Special Projects
Celebrating Works By Women Composers
For the 2021 and 2022 workshops, we encouraged our participants to explore works written by women composers. Many of these beautiful works have been hidden from the spotlight and excluded from the traditional chamber music canon. We have curated a list of chamber works by women for you and your group to play: Women Chamber Works. We have also purchased dozens of these works by women for our SoCal Library so that they are available to play at the workshop for years to come.
Call for Scores Competition
For the 2021 Workshop, the SoCal Chamber Music Workshop solicited submissions of an unpublished string chamber piece by a female composer to be featured and studied by the participants during our workshop July 11-17, 2021. The composer of the quartet chosen for the workshop received a $1,000.00 prize.
Deadline for submission was March 15, 2021.
The Winner of the competition, chosen May 15, 2021 was Berkeley-based composer, Erika Oba, with her piece, “Akoya” for string quartet. Congratulations, Erika! "Akoya" is a wonderful piece and we'd like to encourage you all to play it at the workshop. The piece will be available at the workshop, as well as 12 other great pieces we will be adding to our library. In the following video presentation of Erika’s talk on composition and this piece, the music is played at 13:35 and the encore is at 35:18. Check it out!
Call for Scores Competition details are below:
The composer must meet the following specifications:
Composer must identify as female
Composer must reside, work, or study at a school in the State of California
The piece can be scored for:
Standard string quartet
One violin, one viola, two cellos
Two violins, one viola, two cellos
Pieces which have been previously performed may be submitted, but the piece must not be published or have won any awards
Submissions are limited to one piece per composer
The piece should be playable by advanced amateur chamber musicians
All submissions should be in electronic format (ex., pdf) and include a score and parts (preferably not hand-written), a recording if possible (ex., mp3), and a bio of the composer, along with date of birth, home address, phone, and email contact information.
Note: Any submissions may be added to our music library for future study.
Submissions should be sent to:
Deadline: March 15, 2021
Notification of Prize: May 15, 2021. The winner is Erika Oba, with her piece “Akoya” for string quartet.
Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for big band, small jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute and is a member of the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble and has performed with the Hitomi Oba Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum's Sparkler, and Lisa Mezzacappa's Duo B Experimental Band. She has worked as a dance accompanist for Mills College and Berkeley Ballet Theater and is currently a resident music director with Berkeley Playhouse’s Youth Conservatory Program. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department. Past artistic projects include a collaboration with choreographer Sammay Dizon, through the Red Poppy Art House’s inaugural Crossover Residency program in 2016. She was also a performer fellow with Giant Steps Music Action Lab in 2017, during which she collaborated with an international group of musicians and recorded the album What If. In 2018, she was a composer fellow with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and worked with the Del Sol String Quartet. She was the recipient of a 2019 Civics Art Grant from the City of Berkeley and is currently collaborating with playwright Weston Scott on an original musical. As an artist, she is interested in exploring ritual, diasporic identities, and community through performance. She received her BM in Jazz Piano Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and her MA in Music Composition from Mills College.
