Bellingham Chamber Music Society's 2026-27 season features WWU music faculty

a small audiences watches five chamber musicians perform a concert

August 24, 2026

by Chris Casquilho

University Communications

The 2026-27 Bellingham Chamber Music Society concert season features WWU music faculty members Laura Camacho, Celeste Fraser, Mehrdad Gholami, Pat Nelson, Jay Rozendaal, Eli Schille-Hudson, Jill Whitman, Judith Widrig, and Kay Zavislak.

The Society's fifth season pays tribute to the composers featured in Leah Broad’s biography "Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World."

Broad’s book explores the lives of four British composers spanning 150 years as they negotiated the realities of musical life as women in the world of their times. Broad calls out “historical forgetting [as] a powerful form of erasure." Five chamber works from these composers are sprinkled throughout the season.

The quartet of composers

Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette.
Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist was one of the first women hired by a professional orchestra in London, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation.
Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms; on retirement, she tended Elgar’s grave alone.
Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain’s first woman film composers

Rebecca Clarke’s great-nephew, Charles Johnson, will present a lecture on Saturday, September 26 in the Hotel Leo Social Lounge. Johnson worked with Clarke in the last decade of her life to catalogue her works. He owns Clarke's publishing rights, and has edited or published more than eighty of Clarke's works.

A second special event is in the works for February 2027.

Bellingham Chamber Music Society is partnering with Village Books this season to have a table at each of the concerts with books for sale including "Quartet."