Tag: Female Composer

Gloria Coates American Composer Dies at 89

American composer Gloria Coates has died. Coates displayed an unconventional, though highly-developed sense of texture, grasping the power of microtones and clusters from an early age. But these were often tied to comprehensible forms: canons, palindromes, simple structures. A prolific artist, she composed 16 symphonies, 11 string quartets, orchestral works, song cycles, and a chamber opera.

Hers was a unique voice. I often programmed her String Quartet No. 8 – with its three movements “On Wings of Sound,” “In Falling Timbers Buried,” and “Prayer” – during my broadcast memorials of 9/11. In the context, her sinking glissandi were especially effective, both visceral and chilling.

Coates was also an abstract expressionist painter. Some of her artwork has graced the covers of her albums. For much of her life, she made her living solely from her compositions. Allegedly, she was the most prolific female symphonist.

Born in Wisconsin in 1933, Coates largely made her home in Munich since 1969. At the time of her death, she was 89 years-old.

String Quartet No. 8 (2001/02)

Symphony No. 1 “Music on Open Strings” (1972)

“Holographic Universe” for violin and orchestra (1975)

“Cette blanche agonie” (1988), after Stephane Mallarmé

In English:

The virgin, vivid and beautiful today
Will it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing
This hard, forgotten lake that haunts beneath the frost
The transparent glacier of flights that have not fled!
A swan of other times remembers that it is he
Magnificent but without hope of freeing himself
For not having sung the region where to live
When of the sterile winter glistened the tediousness.
His whole neck will shake off this white agony
By space inflicted on the bird which denies it
But not the horror of the soil in which his plumage is caught.
Phantom that to this place his pure brightness assigns,
It immobilizes itself in the cold dream of scorn
That clothes during the useless exile of the Swan.

Symphony No. 8 “Indian Sounds” (1990/91)

Symphony No. 15 “Homage to Mozart” (2004/05)

A conversation with Bruce Duffie

http://www.bruceduffie.com/coates4.html

August 25, 2023
Cécile Chaminade Rediscovered

Cécile Chaminade, who shares her given name with the patron saint of music, was born on this date in 1857. Though assessed and recommended for study at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 10, her father forbade it, because he thought it beneath her class. He did, however, allow her to study privately. It was in this fashion that she continued with her piano lessons (her mother taught her when she was young), took up the violin, and studied composition with Benjamin Godard.

Georges Bizet, who heard her perform some of her own works before she was teenager, was among those who were impressed by her talents. Later, her pieces were championed by Isidor Philipp, head of the piano department at the Paris Conservatory.

In her early 20s, Chaminade began playing in a salon setting. This would be the prototype for her future appearances, at which she presented programs consisting solely of her own music.

She married a much older man, a music publisher, on the condition that they maintain separate residences. Due to her husband’s advanced age, it was rumored to have been a “marriage of convenience.” After he died, only six years later, Chaminade never remarried.

Her concerts in England were received with enthusiasm. If anything, she proved even more popular during a tour of the United States.

In 1901, she made gramophone recordings of seven of her compositions. She also made some piano rolls before and after World War I. She died in Monte Carlo in 1944.

For decades, then, she fell into obscurity, with the exceptions perhaps of her Concertino for Flute and Orchestra and whatever sheet music happened to turn up in Grandma’s piano bench.

Her reputation was revived largely through recordings, a trickle at first, but now appearing with more frequency.

Ambroise Thomas once commented, “This is not a composer who is a woman, but a woman who composes.” Chaminade said, “There is no sex in art. Genius is an independent quality. The woman of the future, with her broader outlook, her greater opportunities, will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description.”

In 1913, Chaminade was elected a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, a first for a female composer. Here’s some rare footage from the ceremony.

Happy birthday, Cécile Chaminade!

Concertino for Flute and Orchestra

Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra

Chanson, “Te souviens-tu?” (text by Benjamin Godard)

Piano works (linked individually in the information below the video)

Chaminade plays Chaminade

August 8, 2022