Kate Loder and the Brahms Requiem

In my reflective biography of Kate Loder last week, I talked briefly about the performance of the Brahms requiem that she mounted in her living room on 10 July 1871. The account of this event, which was first published in The Musical Times in 1906, seemed to find it slightly scandalous that such a great work might be “first performed in a private house”, the italics of the original faintly pulsating with genteel outrage. Still, the review, much as it comes thirty-three years after the event, is a positive one, drawing on the recollections of Lady Natalia Macfarren, who had sung alto in the chorus.

Although Macfarren is the voice chosen to describe the performance, doubtless chosen at least in part because she remained a well-known name through her translations of vocal works, the list of other performers is equally illustrious:

“The chorus that assisted on that interesting occasion included such well-known names as Lady Macfarren, Miss Macirone, Mrs Ellicott (wife of the late Bishop of Gloucester), Miss Sophie Ferrari (Mrs Pagden) and her sister, Miss F. J. Ferrari, Canon Duckworth, and William Shakespeare. Madame Regan-Schimon sang the soprano solo, and an English version of the text was used.”

This is a fascinating list, for many reasons. Not only does it make clear just how extraordinary those women’s networks were – and it should be noted that some of these names are well-known enough that it is deemed unnecessary to include first names – but it also shows the long tendrils of influence extending from “salon” events of this sort. Let’s go through the names of the women in the chorus mentioned above:

Natalia Macfarren herself was a singer, translator, arranger, editor, librettist, and teacher, Her output was enormous in the world of opera, oratorio, song and choral works, particularly for Novello editions, mainly encompassing translations from Italian and German, including operas by Verdi and Wagner, Beethoven’s symphony 9, and letters between Mendelssohn and Devrient. She also worked on the music of her husband George Macfarren, providing “text adaptation” and a piano arrangement for his cantata Lady of the Lake. There were several genuinely admiring obituaries for her, commenting that “Her linguistic attainments made her sought after for translations.” She was already known as a translator of Brahms works – in fact the translator into English. She had already published several of his lieder, as well as part-songs such as the Liebesliederwälzer, and so It feels likely that her hand is on the tiller of the English translation, based though it is on bible texts. Her translations were in use well into the twentieth century, even Bing Crosby singing her version of the Lullaby.

Clara Macirone has of course already featured in these pages. Four years Loder’s senior, her studentship coincided with the younger woman’s almost exactly. Macirone had a long association with the Academy, having also been a professor there, but this event took place five years after she left (or rather, was ejected from) her post. Like so many of her contemporaries, she was especially busy in the 1870s, being financially responsible for her parents and siblings as well as herself. Her entry in the early twentieth-century American History and Encyclopedia of Music, published during her lifetime, reads:

“Composer of songs, pianist and teacher. Was born at London, and educated at the Royal Academy of Music as the pupil of Potter, Holmes, Lucas and Negri. She was made a professor of the Academy and an associate of the Philharmonic Society, and was for several years the head music-teacher at Aske’s School for Girls, and later at the Church of England High School for Girls, and during this time she also conducted a singing society called The Village Minstrels. She has now retired. Her Te Deum and Jubilate, sung at Hanover Chapel, were the first service composed by a woman ever sung in the church. She has published an admirable suite for the violin and piano, and many part-songs, some of which have been sung at the Crystal Palace by choruses of three thousand voices; she has also written anthems and many solos for the voice.”

Mrs Ellicott: It is not composer Rosalind Ellicott who takes part, but her mother, singer Constantia Becher, now known as Mrs Ellicott, wife of the Bishop of Gloucester. She had been a fairly well-known and in-demand singer prior to marriage, leaving the public stage but remaining active in music, both as a performer and behind the scenes. That she remained in good voice is evident in reviews that spoke of her performances of her daughter’s songs, well into the 1890s. She was an important force in the founding of such illustrious groups as the Handel Society and the Gloucester Choral Society. Like so many such drivers, she feels absent from public view, though a letter to the editor of the Gloucestershire Chronicle in 1867, putting right a piece of incorrect information, gives us a glimpse into both her activities and her musical priorities.

Sophie Ferrari is another name that appears regularly in concert information of the 1870s, before she became the “Mrs Pagden” of the above brackets. A fellow Royal Academy of Music alumna,  she took the stage with collaborative musicians ranging from RAM teachers and pupils to visiting performers from the Continent. Even more telling, she was a soloist at the performance of the Requiem for the Philharmonic Society on 2 April 1873, the first known public performance of the entire work. From the outset, reviews were good: “Miss Ferrari quickly gained the favour of the audience, and the appreciation that she won increased to enthusiasm when her powers had been fully exercised. Miss Ferrari has before her a promising career, for while as yet she cannot be described as a brilliant singer, she is young, charming in feature and manner, she possesses some essentials of success of which better known vocalists are devoid, and her cultivated voice is apparently under perfect command. […] The lady was twice encored.” Sadly, by 1880 she has all but vanished, only reappearing occasionally in local music events under her married name, sometimes singing solo and sometimes performing duets with her husband.

Sophie’s sister, Francesca Ferrari, remains known by her initials F.J. for her entire professional life. She appears on occasion in the papers during the 1870s, for a wealth of musical activity from singing to translating to composing. The most telling entry, however, is one from 24 May 1873, a review of one of Sophie’s concerts for the Bedford Amateur Music Society:

“Miss Ferrari then sang “Placido Zeffiretio,” which had been composed expressly for her by F. J. Ferrari, and, to say the least, the composer has not been far out in his estimate, for to us, and doubtless to most of the audience, this was the gem of the evening in the vocal part; an encore was demanded and accorded.”

Did F.J. Ferrari remain known by initials so that she could compose unburdened by her sex? (It might be noted that she was already known as the composer of this particular piece, but clearly this reviewer hadn’t caught up.)

Of course, Loder herself and her relationship with a wider contemporary music scene is also interesting. This was not a time when Brahms was yet a “canonic” composer, particularly in Britain, so the selection of repertoire points to a musical curiosity and excitement that never left her. Clara Schumann would later write in letters of Loder’s need for musical sustenance; many of her students would play privately for the elderly and disabled Loder, who wrote back to Schumann of her delight and thankfulness for such events. And thus she remained connected to new music.

The Case of the Disappearing Networks

“A composition first has to be written, then it has to be published in order to be circulated, at least after ca.1780. It has to reach public consciousness by a first performance and then remain there through some regularity of performance. This is less likely to happen without some critical attention in print and a positive assessment at least sometime near the work’s debut. Although these steps seem the most basic stages on the road to permanency and potential canonization, they actually take place well into the process.”

— Gender and the Musical Canon, Marcia Citron

We are all aware of the Bechdel test – the requirement for a film to have two named women have a conversation on a topic other than a man. We are also well aware of how badly the film industry still fares under the application of this test. Disney is particularly culpable on this – heaven forbid any woman should exist for a reason beyond the male sphere.

I am now applying the Bechdel test to the stories of women in music, with depressingly familiar results. I have written this month in some detail about composer Rosalind Ellicott and her relationship in particular with the Three Choirs Festival. She started by singing with them, moving quite swiftly to being a regular on their roster of contemporary composers. Several of her cantatas earned their fame here, though she doesn’t make the abbreviated list on the festival’s own website (Ethel Smyth is the only historical woman here):

“The festival has always prided itself on bringing new works to its audiences, and over its 300-year history has included premieres by Edward Elgar, Arthur Sullivan, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Hubert Parry, Ethel Smyth, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, Camille Saint-Saëns, Judith Weir, Judith Bingham, James MacMillan and Cheryl Frances Hoad, many of which were conducted by the composers themselves. Numerous celebrated composers, conductors and soloists have been welcomed to the festival [...]”

