Putting My Mouthpiece Where My Mouth Is?

 It has been a great disappointment to me (and maybe a few of you, hopefully) that the end of quarantine and lockdown has revealed a disturbing lack of time to write more blog entries.  I have not lost interest in or passion for the topic, just time.  But today a perfect storm (literally) has created some for me: it's a "snow" day for both my kids and the university. At the same time, my faculty recital is being streamed tonight, and two female composers will be featured on that program.  So I thought this would be the perfect companion, to give a short introduction to those two pieces and their composers.

The program itself is all based on fairytales, and the colleague who is sharing the recital with me was kind enough to go along with this idea.  The first piece is The Enchanted Forest, a set of three movements for horn and piano by Karen Tanaka.  Tanaka was born in Tokyo in 1961 and studied in Japan, Paris, and Florence.  She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches composition at CalArts.  The list of her other accomplishments is long (and can be found on Wikipedia), and the depth of her catalog is extensive, from orchestral works to solo and chamber works to film music.  Nature is a recurring theme in her works, as is true of the piece featured on tonight's recital.

Impressionistic and evocative, The Enchanted Forest serves to usher our listeners into the land of make-believe through long, sustained horn lines floating over mesmerizing and repetitive piano figures.  Tanaka makes full use of the horn's extensive range, both in terms of pitch and dynamics, challenging the player's mastery of the fundamentals of the instrument in a way that is unusual for its lack of flashy technique.  While we were working on the piece, my pianist, Tom commented frequently on how refreshing it was for a composer to focus solely on creating something beautiful, and I hope our performance tonight will succeed in conveying that beauty to our audience!

Although a commercial recording is not available, if you want to get a preview of the piece, a very good YouTube video of the piece can be found here.

Later on in the program, we will feature the first recorded version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, op. 27b by Ruth Gipps, a piece for horn, oboe, bassoon, and narrator.  Ruth Gipps was a British composer, whose 100th birthday is this month.  Unfortunately, since her death in 1999, her extensive catalog has been severely neglected.  Fortunately for horn players, her son played the instrument, so she was inspired to write several pieces for the horn, a few of which have been commercially recorded.  Even more fortunately, she wrote in a style reminiscent of Vaughan Williams and the other English folksong composers, leaving a repertoire that is not just high in quality but also enjoyable for the listener.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff, while an early, student work, falls into this category of pleasant music.  The three instruments play the parts of the three goats, with the horn playing double duty and portraying the troll as well.  The simple narration (done masterfully by the inimitable Cyrus Williams tonight) fits nicely over the rambling, folksy music, creating a work that would work just as well for educational concerts as it would a serious recital.  Unfortunately, I cannot link you to a recording quite yet, but I am very interested in recording this and other works by Gipps and her contemporaries in a more formal, commercial setting at some point -- once the pandemic has ended.  

I hope you will enjoy tonight's prerecorded, streamed recital.  It was a fun project to put together, and I think it's going to be more interesting than just a camera pointed at some people onstage.  You can find it here, tonight (Wed., Feb. 10) at 7:30pm CENTRAL, although it will be available beyond tonight as well.

A Revolutionary Woman

In any class that teaches music history, we are often told that Beethoven was the bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras -- even to the point that he ushered in the Romantic era through his innovations and creativity.  But what if I told you that there was another -- and a woman at that?

At any rate, I had never heard the name of Hélène de Montgeroult until I started collecting female composers the last year or so.  Now that I know her music and her story, I can't believe there's not a movie based on her life, but I'm also astounded at the size and quality of her artistic output.  

Hélène de Montgeroult was born into an aristocratic French family in 1764.  She studied with a litany of the best teachers and musicians of her day, including Dussek, Clementi, and later in life, Reicha, but as an aristocrat, she was forbidden from giving public concerts.  After her marriage at age twenty to the Marquis of Montgeroult, she became recognized as a salon performer.  And then came the French Revolution.  

The Marquis suffered a violent death during Robespierre's Great Terror, but the story goes that Hélène, while imprisoned, earned her freedom by playing varations on La Marseillaise for the Committee of Public Safety.  In exchange, she was to serve on the faculty of the newly-created Conservatoire de Paris, which was founded in 1795.  Although the consevatoire was unique in its acceptance of female students from its inception, Hélène de Montgeroult was put in charge of a class of male pupils, which attests to the height of her skills as both pianist and pedagogue.  During this time of transition from harpsichord, the aristocrat's instrument, to the fortepiano, newly invented and without such a strong connotation, Hélène's knowledge and abilities on both were highly valued assets.  

