This week on “Sweetness and Light,” for International Women’s Day, we’ll have lighter works by six female composers: (pictured, clockwise from upper left) Peggy Stuart Coolidge, Elisabeth Lutyens, Teresa Carreño, Cécile Chaminade, Katherine Gladney Wells, and Doreen Carwithen – though not necessarily in that order. One was a crotchety avant-gardist who kept food on the table by writing music for sci-fi/horror films. One played for Abraham Lincoln at the White House. One was an heiress of the Seven-Up fortune. I’ll fill you in, as concisely as possible, on “Sweetness and Light.” Cherchez les femmes, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Merveilleuse was the “Boulangerie” that produced sisters Nadia and Lili.
Their mother, Raissa Myshetskaya (Mischetzky), was a Russian princess, who married Ernest Boulanger, a teacher and prize-winning composer at the Paris Conservatory. His associates included Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saëns. Their grandfather, who had also taught there, was a notable cellist. Their grandmother sang at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique. Suffice it to say, from their earliest years, the girls were exposed to the finest musical minds of Paris.
On Nadia Boulanger’s birthday, much respect to these marvelous musical sisters.
Nadia (1887-1979) became what has been described as the most influential teacher since Socrates. Her students included everyone from Dinu Lipatti to Igor Markevitch, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Astor Piazzolla to Philip Glass, from Michel Legrand to Quincy Jones, from Leonard Bernstein to “What Makes It Great?” radio host Rob Kapilow.
Her influence on American music, in particular, has been incalculable. Hopefuls flocked to her American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she accepted applicants from all backgrounds, provided they were determined to learn. It was Virgil Thomson who quipped, “She was a one-woman graduate school, so powerful and permeating that legend credits every United States town with two things: a five and dime and a Boulanger pupil.” The five and dimes may have faded, but not so the legacy of the “Boulangerie.”
Beneath those grey hairs and pince-nez lurked an iron will that brooked no nonsense, yet Boulanger was surprisingly accepting, astonishingly objective, and generally dead-on in her assessments.
Nadia’s younger sister, Lili (1893-1918), was one of the great hopes of French music, the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize. She won the prize in 1913, at the age of 19, for her cantata “Faust et Hélène.” It was actually Lili’s second attempt. The year before, she collapsed during her performance.
Unfortunately, Lili suffered from chronic ill health, contracting bronchial pneumonia at the age of 2. Her compromised immune system left her vulnerable to Crohn’s disease, which ended her life in 1918 at the age of 24.
Nadia too had had ambitions to compose. She attempted to win the Prix de Rome (as their father had done in 1835), but was repeatedly frustrated. She got as far as second place in 1908. It became evident that her sister was the real talent in that regard, so Nadia pursued organ and, of course, pedagogy.
Both sisters were greatly influenced by Gabriel Fauré, who was director of the Paris Conservatory – Lili, a musical prodigy, had been accompanying her sister to the conservatory from before the age of 5 – and of course Debussy’s impact in those days was inescapable. Like Debussy, Lili gravitated toward a kind of indirection in her music, more characteristic of Symbolism than the evocative sorts of atmospheres often attempted by the Impressionists (a classification, by the way, Debussy disliked).
Lili was greatly affected by the death of her father in 1900, and many of her works are marked by grief and loss. Ernest fathered his children quite late in life. He was 72 when Nadia was born, and 77 at the time of Lili’s birth. The girls’ mother was 41 years his junior. Despite the inherent melancholy that pervades much of her music, Lili displayed a colorful mastery of harmony and orchestration.
Often she was perceived as destined for greatness. Her music has actually been programmed fairly frequently for a woman composer of her era. But now with greater sensitivity to male dominance in the world’s concert halls, we are bound to hear even more Lili Boulanger. It’s just a pity she didn’t leave us more.
Nadia’s life was as long as her sister’s was brief. She died in 1979 at the age of 92.