— 3choirs.org/about

There has been considerable speculation in the admittedly small literature on Ellicott as to how she succeeded in attaining this relationship. Let’s leave aside the fact that this is under the microscope at all, and look at this assertion, put plainest on Wikipedia: “It has been suggested that her father's position as a bishop enabled her to have some of her works performed at the Three Choirs Festival.”

Why do I take issue with this? It’s because not only is there the obvious assumption that Ellicott could not possibly have accrued a commission by her own merit, but that it must be a male figure in her life that facilitated her career. Why must it be the father, whose interest in music was small, and not the mother, a singer who sat on several committees and was known for a considerable number of her own public performances? To call her mother an amateur singer is to underestimate her sphere of influence, which included the festival. Another route in may have been via Hilda Wilson, the well-known and successful singer who was a fellow student of Ellicott’s, and taught her singing; in the younger musician’s words, “She instructed me in the best way of producing my voice. I should like to say that I owe more to her than I can ever repay.” Wilson often sang with the Festival in the 1880s and -90s. Surely it is just as likely, if not more, that these female networks were the ones that enabled Ellicott’s inclusion?

Alice Verne-Bredt, who came more to my current attention via the album of trios I reviewed last week, is another case in point of a member of a professionally important female network. She belonged to a German family that emigrated to the UK in the 1850s, anglicizing their name in the process. The sisters, however, each chose a different version. Alice double-barrelled her name with her husband’s, Adela and Mathilde remained known as Verne, and Mary, who spent much of her performing life in German-speaking countries, reverted to the original Wurm, although without the umlaut. The sisters performed each other’s works, as well as giving concerts together in their respective countries of residence. Wurm was a conductor as well as a pianist, thus giving a useful – and rarer – opportunity to have larger works heard.

Of course, there are many more of these – I am always particularly taken with the connections between the women at the Academy in the 1830s, singers, pianists, composers, and how they supported each other in both public and private spheres. Both peer and intergenerational support is evident in the stories and concert reviews that start appearing from the next decades. Indeed, Ellicott herself in turn does her part for the next generation of Academy students. 

The Bechdel test perhaps isn’t quite the analysis to be applied here, but there is certainly the feeling that if a man doesn’t play a defining role in a woman’s career, we’d better shoehorn one in somehow. This has far greater ramifications than just to rewrite women and their creative authority – it also demonstrates what little impact we afford teaching, family, student community, and all the other networks that arise from the business of simply living.

The Dappled Life of Agnes Zimmermann

This week’s offering is the third in an Agnes Zimmermann triptych. After a biography (rectifying some incorrect information elsewhere on the internet), and a reflection on a 2020 recording of her three violin sonatas, today’s blog post is about the ways in which her life as a 19th-century female musician still resonates today, with me, a 21st-century female musician.

Zimmermann has walked with me for the past few weeks. I find this with the women I research, that they become companions in more than performance or writing. Evangeline Livens did for a while, followed by Clara Macirone. Now, I find myself drawing on Zimmermann when talking about musical space, about chamber music, about manuscripts. I co-adjudicated the Historical Women Composers Prize at the Academy last week, alongside Diana Ambache. It is a requirement that every entry for this prize is chamber music, so we had from duos to quintets. Zimmermann was a consummate chamber musician, so this was right up her alley - and I found that I share her passion for space and light in the texture of a collaborative performance. It was an image of her manuscript that I had in my head for this realisation, that perfectly structured writing that allows light between the notes of even the thickest textures. It isn’t necessarily about literal silence, although breath is of course essential, but about the play of transparency through to opaqueness in the performance as well as in the writing. This, Zimmermann has made explicit for me some of the musical priorities I hold, but that I had not put words to.

The other way in which Zimmermann feels very present to me currently is in her life as she lived it. I wrote last week about imagining the composer in the act of writing, but this goes even further, in part fueled by this:

There’s a lot written on mental load, and second (third/fourth) shifts, but it’s not quite these areas that strike a chord for me when I think of women composers of the past. Classical composition – or, to be frank, life as any kind of classical musician – has never been kind to other obligations, not least in how it is written about. The idea of the composer renouncing all else for his (pronoun chosen carefully) art is so entrenched, so removed from everyday life, that the woman who manages to find a few minutes to write a song in between loads of laundry and feeding the children, must necessarily have less of the sublime in her writing. I see that race not just as running towards the goal of a complete artwork, but also running towards the goal of recognition.

Many of Zimmermann’s works were written in the years immediately after her time at the Academy. This is very common, not just for women composers, and I wonder how much it is because of the support and recognition that comes with a successful studentship, which tends to start to fall away as new students take their place. And for composers who do not have recourse to other systems, this can prove fatal to a career. Zimmermann was luckier than many women, as her performing life kept her in the public eye, but what happens to women for whom the printed page is their main way of disseminating creativity?

From 1890-1908, Zimmermann did take a step back from public music. This was during her time living with Lady Louisa Goldsmid, activist for education, both for women and for children. In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, Sophie Fuller wrote of this relationship, of which little is known, causing Fuller to reflect:

“However I, living and working in a different century, decide to name Agnes Zimmermann and Louisa Goldsmid’s relationship, the facts of the devotion, the interrupted career, and the shared home remain a powerful reminder that women’s varied relationships with each other have always played a vital, if often neglected, role in their histories. Despite what can seem like overwhelming attempts to show otherwise, not all women can be defined by their relationships with men and male institutions […].”

In the eighteen years that the two women lived together, Zimmermann performed little and published nothing. This was not due to domestic necessity; Lady Goldsmid’s will leaves money to many loyal servants, including a butler, housekeeper, cook, coachman, and several housemaids. It is a reminder, though, that creativity has often been enabled by women; and Fuller’s question of what women-living-with-women does to their “artistry and creativity” is a far-reaching one. From Zimmermann and Goldsmid, to Macirone and her sister, or Dolby and her mother, or Mathilde Kralik and Alice Scarlat, and even to the servants that tended them and their houses, women pave the way for recognition, not just of creative genius, but of the manifold threads that make up creative work. Several months ago I mentioned the mothers who start their talented daughters on their instruments; the idea of a muse, “A person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist,” suddenly becomes one of great power and agency. What caused Zimmermann to write certain works? To play them?

Zimmermann remains a role model for me, and a source-to-come of rich possibility. In the meantime, I finish with a quote from philosopher Gilles Deleuze, of which Sophie Fuller’s reflections on Zimmermann remind me:

“Difference is not a negation of sameness. Difference may have a meaning that is independent of sameness, and repetition may be independent of the sameness of any given events or actions.”

19C RAM Singers on Stage and Platform

In looking through playbills and reviews of the UK musical scene in the mid- to late nineteenth century, it always amazes me just how often names connected with RAM crop up. Of course, given that the Academy was until 1882 the only college in the country turning out professional performers, it’s not entirely to be wondered at; but this is also testament not just to the performers themselves, but to the extraordinary teachers that the institution managed to procure throughout even the first decades of its existence.

I’ve written before about just how many women at this time were able to earn a living through music, most through piano and/or singing (organ came only slightly later). From mid-century, being a former student of the Academy certainly became a selling point in the many advertisements for teaching services. There was often mention in these of specific teachers as well, demonstrating just how much these musicians were household names.

