Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) lived and composed during the height of the symphonic genre’s cultural prominence in Germany. She wrote eight symphonies and at least seven concert overtures despite the commonly held view of the time that women were not equipped for the large scale and complexity of symphonic composition. Although her work was critically acclaimed in her own time, most of it remained unpublished.

For “The Emilie Mayer Project,” students and faculty in the URI Department of Music will collaborate to bring her music out of the archive and into the concert hall. Using digitized manuscripts, student workers will create an edition of a previously unpublished orchestral work composed by Mayer, with the guidance of URI Symphony Orchestra conductor Samuel Hollister. The orchestra will rehearse and perform the piece for a spring 2023 concert, with a pre-concert lecture about Mayer and the gendered context of 19^th century symphonic composition by musicologist Vilde Aaslid. Following the performance, the project’s final step will be to upload the edition to an open access score repository, making it available for performance by orchestras around the world.