WHAT CAN ONE WOMAN DO? — Nicholas Phan

This post is the program note I wrote for the first concert of CAIC’s 2020 Collaborative Works Festival, Modern Women, which was broadcast October 23-25, 2020.

““The woman of the future with her broader outlook for greater opportunities will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description...””

— Cécile Chaminade

*Marian Anderson’s historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939*

When Cécile Chaminade speculated in the Washington Post about the increased scope of possibility for women artists of the future, her optimism would not prove unfounded. The role of women in music changed radically over the course of her lifetime, and by the turn of the century, the idea of what was appropriate for a woman was evolving radically. During the late 1800s, women entered the workforce in increasing numbers and also saw increased access to higher education. This manifested itself in the music world, with women venturing beyond the domestic confines of the salon and into the public sphere of professional musicianship: from 1870 to 1900, US census data indicates a nearly 21% rise in the percentage of women working as musicians, with over half the musical workforce in 1900 being comprised of women. While many of these women were employed as music teachers, many also populated the growing number of women’s orchestras and chamber groups which were proliferating across the country.

As women pushed harder and harder for universal suffrage and equal rights during these years, their efforts and philosophies bled over into the realm of music. Women musicians fought gendered, patriarchal misconceptions about music and creativity: ideas largely based on sexist tropes such as “feminine frailty” and women’s inability to reason because of their supposed hyper-emotionality and predilection for “hysteria”. George Upton, the music critic of the Chicago Tribune, who published numerous books on music with titles like Standard Oratorios and Standard Symphonies that contributed to the establishment of a canon in classical music in North America during the years of the Gilded Age, after spending paragraphs in his book
“Woman in Music” asserting that women are too weak to withstand the “fierce struggles”, “overwhelming discouragements”, “prejudice and indifference” and “pitiless storms of fate and cruel assaults of poverty” associated with a life in composition, wrote that “every technical detail of music is characterized by science in its most rigid forms. In this direction, woman, except in rare instances, has never achieved great results. It does not seem that women will ever originate music in its fullest and grandest harmonic forms. She will always be recipient and interpreter but there is little hope that she will be the creator.” Yet, in the face of this kind of misogyny, the US would see the first concerto, first symphony, and first large scale choral composition written by women be performed by a major US Symphony Orchestra (all of them with the Boston Symphony).

As women’s access to musical education continued to increase around the turn of the century, it also increased for musicians of color. In 1903, a very young Florence Beatrice Smith entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she studied organ performance, piano pedagogy, and eventually composition with the renowned American composer George Chadwick. History remembers her by the name she took after marrying her first husband, Florence B. Price, the first black woman in history to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra when the Chicago Symphony and Frederick Stock performed her Symphony No. 1 in e minor in 1933.

A resident of Chicago for the majority of her adult life and a fixture on the Chicago classical music scene, Price was a prolific composer who composed roughly 300 pieces in a wide range of genres, from symphonic works to popular songs. The Chicago classical music scene was incredibly active in the early 20th century, especially for black musicians: the first branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians was the Chicago Music Association, which formed in 1919. Music education became more widely accessible to black musicians during these years, with not only black-led music schools such as the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and the Chicago University of Music (which would become known as the National Conservatory of Music in 1925), but also progressive institutions such as the Chicago Musical College (which is now Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performance Arts, where CAIC’s very own Shannon McGinnis now serves on the faculty) and the American Conservatory of Music, both institutions where Florence Price studied composition.

*Margaret Bonds performing the world premiere performance of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago*

In 1921, just three years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, a 20 year old Ruth Crawford arrived to Chicago to study at the American Conservatory of Music, where roughly 85% percent of the student body was comprised of women. Describing Chicago as “the wonder city” during her student years, Crawford’s artistic world expanded exponentially, and it was during these years that she transitioned from studying piano to heeding the calling she increasingly felt to compose. While in Chicago, Crawford developed a close friendship with Carl Sandburg, the author of the poem Home Thoughts. Both a writer and a folk singer, Sandburg became an important influence on Crawford’s life, exposing her to his progressive politics as well as to folk music. Crawford’s first experiences with folk song were contributing arranged accompaniments to Sandburg’s popular anthology The American Songbag. It was also during these years that Crawford fell in with a group of American avant-garde composers, who became known as the “ultramoderns”, of whom Crawford would become perhaps the best remembered. These contacts would introduce her to the man she would eventually marry, composer and teacher Charles Seeger.

The populist political ideologies Crawford Seeger shared with her husband would eventually lead her to transition her focus to the preservation of American folk music, a tradition her children and step-children would carry on to great renown, most notably her step-son Pete Seeger and her daughter Peggy Seeger. While she planned to return to her composition of art music as her children got older, Crawford Seeger died at the young age of 52 of intestinal cancer.

A protégée of both Price and Crawford Seeger’s piano teacher in Chicago, Djane Herz, Margaret Bonds also was blazing trails in the Windy City. A virtuosic pianist, Bonds made history the same night the Chicago Symphony premiered Price’s Symphony No. 1, becoming the first black soloist to appear with the orchestra when she played John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino on the second half of that program. Interested in composition, Bonds naturally gravitated towards Price, who was the only kind of role model she could look to as a Black woman composer. Bonds would go on to premiere and perform many of Price’s works, work as her copyist, and study composition with her. The two remained close until Price’s death in 1953.

Bonds would receive national recognition in her own right very quickly as a composer, and eventually she moved to New York City, where she developed a close friendship with the poet Langston Hughes. The two would collaborate on many projects together, and Bonds set numerous Hughes poems to music, including the Three Dream Portraits, which open this program.