Many women also became performers, both nationally and internationally. One of the first, in just the second intake of students, was Fanny Dickens (1810-1848), whose career was cut short by her early death from tuberculosis at the age of 38. She had been known throughout the UK especially for the concerts she gave with her husband Henry Burnett, also a singer. (It might be added here that it can be quite difficult to unearth anything about Fanny – a search of archives tends to produce results pertaining to her younger brother, who wrote some books.) Two years after the beginning of Dickens’s studentship came Anna Bishop, who has already featured on this website. She was one of the most-travelled singers of the nineteenth century, sallying forth on horse cart, train, ship, or whatever mode of transport would get her to where she was going, on any continent or island. But more importantly, she was clearly a singer of wide-ranging talents, with a repertoire that encompassed opera and concert works from Balfe and Bishop (her first husband) to Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, to Italian composers such as Donizetti and Bellini. Bishop was contemporaneous with the rather less flamboyant but equally successful Mary Shaw (1814-1876), contralto advocate of both Rossini and the modern composer Giuseppe Verdi. She was another singer who benefitted from Mendelssohn’s enthusiasm for British singers, appearing at the Leipzig Gewandhaus several times.

The 1830s began with the admission of such figures as Charlotte Birch (c1815-1901). Active particularly on the oratorio circuit, she entered seven years before her younger sister Eliza Ann (1825-1862), for whom she was the recommender. Charlotte was more in demand than her entry in the 1900 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians intimated:

“Miss Birch possessed a beautiful soprano voice, rich, clear, and mellow, and was a good musician, but her extremely cold and inanimate manner and want of dramatic feeling greatly marred the effect of her singing.”

Sadly, her career was cut short by encroaching deafness, though she remained living with her sister, as so many women of this time did, teaching singing from their residence in Baker Street. Eliza roamed further afield, travelling to other cities to give occasional classes and masterclasses.

Charlotte Dolby 1821-1885 was another famous figure well into the later century, and has also been a highlight of these pages, over on Composer of the Month. Like many of the singers mentioned above, her singing career gave way to other enterprises in later life, though her name remained a drawcard for her pupils.

By the 1860s, female students far outnumbered male, and the proliferation of successful musicians amongst their numbers continued apace. Singers such as Edith Wynne,

Mary Davies, Rebecca Jewell and Arabella Smyth, to name but a few, made their name both within the walls of the Academy and on concert platforms throughout the country. Next month we will look at the change in instrument availability that resulted in a much broader impact for women in the profession. 

Oboe and trumpet, anyone?…

How we listen: Contemporary v 19C audiences, with a stop in between

Concert Etiquette. Hands up who “gets” it?... Hands up who just gets confused?... Oh, just me then.

Seriously though, there’s a whole thing around how to behave in concerts that I have never quite got my head around, mainly because I’m terrible at sitting still. I had a conversation with a pianist once, who had just done a recital in the Wigmore Hall. He complained about the audience member in the front row who appeared to read a book the whole way through the event. If she was going to pay so little attention, he grumbled, couldn’t she just have stayed home?

Now, while sitting in the front row to read your book is perhaps a whole issue in itself, I can well imagine that she might possibly be the kind of listener who actually pays more attention, not less, through the lens of her book. While I might not want to read in a concert, I would have to confess to being an inveterate doodler/drawer/crocheter. If my hands are engaged, so is my mind and so are my ears. The way concert etiquette works, though, I only do this if I can do so undetected. I am well aware that this is seen as impolite to both performers (you’re not paying enough of the right kind of attention) and other members of the audience (you’re being distracting). Thanks, Hanslick. Maybe we should start splitting concert halls like weddings: “Good evening, madam, which side would you like? The sitting still side, or the doodlers? Right this way, follow me.”

Having said all that, it has been more and more in my consciousness just what it means for composer, performers and listeners that ways of listening have changed so much, even for the most traditionalist of concertgoers, and just how much, therefore, we ask of audiences. Even one hundred years ago, the only way of hearing music for most people – at least, music played by others – was to hear it live and in its entirety. Filing into a hall where people sat in serried rows and just listened was par for the course, if you liked that sort of thing. People were accustomed to it. (I differentiate between this and listening to oneself play partly because I find musicians some of the worst at sitting still in concerts.)

Things changed slowly but surely as technology made music ever more present, until we arrive at our current culture, with its almost incessant soundtrack. It’s made an enormous difference to how we engage with music, and it has dawned on me just how much of an ask it is to expect listeners to fulfil the role of a pre-recording audience, to leave their 21st-century ears and thought processes at the door. For some, this is second nature. For others, it is a struggle that can’t be won, no matter their relationship with the music itself. I mentioned Eduard Hanslick above, that proponent of “active” listening over “passive” listening, who did little to disguise his contempt for people who might simply let music wash over them in a wave of sensory enjoyment. He would have hated lift music.

E. M Forster wrote beautifully of what an audience really is, as opposed to what it’s assumed to be. He has just been to one Myra Hess’s National Gallery concerts that happened almost weekly throughout WWII:

“There is no such person as the average concert-goer, and no one can speak in his name. Not only does our enjoyment of music differ, but our attention wanders from it in different directions, and returns to it at different angles; so that if the soul of an audience could be photographed it would resemble a flight of scattering dipping birds, who belong neither to the air nor the water nor the earth. In theory the audience is a solid slab, provided with a single pair of enormous ears, which listen, and with a pair of hands, which clap. Actually it is that elusive scattering flight of winged creatures, darting around, and spending much of its time where it shouldn’t, thinking now “how lovely!”, now “my foot’s gone to sleep”, and passing in the beat of a bar from “there’s Beethoven back in C Minor again!” to “did I turn the gas off?” or “I do think he might have shaved”. Meanwhile Beethoven persists, Beethoven does not flicker, Beethoven plays himself through. Applause. The piano is closed, the instruments re-enter their cases, the audience disperses more widely, the concert is over.”

Christiane Tewinkel has also written about internal distraction being far more important in analysing a listening experience than is external distraction (“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts”, from The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries) ; but alongside this, we need to think about the choices we make that were once deliberate and now so engrained in our everyday life that we have forgotten that they were once voluntary. Interestingly, in some of these choices we seem to have returned to nineteenth-century values. The hierarchy of genre is re-dissolving. Just as in the late nineteenth-century you could hear ballad and art song on the same platform at the same time, or explicitly programmatic music alongside the austerely formal, so now can you choose “programming” options that never would have made it onto many concert platforms of the late twentieth century. I remember one particular concert I gave with a flautist in the late 1990s, when the venue director only very reluctantly allowed us to play Schubert’s Trockne Blumen variations alongside Poulenc’s sonata (“After all, it’s not exactly great music, is it?”). Nowadays, I might even blow his mind further by playing one or two variations, perhaps separated by other works, as most of us might often choose to listen. The hegemony of the full work, a much later aesthetic conceit than is often thought, is vanishing rapidly. A nineteenth-century listener wouldn’t blink twice, being already accustomed to performer selection.

