MUSE
Bands / Ensembles
MUSE (1984–present) is a feminist women's choir from Cincinnati, Ohio. Choral conductor Catherine Roma founded the group in 1984 after moving to Ohio for graduate study at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. MUSE is an auditioned volunteer choir whose repertoire centers on music by women composers and arrangements of songs by women's movement singer-songwriters. Roma retired after the 2012–2013 season, and Rhonda Juliano and later Reina Dickey served as artistic director. The choir won a gold medal at the 2012 World Choir Games. Bluegrass musicians Ma Crow and Trina Emig performed with MUSE in 2002, joined by Katie Laur and other women musicians. Ma Crow and the Lady Slippers returned in November 2015 for the concert Valleys Rivers Mountains: Our Life's Journey, a program of traditional and new Appalachian music. MUSE sang Steve Milloy's choral arrangement of "Memory of a Mountain," a song about mountaintop-removal mining written by the band's fiddler, Margie Drees.
In the newsletter
- No. 27 September 2001