Songs of Job's Daughter Winifred Hyson
Winifred Hyson is a composer based in
Bethesda, Maryland. She was born in Schenectady, New York, and graduated from
the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She received her A.B. from
Radcliffe College (Harvard University), magna cum laude, in Physics, where she
was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her music training at the American
University in Washington, D.C., studying music theory and composition with
Esther Williamson Ballou and Lloyd Ultan. Songs of Job’s Daughter was a prize winner in
the 1971 Mu Phi Epsilon Original composition Contest, the required selection
for sopranos in the 1980 Mu Phi Epsilon
Sterling Staff Competition, and was performed during the 1982 Women in Music
Conference at the University of Michigan. The poems by Jean Starr Untermeyer,
wife of Louis Untermeyer, comment on the ultimate lack of real life choices for
a woman, the ambiguous feelings of a young mother, and the rapture of fulfilled
love. The poet had a difficult life of her own; her husband obtained several Mexican divorces which she never accepted until decades had gone by, finally agreeing to a legal divorce; also, her son committed suicide when he was in college. She began life as a Lieder singer – hence the musical effects of her poetry – but kept company with several poets and eventually became well known in her own right.