There are, though, many ways in which we have arrived at the opposite side to the pre-recording audience. I have already written of the fact that many people hear most of their music through head/earphones, and certainly the vast majority through technology. Those headphones ensure that even when we are in a room with others, our listening experience takes place in isolation. This isn’t just a psychological separation, but is also a technological one. My headphones and my device render a sound-world quite apart from yours, much more than is engendered by our different seats in a concert hall. Not only that, but the performers have vanished, too, disembodied and distant, although conversely, the sound they produce is closer than it’s ever been, pulsing straight into our covered ears. There is little pre-listening information readily available, bar the thumbnail of the often random artwork of the album cover; sometimes it’s hard even to find the name of either performer or composer, depending on the scrolling banner that a streaming service has decided fits their algorithms best. A case in point was the Dora Bright piano concerto recording that was reviewed on these pages last month. On one particular streaming service, the only search that brought up the recording was one for the [male] conductor. Composer and performer names drew a blank. The idea that liner notes might be hanging around somewhere is laughably archaic. You can often google these, but who has the time to do that very often? Our control over the time-lapse of music is completely different, too. We can choose to play a track over and over, or even start and stop within a track, skipping backwards and forwards over the phrases. We’ve become bookshop browsers, flicking through a paperback to see if we feel like committing to the longer read.

And what effect does all this have on how we approach concert-giving? Perhaps none; but it’s certainly worth being aware of the far wider range of listening habits to which we have to relate as performers. Personally, I enjoy fragmentation as well as the narrative arcs of full works. The range of choice, and the relationship between vastly different works, become programming tools that excite me. And as we return to live music making, the opportunities we have are endless. Here’s to a new era.

Women at the Academy in the mid-nineteenth century

While the first intake of female students to the Academy have disappeared into the mists of time, in the second intake, names that make it into public consciousness begin to appear. Fanny Dickens (1810-1848) is an example, entering the Academy in 1823. She studied both singing and piano, as most of the early students did, although it was singing that formed the basis of her career, piano being the side dish. She would go on to share platforms with other musicians such as her husband, Henry Burnett, German soprano Anna Schröder-Devrient, and French singer Rosalbina Caradori-Allan – until, of course, marriage and motherhood sharply curtailed her performing activities, and tuberculosis took her at the tragically early age of 38.

Another extremely famous figure was soprano Anna Bishop (1810-1884), who appeared in these pages last week. She studied at the Academy a few years after Dickens, starting on piano with Ignaz Moscheles before her extraordinary soprano voice was discovered, leading to her switch in focus. It is impossible to do justice here to Bishop’s colourful life; I am an enormous admirer of her talent, dedication and capacity for sheer hard work, and she will appear in these pages yet again later in the year. Her pianism, one infers, was not of the highest order, and thus she missed out on any of the early scholarships, such as the King’s Scholarships instated in 1834. The first two female students to win this, their musicianship now lost to the mists of time, were Catherine Halls and Louisa Hopkins. (Poor Catherine had to suffer from an inept press, who mixed up her last name with that of George Hall, one of the two male winners.) 

By the next decade, female singers who had studied at the Academy were becoming well-known on the stages of the country and the world, such as Mary Shaw (1814-1876), Charlotte Sainton-Dolby (1821-1885), and Georgiana Poulter (dates unknown). Next to become known were the pianists, including the “child prodigy” Elizabeth Jonas (c1825-1877) who was “patronized by Her Royal Highness the Princess Augusta” and admitted to the Academy at the age of eleven in 1836 to study with Ignaz Moscheles and Thomas Attwood. Kate Loder (1825-1904) and Augusta Amherst Austen (1827-1877) were amongst these numbers; both also were organists who held positions in London churches. We also see the beginning of female students at the Academy who wanted to be known first as composers, rather than seeing this as an extra string to their bow. Clara Macirone (1821-1914) was one such musician. Her prolific letters to family members demonstrate that her performances were much more vehicles for her own music than they were pianistic displays. Another was Julia Woolf (1831-1893), composer of song and piano pieces, as well as an operetta, Carina, which by 1888 was “working itself into a genuine success at the Opèra Comique by reason of tuneful, if not very original, music, and chiefly and foremost by Mlle. Camille D’Arville’s artistc and fascinating singing and acting in the principal rôle,” as a contemporary review described.

Many of these women were able to sustain a good musical career, something we forget in our haste to draw them from shadows that are not as long as we might think. Those shadows do exist – Luise le Beau wrote in her autobiography of the extra-hard work that women had to take on, still to be ignored in the higher echelons of music culture. But they are not quite the shape we imagine, and they are not as all-encompassing as is often assumed, especially if we are willing to forego a cultural hierarchy that places public venues and public critical judgement at the top. Contrary to what it may seem, this can render these women even more invisible to succeeding generations – we still have a tendency for our eyes to slide over names that appear in programmes, as being available and thus not needing our help. But as any current composer will tell you, it’s the second performance that’s the hardest to procure. And why is one performance ever enough, when we are up against works with vast reception histories, of performances that occupy an entire spectrum of expertise, thus offering a rich, multi-faceted interpretation? 

Of course, the style of music that many of these composers engaged with is often now seen as anachronistic. We have a deep suspicion of Victoriana, as I have already highlighted in the review of Dora Bright’s much later concerto. The complex nature of the friction between the death of Romanticism and the influence of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, coupled with a dawning discomfiture around the physical aspect of musicmaking in classical traditions, makes us wary of the unfettered sentimentality of some of this music. Indeed, sentimentality has come to be a pejorative term, not to mention at times aligned with contempt for the feminine, seen as sitting firmly in the same aesthetic. It’s a good way of dismissing all those nineteenth-century women who wrote songs to words that make us uncomfortable now. They must be “bad” composers, because the feeling they (deliberately) engender in the listener seems no longer viable.

Here’s a performance of one of Kate Loder’s piano works, Voyage Joyeux.

The first female students of the Academy

When the Academy opened in 1822, it was “for the maintenance and general instruction in music of a certain number of pupils,' not exceeding at present forty males and forty females.” The general idea was that these young musicians would be able to “enter into competition with, and rival the natives of other countries, and to provide for themselves the means of an honourable and comfortable livelihood.” 

In the event, on 8 March 1822 ten girls and ten boys were admitted as the foundation students. These young people ranged in age from 10 to 15 – it is a common error in histories to believe that the Academy was always for an older generation. Unlike its rival over in Paris, however, which was there for musicians on the verge of the profession already, the Academy wanted to get in early in the educational journey. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that the average age rose to what it is now, i.e. tertiary age.

There are several histories of the Academy. Frederick Corder wrote the first one in celebration of the centenary, in 1922. He sets out in some tortuous detail all the meetings and ruminations leading to the opening, then finally gets to the whole point of the exercise, the students themselves, listing those first lucky twenty:

Corder, with a startling lack of imagination and social comprehension, goes on to say,

“The order in which these names are placed is according to the number of votes they obtained, and therefore according to their apparent talent at the time, for they were elected purely on their merits, Nearly all the boys distinguished themselves in after life, but not one of the girls, a fact for which I offer no explanation. ”

It would not be until the late 1830s that the female students began to make themselves more known on the platforms and publishing houses of the country, with the advent of the generation that included such names as Kate Loder, Clara Macirone and Charlotte Sainton-Dolby. It might well be noted that this generation of female students had recourse to the same teachers as the boys did, although still not quite the same range of subjects. This is not so much an indictment of the teachers the first girls had, who were perfectly well skilled in both music and education, but a reflection of the explicit assumption that girls learned music for a different purpose, one that did not include a professional career beyond the livelihood stipulated in the Academy’s first set of regulations. 