Fascinating documentary about Nadia Boulanger, including first-hand accounts, historical footage, and terrific insights. Leonard Bernstein is interviewed in French, beginning around the 7-minute mark:
Nadia conducts Fauré’s Requiem
Nadia’s own “Fantaisie variée” for piano and orchestra
Lili Boulanger’s “Faust et Hélène”
“D’un soir triste” (“Of a Sad Evening”)
“Vieille prière bouddhique” (“Old Buddhist Prayer”)
BREAK BREAD WITH THE BOULANGERS ON NADIA’S BIRTHDAY: Nadia, left, with Lili in 1913. The bread was baked fresh this morning.
I’ve written about Dame Ethel here before. I always liked her music and was a champion of her stuff before it was cool. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I find her Serenade in D, a symphony in all but name, more rewarding than anything written in the form by either of her near-contemporaries, Parry or Stanford. What’s even more remarkable is the range of her development, that the same composer who wrote the Serenade in 1890 (when she was already 32), a big-hearted, Brahmsian creation full of great tunes, arrived at her last, meditative symphony, “The Prison,” as much an oratorio or cantata for vocal soloists and orchestra, in the ruminative manner of Mahler, in 1930.
This is not a bad article, even if the slant makes her out to be more of a battle-axe than she really was. Yes, she was determined (as she had to be), and yes, she busted out some windows, but in between she was just trying to live a happy, fulfilling life like the rest of us. Unquestionably Smyth had lesbian inclinations (most of her lovers were women), but there’s no way in hell she would have described herself as “defiantly queer.” One of the things I find so annoying these days is how everyone, whether specialist or person on the street, seems hellbent on interpreting the past through the lens of the present. Hence, we get the front-loaded insinuation about Smyth’s allegedly bigoted views, as an English citizen whose consciousness was formed during the height of the Victorian era. I just read her memoirs a month or two ago, and trust me, she was not a repugnant, malicious person in any respect.
Ironically, this preoccupation with snap judgments and pigeonholing is the very thing that limited Smyth during her career as a “lady composer.” It’s as misguided as the now seemingly ensconced practice of updating with lurid productions operas composed generations ago, in an attempt to make them seem more “relevant” to the present. If the music and the story and the overall effect truly are timeless, is it really necessary to make everything look like a New Jersey rest stop? If you wonder what I’m ranting about, see the stills from the recent Glyndebourne production of Smyth’s “The Wreckers” at the link (by clicking on the BBC photo below).
I’m grateful that Dame Ethel is getting so much attention now after decades of comparative neglect. I suppose there is a pendulum effect in any revolution, and there is usually a period of overcompensation before things start to swing back, but I long for the day that artists of all backgrounds are finally accepted for their inherent worth, without having to over-politicize everything. I love Smyth for the beauty of her music, not because she was “defiantly queer” or “problematically bigoted.” Hopefully in a few decades, none of this will mean anything. We’ll have learned from history and evolved, and finally we can get back to experiencing the music.
By coincidence, I am getting close to the end of Smyth’s memoirs (abridged from nine volumes). While I don’t find her the most compelling writer, she does offer some fun glimpses of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Mahler, Arthur Nikisch, and Sir Thomas Beecham, among others. Also, she was a great lover of dogs.
However, too often the narrative, such that it is, devolves into a blur of name-dropping. Fine for a diary; not so much for a reader. After a while, I just gave up trying to keep everyone straight. It’s all the same anyway. Whether or not this “shortcoming” was exacerbated by editorial decisions, I don’t know.
That’s not to say the book is not worthwhile. Smyth’s personality definitely comes through. She was indefatigable, I’ll say that for her, and spirited. Often almost giddy. This is a person who would never take no for a definitive answer, but kept looking for new solutions, and when she couldn’t find any, she picked herself up, and peddled her music elsewhere.
Though she regrets that her pieces hardly ever get programmed, it seems she managed to have her operas and orchestral works played all over Germany and, to a slightly lesser extent, England. Her opera “Der Wald” was picked up by New York’s Metropolitan Opera (though she deemed the performances less-than-satisfactory). Gabriel Fauré even helped to organize a concert of her chamber music in Paris.
