The University of Iowa School of Music will honor emerita faculty member Betty Bang Mather with Baroque for Betty: A Flute Extravaganza at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 14, in the Riverside Recital Hall. The event is free and open the public. This summer Mather will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Flute Association at its convention in Las Vegas.

Faculty member Nicole Esposito and the UI Flute Studio, along with special guests, will present this recital to celebrate Mather's life-long achievements and contributions to the UI and the flute world. The mostly Baroque program will feature music by Telemann, Handel, Scarlatti, J.S Bach, W. A. Mozart, and others.

Betty Bang Mather

Mather taught the flute at the UI for 44 years. She was one of the first flutists in the United States to teach herself and her students to play Baroque music from the instructions in early French and German woodwind tutors.

In the 1970s she gave the first annual summer workshops in traversoflute performance in America, and she wrote her book on interpreting French Baroque woodwind music, various articles on 18th-century woodwind performance practices, and the first modern books on the free ornamentation, cadenzas, and preludes for woodwind instruments in the late Baroque and early Classical periods.

In the 1980s she and coauthor Dean Karns wrote Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque: A Handbook for Performance. After that she concentrated on applying historical performance clues to faithful editions of single sets of Baroque pieces.

Mather’s books and articles have been published, republished, or translated and republished, in Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States.

For more information or special accommodations to attend, contact 319-335-1603 or kathleen-forbes@uiowa.edu.

The School of Music is an academic unit of the Division of Performing Arts in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.