Silvano Arieti’s fantastically-named book Creativity: The Magic Synthesis has a chapter dedicated to the kinds of factors that help foster creativity in artists, and the ways in which the society around them can help rather than hinder. He has a list of nine suggestions, ranging from bluntly pointing out that people not only need the tools of their trade, but a financial independence that allows them to purchase these as and when needed, to highlighting the need, in some form or another, of recognition of achievement. In amongst these factors, he points to what he calls the “interaction of significant persons” – in other words, the need for excellent teaching, mentors, collaborative projects, and all the other * of a creative community. No one creates in a vacuum, even the artist alone in an attic garret, shuffling papers off into a forgotten drawer. Allowing female students access to the same community as the males were was the first step towards allowing them entry to that community. I am reminded of Carl Friedrich Zelter’s Liedertafel in 1820s Berlin, when the men sat around a table and sang, while the women sat in an outer circle, listening. As Wilhelm Bornemann’s 1851 history described it:

“In the legends of the Round Table of the British King Arthur, or Artus [...] Queen Guinevere, Arthur’s wife, also appeared with her women. Not at the actual Round Table, but nearby in a window nook, the great noblewoman waited, keeping watch over the happy affairs of the knights and bards.”

In the community but not of it…

A look at the difference in the timetable for girls and boys is also telling – several crucial differences immediately spring out. For a start, there is less practice time for the girls, right from the beginning of the day, when boys rise half an hour earlier to fit practice around prayers and breakfast. Girls don’t get to their instruments until 9 o’clock. They also lose half a day on Wednesday. The other most obvious discrepancy is simply the sheer diversity of the boys’ exposure to musical sound – of course, there is not a whisper of a brass or woodwind instrument in the girls’ timetable. Its really not hard to see that despite those lofty words at the beginning, the Academy saw a feminine “livelihood” as rather less fraught with possibility than the masculine equivalent (and to some degree, vice versa - who could say if there were boys who longed to follow in the footsteps of harpist Nicholas-Charles Bochsa, to all evidence an inspiring teacher?).

I am also quite fascinated at the thought of “tuning taught” – I wonder what this entailed?

The foundations being laid here, however, shouldn’t be underestimated. By the time we arrive at the latter part of the century, things are becoming different, and female students were at the forefront of public Academy life, especially in the number of composers having their works performed in the Academy’s concerts. Remember Liszt’s first piano “recital”, performed in London’s leading concert venue, the Hanover Square Rooms, just around the corner from the Academy’s first site in Tenterden Street? That was the venue for many of the RAM events, and thus the site of many premieres of works by female students. How this translated into the wider music culture is a different question, of course with a much larger pool of factors, not to mention the immeasurably complex question of reception.

In February’s blog entry, we will look at some of the next generation of women who had a RAM education behind them. The mid-nineteenth century London music scene was awash with ex-RAM students - singers, pianists, teacher, composers, including one who was shipwrecked, rescued, and continued on a world tour as though it were all in a day’s work. See you all next month!

The Janusian Blog Entry

This year, I decided to dedicate the Salon Without Boundaries social media presence to birthdays of women composers. Over three platforms, we have celebrated the birth of 1,405 composers, never missing a day. We covered women from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth - I decided to have a cutoff point of 1970, just to keep my time manageable. I found composers from all corners of the globe, from six continents – and one who at least had her music performed on the seventh – and in so doing, I earned far more than I had imagined I would, not just about the composers themselves, but also about the worlds they inhabited and the people with whom they interacted. I also learned what people are interested in today, sometimes to my surprise!

Of course, there are many, many composers whose exact date of birth is unknown, and some of these will be celebrated in the Salon throughout 2022. The Salon’s social media presence will be a little less this year, as we concentrate on building website content, not to mention rebuilding a real-world musical life after the ravages of the past two years. Still, on both website and SM we will be marking the bicentenary of The Royal Academy of Music in London. Founded in 1822, the Academy’s premise was to provide musical education to young teenagers:

“The object of the Institution, under His Majesty’s patronage, is to promote the cultivation of the science of Music, and afford facilities for attaining perfection in it, by assisting with general instruction the natives of this country, and thus enabling those who pursue this delightful branch of the fine arts to enter into competition with, and rival the natives of other countries, and to provide for themselves the means of an honourable and comfortable livelihood.
With this view it is proposed to found an academy, to be called the “Royal Academy of Music”, for the maintenance and general instruction in music of a certain number of pupils, not exceeding at present forty males and forty females.”

We have an upcoming blog entry devoted to the differences in provision for boys and girls, so we won’t go into that here; we can, despite this, acknowledge that the Academy was ahead of its time in allowing instruction at all to both sexes; its geographically closest equivalent, the Paris Conservatoire, would not admit its first female student until the nine-year-old violinist Camilla Urso entered in 1849. And later in the century, female composers would choose the Academy over its rival institution across London, because of its policy of playing student compositions in every concert, by both male and female composers. This would change around WW1, when the Royal College of Music became the preferred institution for many, due in large part to the stellar teaching staff in the department there. Meanwhile, however, Academy prizes were just as likely to be won by female students as by male, and the prize boards often read like a rollcall of the best composers of the time.

The Academy was one of the first to allow its girls to learn instruments other than the traditionally female singing and piano. In the 1890s there were more female violinists than male, and in 1901 there was at least one female cornet player, Catherine Fidler. This was also the  year in which Maude Melliar became the first female winner of a wind instrument scholarship in the UK. Edith Penville on flute followed closely behind. And despite the perceived ‘femininity’ of the piano as an instrument, the sheer weight of talent amongst the women pianists at this time was phenomenal. The singers, too, offered an extraordinary raft of talent and achievement, and it is not an exaggeration to note that the majority of successful productions in London included at least one Academy-trained voice.

Over 2022, we will be celebrating many of these women. All Composers of the Month were trained at the Academy; we will also have a cornucopia of recordings of works by other composers. Even the books will be by ex-students of the Academy, starting with one by a well-known pianist. We look forward to sharing these with you. Please continue visiting us throughout the year for more!

Una Bourne as Pianist

In September, Una Bourne featured on this website as Composer of the Month. Todays, we highlight her as a pianist.

Una Bourne was active as a pianist from c1900 to just before WWII, both live and on record. She started in Australia, where she accrued many a glowing review from a very young age, when she swept the board at local competitions, carrying off every single prize. The accolades continued on her arrival in Europe, both of her live concerts and later, of the many recordings she made:

“The distinction of Miss Una Bourne’s playing seems to lie in the fact that the imagination and thought by which she has formed her musical conceptions is perfectly expressed in her technique.”

“As a pianist Una Bourne plays with her mind and her brain and her heart, as well as her fingers and is the most perfect concert artist to ever grace a concert platform.”

Despite this, she gets rather dismissed in modern reviews. The overview on Naxos labels her “competent, but no virtuoso”, and takes exception to her choice of “popular encores and lighter classics: many works by Chaminade, with whom she studied, as well as pieces by Paderewski, Scharwenka, Smetana, Cyril Scott, Sinding and Sydney Smith” suggesting that “Because of this her reputation today is not high.” The writer goes on to admit that she also recorded pieces “by Granados, Albeniz and Grieg”, thereby inadvertently disclosing his aesthetic priorities. She plays for effect, he says, though does not give details of this.

