 2013. Other recent commissions include works for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Operatecture Project, the P.A.L.S. Girlchoir in Boston, and Omaha-based chamber trio I, the Siren. Her works have recently received performances at Iowa State University, Curry College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Endicott College, the Iowa Composers’ Forum, and the Art Song Preservation Society of New York. As a collaborative pianist, Goble was a member of the voice faculty at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, the senior vocal coach and Coordinator of Opera Programs for the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and the primary rehearsal pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Her work with the TFC took her from Boston's Symphony Hall to Carnegie Hall in New York City, across six European countries, and back to Tanglewood, where she performed on the TFC's annual Prelude Concert at Seiji Ozawa Hall. During her tenure with the Boston Symphony, she was privileged to play under conductors James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Sir Colin Davis, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, Keith Lockhart, and Seiji Ozawa, and to collaborate in rehearsal with artists such as José van Dam, Paul Groves, Yvonne Naef, Stephanie Blythe, Marcello Giordano, and Peter Serkin. Now a member of the voice faculty at Iowa State University since 2009, Ms. Goble collaborates regularly in recital with renowned operatic bass-baritone Simon Estes and is the pianist and artistic director for the Simon Estes Young Artist Concert Series. She is the official pianist of the Metropolitan Opera Guild Auditions in Iowa and a frequent recital collaborator with artists from Des Moines Metro Opera. Ms. Goble holds bachelor's degrees in violin and piano performance from Olivet Nazarene University, and a M.M. in collaborative piano and chamber music from Ball State University. Composers Kati Agócs is a composer whose music merges lapidary rigor with sensuous lyricism, and is performed by leading musicians across the globe. Recently awarded the 2014 Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is also a current Composition Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Born in 1975, Kati Agócs is a citizen of three countries: the USA, Canada, and Hungary (European Union). She has served on the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2008. The New York Times has described her music as “striking”, “nimble”, and “filled with attractive ideas,” and her vocal writing as possessing "an almost 19th-century naturalness." The Boston Globe has called it "music of fluidity and austere beauty" which "combines great tensile strength with a gorgeous unfolding of luminous lyrical episodes, rich inventive counterpoint, and a feeling of deep, elusive mystery." Yii Kah Hoe is an active Malaysian composer. He was the winner of Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra Forum for Malaysian Composers 2 (2007) and a recipient of the 3rd Prize in the International Composition for Chinese Orchestra organized by Singapore Chinese Orchestra (2006). Finalist of International Composers Competition "Città di Udine" (Italy, 2010). Yii’s music is perceived as bold and avant-garde. His pieces use sounds and rhythms of many traditional instruments from various ethnic cultures. The sensitivity of space that he mastered as an artist (Fine art) in his younger years is also evident in his music. His interests in ethnic and traditional music have prompted him to embark on an ongoing research project to collect folk music and ethno musical materials of the regions. Yii blends western and non-western aesthetics, concepts and traditions together to create his own sound which he categorizes as conceptually traditional in every sense. He is also the festival director of the Kuala Lumpur Contemporary Music Festival (Malaysia, 2009) and a senior lecturer at SEGi College Subang Jaya. Moshe Shulman, a composer, violin/viola, accordion and bandoneon player holds a Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and the PhD with distinction in Music Composition from the NY State University at Buffalo. Recently, Shulman led the Baires Klezmer Orchestra in Buenos Aires, Argentina,