Upcoming Performances

Five choirs. Five conductors. Generations of women. One powerful story.

More than a century after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carmen KC brings together five area choirs for a powerful musical telling of the long fight for women’s right to vote.

On Sunday, November 15, singers ranging in age from 16 to 79 will take the stage at Community Christian Church for Andrea Ramsey’s Suffrage Cantata. The work traces more than seven decades of struggle, sacrifice and perseverance through the voices of the women who helped shape the suffrage movement.

The performance brings together Carmen KC, Notre Dame de Sion High School, Shawnee Heights High School, Washburn Rural High School and Washburn University’s Vox Aura, led by five female conductors. With generations of women and girls sharing the stage, the history at the heart of the work takes on new meaning: a right fought for by one generation, secured for another and carried forward by those who followed.

The story behind the music

Award-winning composer, conductor and music educator Andrea Ramsey spent more than a year researching the suffrage movement in preparation for Suffrage Cantata. Written for treble chorus, piano, string quartet, percussion and narration, the work combines music and spoken word to explore both familiar chapters of the movement and stories that have too often been left out of traditional accounts. Ramsey’s official catalog confirms the work’s instrumentation and lists Suffrage Cantata among her compositions for treble chorus.

Ramsey has deep ties to the Kansas City area and wrote the work while living here. An internationally recognized composer with nearly 200 works, she has built a career creating music for singers of many ages and experience levels.  

The Cantata pays particular attention to the experiences of Black suffragists and other women of color whose work was marginalized within the movement and often omitted from the history told afterward. In doing so, the performance celebrates the achievement of women’s suffrage while acknowledging that the passage of the 19th Amendment did not eliminate the barriers that prevented many women of color from exercising the right to vote.

Five choirs, five conductors, one stage

At the heart of this performance is an intergenerational collaboration. High school, university and adult community singers will share the stage, creating a musical connection between women and girls at very different points in their lives.

As Carmen KC Founding Director and President Dr. Sheri Cook-Cunningham explains, “The story of women’s suffrage is, in many ways, a story of one generation passing the gift and responsibility of the vote to the next. Having several generations of women and girls singing this story together makes that connection especially powerful.”

Together, these singers will honor the women who came before them while inviting audiences to reflect on the value of their own voices and participation in civic life.