This hierarchy of repertoire is one that sticks, despite many attempts to demonstrate that “light” music does not mean “trivial”, and that economic success, i.e. writing what your audience likes and will buy, does not necessarily mean a corresponding lack of musical insight. Elaine Borroff writes of this in her defence of parlor music:

“This article is a culmination of unease. For years I had been reading about parlor music, accepting the subtle (and not so subtle) put-downs of that national institution without a murmur. But in some cavern of my mind, a dissonance was resonating, and one day I heard it. Most writers on this subject have used the word limited, applied both to the music and, of all things, to the audience.1 Charles Hamm speaks of “music designed to be performed by and listened to by persons of limited musical training and ability.”2 The clear implication is that parlor music was a style or genre created especially for second- rate performers who deliberately aimed second-rate musical salvos at second-rate listeners. I don’t believe it for a moment. I have no idea how to rank listeners. What persons compose a first- rate audience? Those with an IQ of 132 to the metronome? Those who survived Theory 101 with a B-flat or better? I know of no performer so toploftical as to demand more than persons who come, who listen, and who are willing to respond. Does a doorman check the incoming audience and refuse admission to those below some “cultural” standard? Does the box office at an elite university check the grades of students who want to buy tickets? I knew such statements about and negative characterizations of parlor music were all wrong because I had been there, and it was nothing like that.”

And yet Bourne was a pianist of choice of many highly-regarded musicians, such as Nellie Melba, with whom she toured for many years, and Leopold Godowsky, pianist and teacher. She once was chosen to replace Ferruccio Busoni at short notice in a concert, and on a piano roll of Brahms, shared space with Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer and Mita Nikisch. Are we to believe that people then had a lower standard than we do today? What was it about her playing (and personality) that kept her in such demand for decades?

Bourne was a pioneering recording artist, starting a thirteen year relationship with HMV in 1914, when she recorded two of her own pieces, Petite Valse Caprice and Nocturne. She would go on to record around 80 works, from composers as diverse as Chaminade, Paderewski, Beethoven and Cervantes. Most of these recordings were solo, but she also had a successful partnership with violinist Marjorie Hayward. She seems to have had a particular penchant for Scandinavian music, from Grieg to less-programmed composers such as Olsen and Palmgren. Her final set of recordings was made in 1926 and consists of a series mainly of short pieces by herself and Cecile Chaminade, who had featured prominently in her recorded repertoire over the past twelve years. 

I have picked four recordings here, that demonstrate the breadth of her offerings, and range in chronology from theValse Caprice of 1914, to Chaminade’s Berceuse Arabe of 1926. There is a very clear, underlying performance aesthetic to all of them: Bourne’s priorities lie with precision, clarity of voicing, and a sense of overall structure rather than detail. There is enough variety to prove that her fondness for tempi on the fast side are not simply an outcome of the necessity of fitting a work onto a four-minute side. 

Valse Caprice: recorded 1914

This is an acoustical recording of one of Bourne’s own works. Already there is the trademark clarity, the finger work in the tumbling triplets executed with silvery precision, and attention lavished on the left hand duet in the B section. Sometimes the triplets are given dominance, at other times, the counter-melody. While the waltz rhythm of the left hand is obscured by the combination of Bourne’s voicing and the recording level, one can hear some tantalizingly interesting detail – a highlighting of the tops of chords, or a directive change in rhythmic positioning. With each repetition the phrase endings are subtly different in both rubato and articulation. In contrast to the considerable cuts of later-recorded, longer works, here there is a repeat of the final section that is not in the score. 

Kreutzer Sonata: recorded 1918

The recording of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata was the first of several that Bourne would make with violinist Marjorie Hayward, to critical acclaim. There is not really room here fully to explore the fascinating and dynamic performance practice on offer, but I will touch on a few of the more obvious points , saving the finer details of the partnership for a later date.

The first obvious issue is, of course, the cuts needed in order to fit the sonata onto four sides. These are telling for many reasons, including being a treatise on a certain approach to form, and the accuracy of hitting the four-minute target is impressive. Our modern sensibilities, so obedient to the nineteenth-centuy’s exhortation that we should listen to complete works and in silence, shrink at the swathes cut from this Kreutzer. But you know what? If I want the full experience, in itself an aesthetic choice highlighted by current listening habits shaped by streaming sites, I can go elsewhere. This is history-making, the first recording of this work, judiciously pruned to the four sides of 78s that it inhabited. The second movement is permitted to take two sides, meaning that there are only two small cuts, with lost time made up by ignoring repeats. The first movement is sliced to the required four minutes through one huge cut, while the last movement, also one side and thus four minutes, has several, smaller but nonetheless substantial cuts. (The first full-length recording would not be for another eight years, after the advent of electrical recording, when Isolde Menges and Arthur de Greef recorded it for HMV. Their performance comes in at around 34 minutes.) It’s worth noting, too, that the performance offers more proof that Bourne’s tempi are a musical choice, as much as a practical one. The Presto of the slow movement is slow by her standards, at minim=72, while the slow movement is crotchet=48. There are interesting choices here in ensemble – Hayward and Bourne clearly don’t see precision of playing a note exactly together as always the goal of good ensemble – dynamics, and articulation, both of which can stray quite a long way from the literal markings of (most) scores. It’s a fabulous performance, well worth shelving modern biases for.

Rondo alla Turca: 1925

Bourne takes it a good deal faster than almost anyone else at the time, at crotchet=164. In contrast, both Emil Sauer in 1923 and Rachmaninov in 1925 take it at 144, while 1933, Edwin Fischer adopts a stately 120. As a result, Bourne only omits two repeats in the 2’30” she takes to play the piece - and still has time for a ritardando at the end. Possibly as an outcome of this speed, Bourne does have a tendency to “land” on final notes of phrases, although this gives such a clear picture of the structure she is creating that it feels very much deliberate (and is not noticeable in recordings of other Classical era pieces). The clarity is still superb, and one can hear the colour change between major and minor, and particularly into the f# minor section. The way in which she emphasizes a LH crotchet melodic line is a particular highlight.

Berceuse Arabe: recorded 1926

This performance was recorded in the C Studio, Small Queen's Hall, on 18 October 1926, probably making it the last piece Bourne recorded. It was an up-to-the-minute repertoire choice, as the work had only been published the previous year. As already mentioned, Chaminade’s music played a large role in Bourne’s recorded output. It’s worth remembering that at this point, Chaminade herself was still recording and with some success, although her reputation was fading fast in the turn towards neoclassicism and newer modes. Bourne is perhaps a fellow victim of this change in aesthetic, being seen as a relic of a past age that music was surprisingly eager to dissociate itself from. Certainly it’s easy to hear a commonality in performance practice between the two pianists, not just in repertoire but in approach to the keyboard. Bourne clearly enjoys experimenting with the articulation, using very little pedal throughout.

Ninon Vallin in Dimitri Kirsanoff's film of Les Berceaux

In the move to include women composers in the historical landscape, we sometimes tend to obscure the many extraordinary women performers that have helped make music the experience that it is and has been. In part, this is an issue to do with ‘capturing’ – recording is so young, still, that it is easy to forget those performers who came before the clarity of modern technology. But it is also a sign of the hierarchy we often assign within the composer-performer-audience triad, with the performer, albeit at times unconsciously, seen as creatively less authoritative then the composer. I intend to celebrate some of these bygone women performers in the blog, starting today with some fairly unknown film footage from pre-WWII. 

Between 1932 and 1940, film director Dimitri Kirsanoff made three short films with collaborator and cinematographer Boris Kaufman, all taking a piece of music as the inspiration and soundtrack. They were part of a wider project by director Émile Vuillermoz to encapsulate music in visual form and all show a different relationship between music and the visual. They range from the extraordinarily moving to the seriously unacceptable, with Kristanoff’s offerings occupying much of that spectrum. 

