"La Vita Femina" concert

Women’s lives in the Middle Ages are the focus of a recital of early music to be  performed by artist-in-residence Debra Gomez-Tapio at SUNY Fredonia’s Rosch Recital Hall on Thursday, March 2 at 8 p.m. Entitled, “La Vita Femina,” the concert is free and includes a pre-concert talk at 7 p.m., and reception afterwards.

Debra Gomez-Tapio, left, will present a concert of early music.

An expert in Europe’s classical music prior to the Baroque period, Ms. Gomez-Tapio will sing some of the songs in the original Occitan language, which dates to the 10^th century and is still spoken in some areas of southern France.  

Having extensively studied the ballads and poems sung by men and women of the 12^th and 13^th centuries, she has detected important gender differences. “Though this program in no way claims to be a study in gender discourse in the Middle Ages,” she said, “I believe one can detect a different mode of expression between the genders.”
 
Her residency at the Fredonia School of Music will be spent teaching and demonstrating some of Europe’s classical music prior to the Baroque period, which is known as Early Music. The Carnahan-Jackson Humanities Fund of the Fredonia College Foundation is a sponsor of the residency.
 
Ms. Gomez-Tapio teaches English at the University of Tampere in Finland. She is a two-time recipient of a Fulbright award for study at the internationally-known Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, and has performed and recorded with many of the most prestigious artists associated with Early Music.

“In the 12th and 13th centuries, women in southern Europe, especially in France, enjoyed rather strong positions in life,” she noted. “Because of a change in ownership laws and a depletion in the male population caused by the crusades, women were allowed to own property and to wield power over it. Therefore we have more documentation about women’s lives from this period in history than from many other times.”