The Marquise spent two years at the conservatoire, resigning in 1798 for health reasons, but she did not stop teaching, as evidenced by her Cours complet pour l'enseignement du pianoforte, which she began in 1788 and completed in 1812.  This pedagogical text contains 972 exercises and 114 etudes, several fugues, and sets of variations, as well as detailed instruction, and its influence can be heard in the works of Mendelssohn, Chopin, the Schumanns, and generations of French composers and piano teachers. As her music is gradually being rediscovered, recognition of her innovations is spreading, as musicians and historians identify in her works stylistic ideas and figures previously attributed to later composers.  She is especially remembered for cultivating a singing style, even amidst complex arpeggiated figures.

Hélène de Montgeroult's melodic, Romantic style can be heard in one of my favorite piano etudes, no. 110, which can be heard here.   Although the term had not yet been applied to piano pieces, this etude is a kind of a nocturne; it is interesting to note that John Field's first nocturnes were also purported to have been written in 1812, the year that the Marquise finished her Cours.  The etude is reminiscent of Beethoven's slow movements, with triplets providing accompaniment throughout, while the melody floats expressively above.  In the introduction to the etude, Hélène stresses the importance of the steadiness of the triplets but even more so, the singing nature of the melody -- and the difficulty of creating such an effect on the piano.  Although her etudes contain beautiful music, they were, nonetheless, created specifically as pedagogical tools.  It is this combination, done so well, that is so impressive.

After having outlived two more husbands (one almost twenty years her junior -- she must have been extremely charming!), the Marquise died in 1836, while seeking respite from ill health in Florence.  Although she stopped composing as early as 1820, her output is considerable, consisting of nine sonatas, 6 vocal nocturnes, and the imposing 700-page Cours complet.  It is somewhat incredible that her discography is so incomplete:  the vast majority of her etudes and sonatas have not been commercially recorded.  Pianists Edna Stern, Bruno Robilliard, and Nicolas Stavy are to be applauded for their efforts in rectifying this situation, as is French musicologist, Jérôme Dorival, whose research is presented in this documentary, produced for the semiquincentennial anniversary of her birth.  

 One of the most telling moments of the Montgeroult documentary is Dorival's indictment of Schumann and Mendelssohn for incorporating Hélène's ideas without ever giving her credit.  In Dorival's estimation, it would have been impossible in their minds to owe so much to a woman.  I, for one, am glad that today, musicologists are tracing the many far-reaching legacies of Hélène de Montgeroult back to their rightful source -- better late than never!

Emilie Mayer

Sometimes researching these blog entries leaves me frustrated and a little angry.  Okay, more than a little.  Take, for example, Emilie Mayer.  

A contemporary of Clara Schumann, Emilie Luise Friderica Mayer was born in the northwestern part of Germany in either 1812 or 1821 to a well-to-do pharmacist.  Already, in our first biographical sentence, we are frustrated by the poor record-keeping that is inflicted upon those whom history has relegated to obscurity.  As a middle-class girl, she was most likely given a good education based primarily on literature, religion, foreign language, and history, with a good dose of music as an "adornment," as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's father called it.  Women of the nineteenth century were often responsible for creating music in the home, as entertainment in the world before radios and CD players, but the prevailing attitude -- even from Clara Schumann herself -- was that women were not "born to compose."  Women who did so, especially those who received money for doing such a thing, reflected poorly upon their husbands.

Fortunately for Emilie Mayer, she had no husband whose reputation she could harm, and her family seems to have supported her compositional efforts.  After her father's untimely death in 1840, Mayer was sent to Stettin to study with the "Schubert of North Germany," Carl Loewe, who recognized her talent and promoted her works enthusiastically until his death in 1869.  In 1847, she moved to Berlin, where she continued her studies and tried to find publishers for her music.  The rest of her life consists mostly of successful performances, followed by rarely fruitful efforts to get publishers to pay attention to her works. Although her family continued to support her musical career, Mayer's finances were precarious towards the end of her life, as she was forced to sustain most of the cost of publishing the few pieces that found a reception with companies such as Bote & Bock and Challier.  Most of her prolific output remains in manuscript form (fortunately, she made very clear copies for her performers), and many pieces, such as her fifth and eighth symphonies, are presumed lost.  After her death in 1883, she languished, forgotten, until recent focus on female composers has revived some interest in her music.  Just think: this poor woman spent her entire life devoted to promoting her music, and for over a hundred years, little if any of it saw the light of day.  Hence my frustration.