What is striking is how impromptu the concert programming seemed to be back then. In Leipzig (at the Gewandhaus, no less), in Weimar, Berlin, and Prague, it seems like one could get an opera picked up fairly quickly, on a whim, almost. Of course, the commitment could just as rapidly fall through.
While history, and, to some extent, even her contemporaries, may have undervalued her, I’d say, all in all, she did pretty well – if having to wait 30 years for some of her works to be revived is tolerable. Happily, she never seemed to let it get her down, and she was always writing new things. Now her music is being performed again.
I wrote more about her, only just last month. If you’re interested, you can read it here, with plenty of links to her music:
I’m happy to note that in the past several years the idea of month-long celebrations devoted to “Women’s history” or “Black history” has started to seem almost old-fashioned, as the programming of concerts and radio broadcasts has become more and more diverse, so that it’s no longer unusual to encounter music by “minority” composers, with increasing regularity, year-round.
I feel the historic shift most keenly as I reach back into the “Lost Chord” archive to 2010, when I believe the show that will air this evening was probably already a repeat. (I began the series in 2003.) Time was when one really had to scratch around in order to find enough material to fill out an hour’s theme. Looking back now, over a decade later, recordings have yielded an embarrassment of riches.
I hope you’ll join me tonight as we revisit some of the selections available in the early years of the 21st century, for a program of music by women composers of Philadelphia.
Andrea Clearfield (born 1960) was raised in Bala Cynwyd. She studied at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA (where, by the way, this particular broadcaster got his start in community radio in 1986). At Muhlenberg, she was mentored by Margaret Garwood. She then studied at Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (now the University of the Arts) and at Temple University, where among her teachers was Maurice Wright.
Clearfield herself taught at the University of the Arts from 1986 to 2011 (after this show was recorded, so some of the info may be a little out of date). She is well-known in Center City for a long-running, monthly, multidisciplinary salon held at her studio, located not far from the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Since the pandemic, this has been a virtual event, but the salon has run, more or less uninterrupted, since its inception in 1986.
Clearfield’s recorded discography has expanded considerably since 2010, but for tonight we’ll sample her work for oboe and piano, “Unremembered Wings,” written in 2001.
Then we’ll turn to Jennifer Higdon (born in 1962), whose career by this time had already taken off like a rocket. She would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto in 2010. Again, assuming the show was recorded before February of that year, it would have been at least a few months before the honor was bestowed in May.
Higdon, born in Brooklyn to an artistic family, grew up in Atlanta and Seymour, TN. She studied flute at Bowling Green State University, where she was encouraged to pursue composition. This led her to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where her teachers included David Loeb and Ned Rorem. She also received a Master of Arts and PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with George Crumb.
Parenthetically, we were practically neighbors during my final decade in Philadelphia. Even so, it was only through the station that I finally met her, and I interviewed her for the paper a few years ago.
Tonight, we’ll hear her “Concerto for Orchestra,” written for the hometown band – the Philadelphia Orchestra – but recorded by the Atlanta Symphony, under the direction of her old friend from Bowling Green, Robert Spano.
Finally, we’ll turn to Evelyn Simpson-Curenton (born in 1953). Now based in Washington DC, she is music director of the Washington Performing Arts Men and Women of the Gospel and an associate of the Smithsonian Institute. After graduating from Germantown High School, she earned a BM in Music Education and Voice from Temple University. She’s received commissions from George Shirley and Duke Ellington, among others, and provided arrangements of spirituals for Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle.
We’ll listen to Simpson-Curenton’s setting of Psalm 91, “My Soul Hath Found Refuge in Thee,” in a performance by the ensemble VocalEssence under the direction of Philip Brunelle.
Philadelphia is our sister city tonight, on “Sisters of Brotherly Love” – selections for hopefully soon-to-be-outmoded Women’s History Month – this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTOS (clockwise from left): Higdon, Clearfield, and Simpson-Curenton
