Returning to Ithaca College, I’ll be joined by the incredible Xak Bjeerken on piano. We’ll be performing a program that explores the many ways that people’s voices and artistic expressions can be inhibited, excluded, muted, and restricted. The first half of the program features songs by three Welsh composers – Morfydd Owen, William Mathias, and Grace Williams – almost completely unknown outside of Wales. Despite the high quality of their work, their songs have not made it into the main-stream canon of British music, in part due to still-existing cultural prejudices within the UK. The second half of the program explores other methods of suppression: racism, incarceration, and conflict. Until recently and certainly during their lifetimes, African American composers such as Harry T. Burleigh, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds did not receive the recognition or performance opportunities that they deserved within the US music industry due to longstanding racism and exclusion. Ethnicity, paired with religion, is also the reason that Abduquadir Jalalidin, a well-known Uyghur poet, is being held in captivity in China. This poem escaped its confinement through oral transmission from prisoner to prisoner, eventually being translated into English by Joshua Freeman and set to music by Thomas Osborne. But countless other works of art and their artists remain trapped. And though he lived for many years after completing his Op. 38 songs, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was forced to flee his native Russia during the Revolution of 1917, never wrote another song. What had been a prolific career in composition was silenced by his displacement and emigration. If these artists’ voices had been allowed to fully flourish and their works fully welcomed into our canon, our artistic landscape may be even richer.