To be sure, there are plenty of composers of both genders whose music could happily be forgotten, but Emilie Mayer is not one of those composers.  On the contrary, I think we are on the brink of a Mayer revival, as just in the last four years, no less than three full CDs of her work have been released.  In addition, Mayer has been featured in an award-winning documentary about female composers (more information here), and a new edition of her most successful orchestral work, Faust, has been completed by ComposHer  and is available on IMSLP.

In the meantime, I recommend Mayer's Notturno in D Minor for Violin and Piano for your listening pleasure.  Dedicated to the well-known virtuoso, Joseph Joachim, the piece dates from the year of Mayer's death and is the last known work she wrote.  In the various descriptions of Mayer's style I've seen, common themes include her adventurous harmonies, complex rhythms, and a refusal to stay within the bounds of what was, in her lifetime, seen as "feminine" music.  Since women were educated in music in order to provide music in the home, this often meant composing pieces that were sentimental in nature and could be performed by small forces, often piano and violin or voice. We find these works easy to dismiss, as they often did not age well and can be considered akin to the "pop" music of their day.  For this reason, Mayer's orchestral output is unusual, but even her chamber works are far more meaty and substantial than that of many of her contemporaries (Amy Beach was thrown under the bus in one review I read).  

The Notturno is a beautiful example of a chamber work with plenty of substance for the modern listener.  It begins with a stately piano introduction, and the violin enters almost as an obbligato before it takes over the melody.  This melody, in D minor, comes back two more times, alternating with an almost nostalgic D major melody, played by the violin.  Mayer alternates easily between the two modes, using the deceptively simple ABABA form to effectively showcase the two contrasting sections and their beautiful melodies.  Although not virtuosic, this piece is a lovely addition to the recital repertoire, requiring the best chamber music sensitivity of both players.

Listen to the Notturno here.  Of the two commercial recordings available, I prefer Schreiber and Ernst's empassioned performance to that of Najfar-Nahvi and Schumacher, but both duos are to be commended for exploring the work of neglected nineteenth-century female composers.

The Nightengale of Mexico

By far the most fascinating piece of history that I've encountered in researching female composers is the story of Ángela Peralta, known during her lifetime as "the Nightengale of Mexico." Born in Mexico City or Puebla -- sources vary -- in 1845, La Peralta, as she was also known, went from working as a servant girl to studying with the best teachers in Europe on the strength of her voice.  During her career, she sang lead roles at La Scala and toured throughout Europe, the Americas, and even Cairo.  From all accounts, her career was fantastic, and she enjoyed a cult following, both in Italy and in Mexico.  Her fame did suffer a small setback when she began an affair with her manager, a married man named Julián Montiel y Duarte.  Hired hecklers harassed her in conservative Mexico City, and she vowed never to sing there again!  Unfortunately, she did not live long enough to do so anyway, as she was carried away in a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1883.  But here's the most fascinating part of her story: on her deathbed, La Peralta was married to Duarte, who had recently been granted a divorce -- but from witness reports, La Peralta was not conscious during the ceremony (a member of her troupe nodded her head for her) and may have already been dead.   Ewww.  Or...how romantic?  Nope, sticking with ewww.  And if you're thinking, "What a soap opera!" you're right -- and someone actually wrote an opera about her.

Although nothing could beat the tale of La Peralta's bizarre nuptials, it's quite interesting to look at music in Mexico in the nineteenth century.  My knowledge of the history of our southern neighbor is limited to a passing knowledge of the Battle of the Alamo and the Mexican-American War, so it came as a complete surprise to read that opera was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Mexico.  A national conservatory was founded in 1866, at which Ángela Peralta studied before traveling to Italy, and numerous ornate opera houses were built, including the one in Mazatlán which now bears Peralta's name.  In fact, classical music in Mexico stretches back into the 16th century, and the first opera by a Mexican composer was performed in 1711.  Suffice it to say that American listeners would do well to move beyond mariachi in exploring Mexican music.

While we will never be able to travel back in time and hear the famed voice of the Nightengale of Mexico, her compositional output has been preserved, consisting of songs and piano pieces.  Two of her songs have been beautifully recorded by Martha Molinar, a well-known Mexican recitalist, who showcased Mexican song in her 2006 album Larmes.  Larmes also happens to be the name of one of the two Peralta songs; the other is Io t'amero.  Unfortunately, I cannot find the lyrics to either song, but both are lovely, with languid, arching melodies over flowing piano accompaniments.  Both are clearly the product of Romantic era sentimentality and were created as a vehicle to showcase a voice that one opera-lover and journalist described as "produc[ing] notes from the very highest to the lowest with astounding ease."  Nevertheless, the songs are more than just technical showpieces and exude an enjoyable sweetness and poignancy.

