The 2026 SHE: Festival of Women in Music returns to the University of Arkansas beginning Friday afternoon. It's a full weekend of performances, presentations and lecture recitals, including the featured concert Saturday night in the Faulkner Performing Arts Center with the U of A Jazz Orchestra. It will close Sunday afternoon with the U of A student collage concert.
In just a few minutes, we'll hear a preview of that collage concert with four student musicians. First, Theresa Delaplain, associate professor at the University of Arkansas, gets us ready for the festival.
She says the 2026 festival highlights both historic and contemporary composers, including commissioning composers.
Delaplain: This year, we've commissioned Jihye Lee, a very young composer based in New York City, to write a work for jazz orchestra and solo piano. She's won a lot of awards in terms of what she's done in the jazz scene. She's had residencies at NYU. She's had a BMI Foundation Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, an ASCAP Foundation Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize, and a Korean Music Award for Best Jazz Album in 2022 and 2025, among other prizes. She's really pretty young to have won all those prizes.
Kellams: And this piece, we're going to hear it Saturday night?
Delaplain: Yes. It's at the Faulkner Performing Arts Center at 7:30, and that's actually a free concert. You do need a ticket, but the ticket doesn't cost anything. Our Jazz Orchestra from the university is going to be performing. And our own Claudia Burson, who's just a well-known local jazz piano legend and also teaches jazz piano students at the U of A, she's going to be playing the solo.
Kellams: It's a commissioned work. This will be the first time anyone has heard it.
Delaplain: This will be the world premiere. Yes, this will be the world premiere. We on the SHE Festival are really excited about being able to do things like this. While I'm mentioning that, I should say that we've had some financial help. This year we had financial help from Reed Greenwood. And we also are using a grant from the Women's Giving Circle for the commission.
Kellams: Obviously a music festival will have performance, and that's wonderful. Not just the one we mentioned, but there are performances all over. But there are also lectures and presentations that are so interesting.
Delaplain: Yes, we have 14 lecture recitals and 10 presentations. A presentation would be one where the person's not performing — they're giving a presentation about a specific topic, and the range of topics is astounding. "The Louisiana Lady: Camille Nickerson and the Legacy of Afro-Creole Song" — that's on Saturday morning. And that's just one of them. There's a whole variety. Let me take another — a lecture recital on Saturday afternoon from 3 to 3:30 p.m. Marie Gallardo, "Voices of Resilience: Clarinet Works by Women from Central America." So when it's a lecture recital, that means we'll hear something about the composer, but we'll also hear something by the composer.
Kellams: I would imagine for something like the SHE Festival, most of the attendees are musicians or music educators. But what about someone like me — someone who loves music but doesn't teach or perform?
Delaplain: Oh, I think you'd love it. Anybody can come. You just have to register.
Kellams: What do you think is the value of having intergenerational musicians, scholars and aficionados coming together for two and a half days?
Delaplain: It's really exciting. The students get inspired by it. They learn about new composers. They learn about historic composers that they didn't know about. And the presenters or performers get to meet with each other and also learn new things and share new things.
Kyle Kellams: I will be the first to tell you I have ignorance on so many of the composers that are going to be discussed.
Delaplian: That's why we do this, because a lot of these composers are really deserving of being better known. We hope they'll be better known and more performed and more studied.
Kellams: Where can people find the program?
Delaplain: The program is also on the website. It's just she.uark.edu.
Kellams: In a minute we're going to move over to the Furman Garner Performance Studio. There are some musicians coming. What can you tell me about them?
Delaplain: They are a flute quartet, and they're playing on the student collage concert, which is another part of the festival that we have every year. And that'll be at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 8, in the Faulkner Performing Arts Center. That's also a free concert. And so we have several of our own students who were chosen by faculty recommendation to perform on this concert. So the flute quartet is one of those ensembles playing on the concert.
Theresa Delaplain is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas and is helping put together the 2026 SHE: Festival of Women in Music, taking place Friday through Sunday on the U of A campus. After our conversation, we moved over to the Firman Garner Performance Studio for that preview of Sunday's student collage concert. Here are master's of music students Rose Moeller, Karla Martinez, Jackson Gordon and Charlie Grady performing "Umoja," composed by Valerie Coleman.
[Music]
Our thanks to Wai Kay Carenbauer for technical direction with the musical recording.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
