Henselfest 2027
Presenters/Performers
Henselfest 2027 will feature lectures, panels, musical & theatrical performances, and the visual arts.
Anna Beer, the author of biographies of some very familiar figures (think Milton, Raleigh and Shakespeare), is best-known for her feisty, feminist accounts of less-well-known female creatives, including her most influential book, Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (2016). In Sounds, Anna explored the life and work of eight superb composers, including Fanny Hensel. Sounds has led to creative collaborations across the musical world, on radio and TV, on film and the concert platform, and now the first Henselfest.
Ten years on from Sounds, Anna is again exploring the position of women in the music industry, combining her trademark historical analysis with interviews with contemporary practitioners. Composer: the changing face of music will be published in 2027.
Anna lives and works in Oxford, where she’s a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College. The city and university provide the settings for her murder mysteries: Death of an Englishman and An Inkling of Death.
Eva Meitner is a German-French conductor and pianist based in Leipzig/Germany and specialized in works by women composers.
She is conductor of the Leipziger Lehrerorchester since Juni 2026, Sinfonisches Orchester Hoyerswerda since 2015 and Community Orchestra of Silesia Sonans in Jelenia Góra since 2019. She is regularly performing as a pianist in solo recitals and chamber music (duo with horn), too. In addition to this she is curating publications (Chaminade 2025, Clara Schumann 2026) and working as an editor (Etudes by women composers, 2026) for Edition Peters.
She is a deep admirer of the works by Fanny Hensel and a big fan of Hensel Pushers. In 2018 she conducted Hensels Ouverture with Freies Orchester Leipzig during the Festival of Lights Leipzig in front of 15.000 people. In the season 2022/23 she played Hensel's whole The Year (every month a month) in a project called "Through the year with Fanny Hensel" as part of her "Coco" video series. She also made a YouTube video about Hensel's "Oratorio", explaining the content of this composition. Since 2023 she is a member of the Internationale Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Mendelssohn-Hauses Leipzig (International Society for the Promotion of Mendelssohn House Leipzig).
Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on nineteenth-century song, especially music by women composers. He has published widely on the songs of Fanny Hensel and is the editor of The Songs of Fanny Hensel (Oxford University Press, 2021), the first book devoted to Hensel’s contributions to the Lied. The collection received the Society for Music Theory’s 2024 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award. Rodgers is also the creator and host of Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song, and the founder of Art Song Augmented, a digital resource devoted to music by underrepresented song composers.
Jennifer Vosters (she/her) is a Chicago-based writer and theatre artist. Her original solo play, Songs Without Words (or, The Mendelssohn Play), won the M. Elizabeth Osborn Award from the American Theatre Critics Association in 2024 before touring various theatres, universities, and festivals in the U.S. and Canada. Other awards for Songs Without Words include Critics’ Pick (Cincinnati Fringe), Pick of the Fringe and Audience Favorite (Green Bay Fringe), Best International Show (Saskatoon Fringe), Members’ Pick and Venue Pick (Minnesota Fringe), and Audience Favorite (Elgin Fringe). A proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and the Dramatists Guild, Jennifer has worked professionally as an actor, director, playwright, and occasional musician for more than ten years. She fell in love with the Mendelssohn/Hensel siblings and their music as a middle school orchestra student—so keep the arts funded in schools!
Marian Wilson Kimber, Professor of Musicology at the University of Iowa, has been writing about Fanny Hensel and the issues surrounding women composers for over three decades. Her 2002 article, “The Suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography,” continues to be widely read. Wilson Kimber’s scholarship has treated Das Jahr, Hensel as a travel writer, and her position in the writings of the American suffrage movement. Her article about nineteenth-century band arrangements of Hensel’s Gartenlieder led to performances of them by the Prince Regent’s Brass in England. Wilson Kimber has spoken about Hensel and her music in Germany and Korea, and been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal on women composers’ careers.
Wilson Kimber’s research into women’s roles in American musical life appears in two books, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (2017) and Clubwomen Activists and the Making of American Music, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. She currently serves as the editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music and contributes to the blog, Women’s Song Forum.
new Henselfest participants are being announced every Tuesday!