All of Kristanoff’s short films centre around water as a theme. It tumbles through the landscape, around it, over it, sometimes hurling itself at the eye of the spectator. We won’t spend time here on the psychological weight of meaning behind such a choice of theme, be it conscious or unconscious, but will let it provide the backdrop to our focus, i.e. the women who perform in them, through music and drama. It’s striking just how the films demonstrate pretty much the entire gamut of women’s roles in the space of about 15 minutes. I have always found Delys Bird’s summation of these roles, in her 1992 exploration of the relationship between artisthood and motherhood, to be the most succinct and descriptive:

“Major constructions of the feminine in Western patriarchal societies are situated within the discourses of creativity and maternity, but women are positioned in a different gendered relation in each of these discourses. The fa¬miliar, secondary roles assigned to the creative feminine — as muse, nurse, handmaiden, wife or mother — are understood as necessary prerequisites to the environment that will enable masculine creativity to flourish.”

I am most interested in the first film, featuring French singer Ninon Vallin (1886-1961), which seems to me to offer the most complex reading, but the other two must be touched upon. The gradual erosion of female agency from number one to number three is stark and shocking. The final film, La Fontaine d’Aréthuse from 1940, is based on Symanowski’s violin and piano piece of the same name. The interesting part of it is how Kristanoff combines footage of the performers - Jacques Thibaud plays violin, Tasso Janopoulo is on piano - with the storyline. It feels like a very early forerunner of the Oxford Lieder Festival’s shadow puppetry take of performers and protagonists in their film of Erlkönig, though the concert dress of the two musicians in the 1940 film exudes a cultural authority the later film caricatures to an extent. My interest gives way here to extreme discomfort, as the nude female figure of dancer Sabine Earl appears (I had to promise YouTube that I am over 18 in order to view this). According to IMDB, this figure is ‘a vision of divinity’, being chased by The Hunter, who is fully (who’d have thought it?) if scantily dressed. It's not the nudity itself that disturbs me, but the fact that the woman is the only one undressed. Thus we have the single woman in the looked-at position - and her terrified flight leaves us under no illusion as to how powerless she feels - while the men wear the trappings of hegemony. It’s not acceptable to modern, post-Laura Mulvey eyes.

The 1936 film of Mompou’s Jeune Fille au Jardin is at least clothed, as Magda Tagliaferro plays the backcloth to dancer Clotilde Sakharoff. Again, we see both pianist and dancer, Tagliaferro bookending the whole with her visual presence, and Sakharoff occupying the middle section. This has a definite feel of a choreographed rendition of the piano music. Sakharoff takes many cues from the piano, occasionally to faintly and probably unintended comic effect, and making the whole feel the least experimental of the three films (although Tagliaferro lives up to her reputation as an innovating interpreter by making some notable choices in her own choreography, for example the exaggerated leaps of the opening line).

The first film, Les Berceaux of 1932, on Fauré’s song, is to my mind the most interesting and certainly the most moving. It’s interesting if unsurprising that the pianist remains anonymous here, in the accompanying role. Ninon Vallin takes centre stage as both musician and actor, her trademark clarity of language emanating from every second that she sings. She is first to be featured in the opening credits, in the largest font, before cinematography, and even the song writers. I choose this term carefully, as Sully Prudhomme, the poet, is listed above the composer, in the same size font, in a move that may feel surprising in comparison to common etiquette of classical music programme listings. 

The film opens with an unaccompanied choral vocalise across a series of serene visuals. These segue from seaside to boat to house, as though the boat is the bridge between nature and humanity. Gradually, as the piano starts with the rocking figure of Fauré’s introduction, the camera pulls back into a dark room, the natural world now seen through a window. We see Vallin, the only musician to act in these films, appearing in costume, as she rocks the cradle.

The room creates a dark foreground, with Vallin’s equally dark figure turned from the camera towards the window in a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting of the woman at the window. Unlike that iteration, however, it’s clear that this woman sees not what is outside, but what is in her mind’s eye, something beyond physical vision.

The window opens at the second verse - Mais viendra le jour des adieux, as though that first word, the ‘but’ that signals something more, has unlatched it. We see the men for the first time, and Vallin and her surroundings vanish for a few bars into the wave that crashes through the window. It brings the last verse with it, before the water calms at the end, on an incoming tide. The sea returns, without bearing its cargo of ship and men, and the piano stills to nothing. 

Et ce jour-là les grands vaisseaux,

Fuyant le port qui diminue,

Sentent leur masse retenue

Par l’âme des lointains berceaux.

There are many ways of reading Prudhomme’s words, and what Fauré finds in them, but here I find both Vallin’s observational, slightly reserved tone, and Kristanoff’s visual world, offer a truly empathetic interpretation. There is no complete experience here; both the women in their homes, gazing longingly out into the external world, and the men, remembering that home they leave behind them, yearn for what is missing. While the darkness feels both stifling and protective, there is a real sense of regret for the men out on the seas, missing the child and its growing. Music and film feel like an observation on the parent-child relationship that excludes, at the same times as it yearns for the third person, and on the longing for new horizons that always realizes implicitly what it leaves behind.

"And loved you better than you knew": finding the whole story

Over on Twitter and Facebook, each day we are commemorating birthdays of women composers. Although for many women we do not know the specific birth date, we have a full almanac (including Leap Day) of composers from the last 500 years.

One such composer is Mary Dickenson-Auner, whose birthday was yesterday. Dickenson-Auner was an Irish violinist-composer, who wrote works ranging from symphonies to violin sonatas, and also happened to have collaborations with both Bela Bartok and with Arnold Schoenberg, giving the first public performance of Bartok’s violin and piano sonata No. 1 in 1922.

In reading the biographies of Dickenson-Auner, it struck me yet again, as it has with so many other biographies of women, how overshadowed she is in her own story by the men with whom she is associated. Despite being a phenomenal player, composer and teacher, despite a career that took her all over the world, she is often relegated to a supporting role; a secondary presence that is only looked at, and must not speak. And thus, much of her story is lost to us (as certainly most of her own words are); it is the story of Bartok and his compositions that we are offered.

There is a whole plethora of reasons for this, from the composer-performer hierarchy that informs most of Western classical music history, to the idea that ‘woman’ cannot be creative in her own right, but must rely on the creativity of men for her expression. George Upton spent a large proportion of his 1890 book Women in Music explaining why this was the case; women are too emotional, they become discouraged too easily, they prefer supporting roles anyway. He concludes:

“For these and many other reasons growing out of the peculiar organization of woman, the sphere in which she moves, the training which she receives, and the duties she has to fulfil, it does not seem that woman will ever originate music in its fullest and grandest harmonic forms. She will always be the recipient and interpreter but there is little hope she will be the creator.
However this may be, there is a field in which she has accomplished great results, namely, her influence upon the production of music. She has done so much for music that it is no exaggeration to claim that without her influence many of the masterpieces which we now so much admire might not have been accomplished at all; that the great composers have often written through her inspiration; and that she has, in numerus notable instances, been their impulse, support, and consolation.”

Women themselves have quite a different view on this role, as well as their own contributions to the creative outpourings across the centuries. Margaret Steele Anderson’s poignant poem sums up the inner turmoil involved:

“Song
The bride, she wears a white, white rose — the plucking it was mine;
The poet wears a laurel wreath — and I the laurel twine;
And oh, the child, your little child, that’s clinging close to you,
It laughs to wear my violets — they are so sweet and blue!

And I, I have a wreath to wear — ah, never rue nor thorn!
I sometimes think that bitter wreath could be more sweetly worn!
For mine is made of ghostly bloom, of what I can’t forget —
The fallen leaves of other crowns — rose, laurel, violet!”

