by Kevin McLaughlin
Seven first-rate pieces for small ensembles received superb performances on Saturday, June 3 as part of the Local 4 Music Fund’s She Scores series, which spanned three programs over three days in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University. Oberlin Conservatory musicology professor Emily Laurance provided informative and engaging remarks beforehand. The program offered a cornucopia of ear-tugging, seldom-heard pieces, or premieres, all by women-identifying or non-binary composers, many with Ohio or Cleveland connections.
Akron native Margi Griebling-Haigh, a longtime fixture of the Cleveland new music scene, was represented by ¡de Chiripa!, the opening work. The title translates to “by chance” or “by a fluke,” suggesting a playful or casual perspective. Scored for English horn and two guitars, the work references Spanish music both through its title and its use of Phrygian semitones and dance rhythms. Guitarists Andy Poxon and Bryan Reichert contributed to the Mediterranean warmth, and English hornist Cyn Warren displayed apt nobility and ardor.
When the Cleveland Composers Guild added the requirement of writing a vocal piece to its collegiate composition contest in 2019 and generated only a single entry — impressive as that piece was — the idea was born for dedicating an entire year to vocal music.
Since bursting onto the scene in 2012 with its 
How should we remember someone after they pass away?
ChamberFest Cleveland, the celebrated summer music festival founded by Franklin Cohen, principal clarinet emeritus of The Cleveland Orchestra, and his daughter, Diana Cohen, concertmaster of The Calgary Philharmonic, returns to the Cleveland scene with Season 8, “Under the Influence.” The festival will take place from June 13 through June 29, 2019, at venues throughout Greater Cleveland, and will include nine concerts plus a special late-night electronic violin performance at The Wine Spot on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.
Music can be a powerful tool for the expression of social discourse. Sometimes it is subtle. Other times it is overt and unapologetic. Such was the case with Andrew Rindfleisch’s 
Last week, as part of the seventh annual Cleveland Trombone Seminar, a concert by Mark Lancaster Lusk took listeners into the heart of the brass player’s world: a region dominated by vocal music, modernist explorations, and jazz.
Whisking the listener away on a diverse journey of sounds, the AHA! Festival will present a piano trio from a fellow local summer series, ChamberFest Cleveland. Pianist Roman Rabinovich, cellist Oliver Herbert, and violinist David Bowlin will come together to play gems of the chamber music repertoire by Brahms, Kodály, and