Both songs can be found on Spotify on this album.

The MIddle Pigeons

After a family visit and a bout of strep throat, it's time for me to get back to my blog! 

The next piece I would like to present to you is The Middle Pigeons, composed by Inez S. McComas for trombone, tuba, and recorded sound.  Let me start by saying that I have resisted the incursion of electronic media into classical music for as long as I can remember.  The final result didn't seem worth the layer of complication that it adds, between finding good speakers, lining up with the track, finding the right volume, dealing with electrical and computer issues, etc.  But with the vast majority of my colleagues -- and many orchestras, too -- adding this element into recitals and concerts, I have begun to hear some pieces that move beyond the realm of novelty into truly effective musical expression. I suppose that like with most eras, genres, and styles, there's simply as much chaff as there is actual substance and you have to separate the good from the bad. 

Enter The Middle Pigeons.  As I listen through random CDs on the Naxos Music Library, I am occasionally surprised by how much I enjoy a particular piece, as was the case with McComas' work.  The piece begins with audio samples of pigeon sounds and children's giggles, followed by a rhythmic ostinato over which the brass instruments play.  On her website, McComas describes the inspiration for her piece as follows:

The Middle Pigeons is an auditory journey that harmonizes the life of pigeons to the likenesses of middle-school girls. The inspiration for this piece began with observing a row of pigeons situating themselves on an electrical line, swaying their tails in tandem to counteract the effects of the wind. They were sitting two by two by four, with a small space in-between. This grouping is the opening melodic rhythm of the piece. With further thought, [a] poem was born and other similarities emerged: each group is a bit odd-looking, they flock together, they strut, they are used as go-betweens, and they chatter and cry. 

I love that not only is this work by a female composer, it is also about female experience -- not that I would ever want to go back to middle school!   The poem she references can be found here, along with further description of the piece.  I particularly enjoy the rhythmic grove of the outer parts of the composition, as well as the joyful sounds of children's laughter that punctuates the recorded accompaniment.  It's music that is pure enjoyment to hear, which is a rare treat indeed in contemporary music

Since McComas is a living composer, I'm going to let her tell her own story via the biography found on her website, and I would encourage you to check out some of the other pieces on her site.  Although fixed media is a common element in her compositions, for my fellow Luddites, there are a number without an electronic component as well.  In addition, several other of her pieces have been recorded and are available on Spotify, including Spinner, for trombones and fixed media, and Descending Into Light, for trombone and alto saxophone.  What I don't see, however, is a work by McComas for the horn, which is surprising given the predilection she seems to have for wind instruments.  If this obvious oversight is corrected, I would be excited to program the work, even if it calls for fixed media.

Listen to The Middle Pigeons here on Spotify.

Zara Levina

If I had to pick a favorite of the female composers I've discovered, it would probably be Zara Alexandrovna Levina.  Every time one of her pieces comes up on my playlist (which I always keep on shuffle), I find myself consciously thinking of how much I am enjoying the piece.  Imagine, if you will, a cross between Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev (with a good dash of Poulenc) who just happens to be a woman!

Born in Russia in 1906, Zara Levina was educated in the Russian musical tradition at the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Glière and Myaskovsky, from 1925 to 1930.  During her time at the Conservatory, she was the only female member of the student group, Procol, which was dedicated to the task of creating proletarian music, which they described as being "saturated with the ideas of Soviet revolutionary public opinion."  From there, she went on to organize the Children's Music Committee of the Composer's Union and spent much of her early career in the service of music education.  Much of her output is in the form of children's songs and romances, but as a talented pianist, Levina also wrote a handful of piano and chamber works that found favor with some of the preeminent Russian performers of her day, including violinist David Ostraikh and  pianist Maria Grinberg.  Zara Levina remains fairly well-known in her native Russia and deserves far wider recognition elsewhere.

If allusions to Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev don't give it away, there is something very Russian in Levina's music.  Even in the United States, children are introduced to Russian composers at an early age, from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and Russian repertoire forms an essential part of the Western musical canon; however, it cannot be forgotten that most of Russia is not, in fact, part of Europe.  This geographical and cultural truth became especially apparent to me when I read the works of Nikolai Leskov, whose novella, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was the basis for Shostakovich's controversial opera of the same name.  Leskov's account of the steppe and the Tartars who inhabit it in the story of The Enchanted Wanderer was particularly fascinating in this regard, and the Tartars are just one of over 300 ethnic groups who contribute to the richness of Russian culture.  Levina herself was born in Crimea but was of Jewish descent.  These non-Western influences may be one of the things that gives Russian music that unmistakable sound, or it may be that so many of the great Russian composers were educated at the Moscow Conservatory, as was Levina.  Or maybe it was that they all had to deal with the brutal Russian winters!  At any rate, there's a certain melancholy that pervades so much of Russian music, and the same is true of Zara Levina's music.