Elizabeth Akers Allen’s longer poem points to the cost of the silence imposed on these women:

“Left Behind
It was the autumn of the year;
The strawberry-leaves were red and sere;
October’s airs were fresh and chill,
When, pausing on the windy hill,
The hill that overlooks the sea,
You talked confidingly to me, -
Me whom your keen, artistic sight
Has not yet learned to read aright,
Since I have veiled my heart from you,
And loved you better than you knew.

You told me of your toilsome past;
The tardy honors won at last,
The trials borne, the conquests gained,
The longed-for boon of Fame attained;
I knew that every victory
But lifted you away from me,
That every step of high emprise
But left me lowlier in your eyes;
I watched the distance as it grew,
And loved you better than you knew.

You did not see the bitter trace
Of anguish sweep across my face;
You did not hear my proud heart beat,
Heavy and slow, beneath your feet;
You thought of triumphs still unwon,
Of glorious deeds as yet undone;
And I, the while you talked to me,
I watched the gulls float lonesomely,
Till lost amid the hungry blue,
And loved you better than you knew.

You walk the sunny side of fate;
The wise world smiles, and calls you great;
The golden fruitage of success
Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
And you have blessings manifold: -
Renown and power and friends and gold, -
They build a wall between us twain,
Which may not be thrown down again,
Alas! for I, the long years through,
Have loved you better than you knew.

Your life’s proud aim, your art’s high truth,
Have kept the promise of your youth;
And while you won the crown, which now
Breaks into bloom upon your brow,
My soul cried strongly out to you
Across the ocean’s yearning blue,
While, unremembered and afar,
I watched you, as I watch a star
Through darkness struggling into view,
And loved you better than you knew.

I used to dream in all these years
Of patient faith and silent tears,
That Love’s strong hand would put aside
The barriers of place and pride,
Would reach the pathless darkness through,
And draw me softly up to you;
But that is past. If you should stray
Beside my grave, some future day,
Perchance the violets o’er my dust
Will half betray their buried trust,
And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
”She loved you better than you knew.””

Fanny Hensel, who knew quite literally what it meant to be left behind, when her brother Felix was taken to meet Goethe and she was required to stay at home, was known as the Cantor in her family – the musical support and critic of Felix (his corresponding critique of her works did not earn him the same title). How fascinating, then, that in her piano trio, she chose to quote from the first work to see public light of day without any input from her, Felix’s oratorio Elijah.

It is an ongoing story, and will be revisited again and again. Today, let the last word belong to Mary Dickenson-Auner herself. Here is the third movement of her Irish Symphony, the Caoine (Lament). You can find the whole symphony on YouTube, played by the Mährische Philharmonie.

The return of live music

Normally, these blog posts are going to be on material that I’m researching, or teaching, or just thinking about. But I feel that I must first at least acknowledge the current situation that remains ongoing around the globe. 

There are a lot of adjectives flying around at present, to describe the times in which we live. Words like unprecedented (unprecedented times), and overwhelmed (The NHS will be overwhelmed), and plunged (plunged into another lockdown), through to words that are rather more unrepeatable, so I won’t. Though I may have yelled them at a wall fairly often over the last eighteen months.

And of course, it’s a particularly tough time for the arts. The disjunct between the complete closure of all live performance, and the enormous role of online performance in keeping morale high during lockdowns of varying degrees, in different countries, is clear wherever one turns. On one hand, arts courses face financial cuts from the current UK government that are often unsustainable; on the other hand, the leader of that government is at ease with quoting song lyrics in a party conference speech. Hmm, could it possibly be that an art form offered a way of saying something that nothing else comes close to doing? 

There was an enormous amount of online musical activity, of varying types and levels, but all driven by the same need to communicate. I watched some of the live feeds from opera houses around the world, from Wigmore Hall, from living rooms and kitchens. My whole family watched the Epica Omega concert, and I saw the same need in that band as I did in classical musicians – a longing to be back with a live audience, that feeds the performers, but also being lost in the enjoyment of being back in a studio with one’s musical collaborators. 

Let’s skip over the fact that the arts bring in billions to the UK economy for now; I’m talking about what gives our lives meaning. What’s the point of economic gain, if it doesn’t make our lives more fulfilled?  Even the word entertainment isn’t the fluffy luxury that many in power assume. It comes from the Old French word entretenir, meaning “to hold together, to support,” in other words, the communication that happens between artists and their audiences, between artists and each other, is fundamental to our relationships, to our livelihoods, and even to our existence. 

Nowhere was this clearer than watching students at the Royal Academy of Music come back together after so many months of sitting at home, unable to meet another musician. Piano accompanists who had been making backing tracks for singers, singers who had to sing down a Zoom camera and try to make eye contact with a blinking light, orchestral players who watched a split screen and tried to time their entry to allow for a technological delay, they all got to walk back into a room together and make live music. The delight and excitement was almost tangible, the smiles being cast at each other as sound filled the rooms once more were constant. Of course, it’s not all a straight line back into the thick of things. There are anxieties, and uncertainties, and moments of friction. But that’s life too, and after all, music encompasses everything, not just the glorious. As the words of Laura Farnell’s choral work In Praise of Music says, “awake my voice, awake my soul and sing!”

It's great to be back. I hope we get to stay. 

Welcome to the new Salon website!

Welcome to the new Salon Without Boundaries website! There are several new sections for you to explore, with more coming soon. 

It is a common misconception, that women composers of earlier times were as unheard and unprogrammed as they are now. This isn’t true. While they have never had the same recognition and authority of their male counterparts, many were heard on stage and platform, with works often being favourably reviewed and – crucially, as any contemporary composer will tell you – heard multiple times. What does tend to happen, however, is that this recognition and success dies with the woman herself. This is also the case for performers, especially those who graced the stage before the advent of recording. How do we accord creative authority to someone whose output doesn’t seem to exist any more, when we tend to see authority as residing in a permanent artifact (i.e. a published score)? 

With the current recognition of the essential nature of diversification in programming, there is a real need to make both information and scores readily available. One purpose of the Salon is to shine a spotlight on what’s out there, to help make it accessible. And we are well past the time of performing a work without understanding where it’s come from, who it has mattered to, how it speaks to us now. We aim to offer context, both musical and non-musical, as well as the musical objects themselves. With this in mind, we will be exploring not just new compositions, writings and performances, but also old ones, some very easily found online, if you know how to search past the dominant algorithms. We have a long way to go to make historical women’s outputs as accessible as their male counterparts’, but it’s worth highlighting the unceasing efforts of so many people to start addressing the imbalance.

We’ll be starting with these sections:

Composer of the Month: An introduction to historical women composers who are lesser-known, and often never programmed. We will be first concentrating on women active in the UK, Ireland and Germany (my areas of research), particularly women from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Poem of the Day: Poetry was once seen as indistinguishable from music. Here you can get a daily dose of Lieder ohne Musik.

In My Headphones: Not so much reviews, as reflections on recordings old and new – not just CDs, but recordings you can find online, e.g. on YouTube, of composers and of past performers. Sometimes this will be related to the Composer of the Month.

From My Bookshelf: Explorations of books by women and about women. We will be ranging from eighteenth-century publications to new releases.

The Salon Blog: Thoughts, reflections, ideas, discussions on anything and everything  around creativity, including the links between the arts and the every day, and what it’s like to be women living that. We’ll also be exploring those previously-mentioned ideas around creative authority.

You will also be able to find scores, recording links, poems, pictures and more, all being uploaded regularly. More exciting sections will be following soon.