The UTM Department of Music presented the Phi Kappa Phi’s 2024 Muriel Tomlinson Memorial Lecture, featuring a musical performance and lecture by Drs. Amy Yeung and Chan Mi Jean.
The event, “There is No Gender in Music: Music Heroines from Baroque Onward,” began at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 19 in the Blankenship Recital Hall at the UTM Fine Arts Building.
The event featured songs by distinguished women who made significant contributions to Western classical music from the 1600s onwards. Dr. Yeung discussed the evolving attitudes towards women composers and explored social, historical, and cultural aspects of their music and lives.
“Listening to a piece of music,” notes Dr. Yeung, “no one can tell whether it is written by a man or a woman. Historically, however, women composers have often been treated with skepticism, disdain and denigration, especially for women of color.”
Dr. Yeung is a professor at UTM, teaching applied voice and lyric diction while directing lyric opera theatre. She has performed recitals and concerts extensively throughout her career. She has a considerably large academic portfolio, including a doctoral degree in voice performance, a second master’s in music theory from Michigan State University, a master’s in voice performance from Texas State University and an undergraduate degree in voice performance from Hong Kong Baptist University.
Dr. Chan Mi Jean is a collaborative pianist at UTM, but she is also an emerging solo pianist, chamber musician and opera coach who has made international appearances. She has earned a doctoral degree in collaborative piano and a doctoral minor in opera coaching from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a master’s and graduate performer diploma in piano performance from Indiana University.
Phi Kappa Phi Chapter 127 was founded on the UT Martin campus in 1971 and hosts the Muriel Tomlinson Memorial Lecture series each spring. It is in honor of Dr. Muriel Tomlinson, a former faculty member and chairperson of the Department of Modern and Foreign Languages from 1959-1976 and avid supporter of Phi Kappa Phi.
For more information about this event and past Muriel Tomlinson Memorial Lectures, contact Dr. Chris Hill, President of Phi Kappa Phi Chapter 127 at 731-881-7292.