My favorite example of Levina's music is the first movement of her Second Piano Sonata.  The piece dates from 1953 and is dedicated to the memory of her husband, composer Nikolai Chemberdzhi, who died in 1948.  The three movements of the sonata progress from joyful ebullience to subdued tristesse to passionate grief and anger.  Pianist Katia Tchemberdji, in her program notes for the recording here, describes the sonata as ending "on the abyss," with the descending fifth motif of the first movement transformed with decisive finality.  It's an effective journey.  Levina writes simple melodies that are somehow hard to sing, accompanied by lush, romantic harmonies.  Like many of her contemporaries, she includes just enough dissonance to prevent her romanticism from descending into maudlin sentimentality.  It's truly unfortunate that her output of piano music is not large enough to rank her alongside the other great composers of her era, but the pieces she did leave us are definitely worth the listen.

Émergence

The first musical selection I would like to share with you is a song by Jeanne Landry, appropriately titled "Émergence." This was also the first piece I saved to my Spotify playlist, so it's fitting that it would be the first selection here on this brand new blog.

Emergence (link to this piece on Spotify)

Jeanne Landry (1922-2011) was a Canadian musician who traveled to Paris to study with, among other great teachers, Nadia Boulanger. Upon returning to Canada in 1948, she enjoyed an active career as a pianist and a professor at Laval University in Quebec. She can be heard on numerous recordings with tenor Jean-Paul Jeannotte, a partnership that lasted for more than twenty-five years and took her on tours throughout the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. After her retirement in 1983, Jeanne Landry dedicated herself to composition; her published works listed in WorldCat are all dated after 1987. These include piano pieces, two song cycles, organ works, a viola sonata, and a set of pieces for cello and piano.

Émergence is from one of the two song cycles, Le feu et la cendre, or "Fire and Ash." The texts of the songs are poems written by Jeanne Landry herself. The text of Émergence is as follows:

Connais-tu le lieu

où l'âme se replie

quand le corps

tout lien rompu

dérive lentement

vers la nuit du tombeau

Pourquoi donc faut-il que plane la mort

sur nos précaires destins

que s'acharnent les vautours

sur les restes du festin

qu'il suffise d'une pierre

pour qu'achoppe le désir

Un grand vent de révolte

souffle sur mon coeur

y semant une tempête

dont ma voix se fait l'écho

pour crier dans l'infini

ton nom que j'aime

inscrit dans le temps

qu'il fera demain

quand nu tu te dresseras

dans ta sauvage beauté

pour célébrer le soleil

My French is a little rusty, even with the help of Google translate, but there are some lovely lines: 

Do you know the place

where the soul bends

when the body

every bond broken

drifts slowly

towards the night of the tomb

Why then must death hover

over our precarious destinies

that the vultures are relentless

on the remains of the feast

a stone is enough

so that desire stumbles

A great wind of revolt

breathes on my heart

sowing a storm

which my voice echoes

to cry out into infinity

your name that I love

inscribed in time

that it will make tomorrow

when naked you will stand up

in your wild beauty

to celebrate the sun

I'm pretty sure the last stanza would make a lot more sense in the hands of someone who went beyond high school French, but you get the idea.  Fortunately, although Landry makes full use of the emotions she evokes in the lyrics, the song never ventures beyond the boundary of dignified expression.  The song begins with a simple introduction in the piano, blossoms in the middle of the piece, and then ends with the same piano introduction.  The vocal line is fairly simple, highlighting the words, while most of the emotional content is carried by the lush piano part, like the best Brahms lieder.  Overall, the piano accompaniment is somewhat redolent of Brahms, with rich chords laced with countermelodies almost Baroque in their counterpoint, obviously the work of someone who knew the art of collaboration first hand.

The only available commercial recording of Emergence is by French soprano, Hélène Guilmette, with Martin Dubé at the piano.  It is part of an album which showcases female composers, including Mel Bonis and Amy Beach, called L'Heure Rosé.  Unfortunately, Guilmette and Dubé do not include any more of the cycle from which this song came, nor has anyone else recorded any more from it.  Guilmette's voice is ideal for this song, rich without being heavy, so we can only hope that she returns to record more of the cycle at some point!

Landry's full discography can be found here.