Women composers continued to persevere as the 20th century ambled along, but misogyny and racist ideas about music stubbornly stuck. The classical music world increasingly worshipped the hallowed canon of repertoire composed by white men it had placed on pedestals that grew higher and higher with each passing decade. The musicologist Marcia J. Citron sums the challenges up in her book Gender and the Musical Canon:

“The presence of a past can go a long way toward assuaging creative anxiety. Bu which past does the female creator relate to: some neutral or universal past, or a female past? Perhaps she might want to relate to more than one tradition. But if one of them is a female tradition the problem is that there is still no fully formed female tradition to relate to. Music by women is performed occasionally but still has not acquired the status of a meaningful tradition. As statements by many women composers suggest . . . relating to a neutral past can mean marginalization and subordination to the ideologies of dominant culture, which is male culture.”

Despite women’s high enrollment in music conservatories in the first half of the century, by 1970 women only accounted for 6% of the players in American top-tier orchestras. In 2018, a Cleveland Plain Dealer article excoriated the classical music world for its glaring lack of female representation and listed a Baltimore Symphony study which found that music composed by women comprised just 1.3% of the musical programming of 85 American orchestras. Just this past summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, there was a general outcry amidst the industry about the lack of Black representation in classical music with numerous articles on the subject appearing in almost every publication, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Opera News, and NPR.

Despite these bleak statistics which indicate that the journey towards equality in music is far from over, the women composers enjoying success today attest to the progress that has been made these past 150 years. The sampling of living composers featured on this program is just a taste of the extraordinary music being created by women all over the world today.

The two regional premieres on this program by Errollyn Wallen and Iva Bittová were commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and had their world premiere performances in January of this year. Wallen, a Belize-born British citizen, is a prolific composer who has written numerous chamber and orchestral works, multiple operas, and scores of songs. Her Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra was the first piece composed by a black woman to be performed at the BBC Proms in 1998, 103 years after the festival’s founding. A free-spirited composer, Wallen’s music draws on influences of many genres, including the avant-garde edges of classical music as well as popular song. Roundel is a haunting setting of Vera Brittain’s poem of the same name for baritone and mezzo-soprano, in which Wallen uses the two voices to evoke the ghostly presence of one who has passed and the pull they have on the loved ones left behind.

Born in Czechoslovakia to a musical family, Bittová initially worked as an actress, eventually refocusing her work on music, performing as a violinist and singer, and composing numerous works. She describes her ever-evolving music: “For many years, I have worked in a range of musical genres, including jazz, rock, classical and opera. Deciding on a name for my style of music is far from over yet.” Nezabudka draws on folk music from Bittová’s childhood, evoking a sense of memory and nostalgia for a time past. About this piece, she writes: “I intend this piece as a reminder to keep connected with childhood, parents, traditions, passions, and emotions; to learn how to stimulate and sublimate our dark moments and transform every little shiver of inspiration into art.”

Sarah Kirkland Snider has been commissioned by many of the leading orchestras and chamber ensembles in the United States, and one of her latest commissions was for the New York Philharmonic as part of their celebrations of the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. A leading voice in the new music community, she co-founded New Amsterdam records in 2008, an independent record label that has since evolved into a non-for-profit service organization with the mission of supporting public engagement with new music. How Graceful Some Things Are, Falling Apart is a setting of a poem by Jonathan Breit that was commissioned by Yale New Vocal Works in 2006.

Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop represents the continuation of the tradition of Chicagoan women composers that has been explored through the songs of Bonds, Crawford Seeger, and Price throughout this program. Also premiered in 2006, Garrop’s In Eleanor’s Words forms the bulk of tonight’s program, and is the most direct reference to the 2020 festival’s theme of commemorating a century of women’s suffrage in the United States. The song cycle draws on excerpts of Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated newspaper column, My Day, which ran from 1935 through 1962. The cycle affords the chance to revisit some of the musings of one of America’s most progressive women leaders. Over the course of the work, we hear snippets of Roosevelt’s thoughts on systemic oppression of people of color and the poor, her pleas for pacifism, and her beliefs about the importance of the participation of the individual in our democracy, all statements that remain sadly relevant nearly a century hence.

Answering Roosevelt’s final question, “What can one woman do?”, we end this program with a performance of Florence Price’s Songs to a Dark Virgin, which Marian Anderson featured on her program at her famous concert in 1939. Denied access by the Daughters of the American Revolution to Constitution Hall because of her race, Eleanor Roosevelt helped move the performance to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, drawing a crowd of over 75,000 people to the National Mall in addition to millions of listeners on the radio, a testament to just how much one woman can do.

It is an impossible task to distill the vast body of work of women composers into a single festival. We will continue our commitment to programming the music of women composers, and we regret that there wasn’t time for works by Vítězslava Kaprálová, Chen Yi, Undine Smith Moore, Louise Talma, Unsuk Chin, Imogen Holst, Alma Mahler, Settimia Caccini, Isabella Leonarda, Clara Schumann, Lori Laitman, Libby Larsen, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Amy Beach, Ethyl Smyth, Augusta Read Thomas, Gabriela Lena Frank, Lita Grier, Shulamit Ran, Missy Mazzoli, and Caroline Shaw, just to name a few. It’s time for us to dispense with the idea of a classical music canon, and embrace the reality that both our art form and its history are living, ever-evolving things. While we can, of course, continue to enjoy all the works by white men that have been canonized, we have the privilege of an adventure of discovery as we continue to unearth women’s masterworks of the past and commission a more balanced repertory in the present.

.