Four Centuries of Great Music March 10, 2024 Music of Women Composers

We are opening this Four Centuries of Great Music featuring women composers with Florence Price and her Symphony #3 in in C Minor

Florence Price thought about and worked on her Symphony No.3 for a long time. She explained the genesis of the symphony this way: ‘The Symphony No.3 in C Minor was composed in the late summer of 1938, laid aside for a year and then revised. It is intended to be Negroid in character and expression. In it no attempt, however, has been made to project Negro music solely in the purely traditional manner. None of the themes are adaptations or derivations of folk songs. The intention behind the writing of this work was a not too deliberate attempt to picture a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought, with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled, or influenced by concepts of today.’

Price’s Symphony No.3 was premiered by the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Valter Poole. This
ensemble, like other WPA units, was organized to provide work for the large number of unemployed musicians and others
during the Depression years. Through its regularly scheduled concert season, Poole raised the level of this full-size symphony orchestra to national prominence.

The Symphony begins with a solemn introduction before giving way to a bold theme in the lower strings. Like most sonata form movements, this one has a contrasting second theme of lyrical beauty.

The second movement of the Symphony features antiphonal “choirs” of instruments. It is rich with beautiful melodies, some spiritual-like,
bathed in orchestral color. Price’s love of French impressionist music is particularly evident here.

The third movement, entitled Juba Dance, is based on characteristic
antebellum African American dance rhythms. For Price, the rhythmic element in African American music was of utmost importance. She wrote, ‘it seems to me to be no more impossible to conceive of Negroid music devoid of the spiritualistic theme on the one hand than strongly syncopated rhythms of the juba on the other.’ The listener will recognize the Latin- American habanera dance, which by 1940 had made its way into American popular music. The xylophone, an instrument common to jazz, is also featured in this movement. Although Price was not a jazz musician, jazz was all around her in Chicago, and its styles and rhythms did have an unconscious impact on some of her compositions.

The last movement of the Symphony is a lively allegro movement, which is concluded triumphantly by a lengthy Beethoven-like coda.

Here is a performance of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor by the Women’s Symphony Orchestra (San Francisco) conducted by Apo Hsu from the album Florence Price: Mississippi River Suite, The Oak,  Symphony #3    Alto Records

Florence Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor - I. Andante 10:37
Florence Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor - II. Andante ma non troppo 8:34
Florence Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor - III. Juba. Allegro 5:06
Florence Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor - VI. Scherzo. Finale

Lets close this first hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great music with the music of Teresa Carreño.  Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor

Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1853 but really began her concertizing career at 8 after her family emigrated to New York City in 1862.  And she performed for President Abraham Lincoln in the White House in the Fall of 1863.  As a pianist she displayed such force and passion that she was known as the “lioness of the piano.” However, Carreño was also an accomplished composer, and not only wrote works for piano but also composed several pieces for chamber ensembles, of which her String Quartet in B minor, composed in 1896 reveals a style that closely follows many of the common practices of her day. For example, the chromatic and arpeggiated subject of the quasi-fugal section that brings the fourth movement to an end seems to anticipate the fugal subject of the “Von der Wissenschaft” section of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra composed later that year.

Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - I. Allegro
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - II. Andante
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - III. Scherzo
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - IV. Allegro risoluto

The work is in 4 movements: I. Allegro; II. Andante; III. Scherzo and IV. Allegro risoluto

Here is a performance of Teresa Carreño's  String Quartet in B minor by Tamas Strasser, Camilla Heller, Joseph Roche & Robert Zelnick from the album The Essential Latin American Composers Collection.  Menuetto Classics/BMG



Lets open this second hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great Music celebrating the music of women composers with the chamber music of Amy Beach. Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 150

Born in 1867 in New Hampshire, Amy soon shown herself to be a prodigy on the piano including improvisation.   After her family moved to Boston area, she continued her development as a pianist and began composition and theory lessons.  At 16 she gave her concert debut, but ended concertizing at 18 following marriage.  Because her new husband did not want her performing.  She was limited to two concerts a year and both had to be for charity.  However her husband did not restrict her composition, but did not allow her to continue composition lessons, so most of her further development as a composer was the result of her own self-study.  Although she enjoyed composing, she considered herself first and foremost a pianist.  She returned to piano performance at the death of her husband.

Her Piano Trio, Op. 150 was composed during her late period in 1938 while Beach was at the MacDowell Colony, a colony for composers and artists, in Peterborough, New Hampshire.   This piano trio was first performed at the MacDowell Club in January 1939 with Beach at the piano, and it was published by The Composers, Inc. that same year.

This piece would turn out to be the last chamber work that Beach would compose in her lifetime.  Due to heart disease, she retired from composing in 1940 and died in 1944.  The trio was composed during a time where Beach was exploring dissonance in her works, which she had started to use after going to Europe for the first time in 1915.  However, the late-Romantic style in which Beach composed, as seen in the virtuosic piano part, was considered to be old-fashioned by the time the trio had been composed. Like her earlier Piano Quintet, the trio has three movements,:  The movements are marked Allegro, Lento Expressivo, and Allegro con Brio.   The trio also features equal writing, and importance, for each instrument.   Similar to the Themes and Variation featuring a theme from a past song, the trio has fragments from her song, “Allien” and the piano piece “The Returning Hunter.”

Here is a performance of Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 150 by Thomas Albertus Irnberger, David Geringas & Barbara Moser from the album “It’s a Girl!”  Gramola Classics

Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 150: I. Allegro
Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 150: II. Lento Expressivo
Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 150: III. Allegro Con Brio
Thomas Albertus Irnberger, David Geringas & Barbara Moser
It’s a Girl!    Gramola Records


Next is Germaine Tailleferre’s sonata for harp.

Born Germaine Taillefesse in 1892, she changed her name to “Tailleferre” to spite her father who refused to support her music studies. He considered music an unworthy pursuit, and a “woman studying music” he once remarked, “was no better than her becoming a streetwalker.” She never forgave him for his inflexible attitude towards her artistic gifts. Embittered, she is said to have regarded his demise in 1916 as something of a relief.   Studying at the Paris Conservatoire she immediately won various prizes and caught the eyes of her fellow students Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. When she published her first string quartet in 1918, she was welcomed as a major talent and as the only woman into the private musical club that eventually blossomed into the composer collaborative known as “Les Six.”

Her harp sonata however was written much later in her career in 1953 for the Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta. The sonata was later revised in 1957 after the premiere. The sonata is praised for its influences of jazz, Spanish Habanera and expressionism and is in 3 movements I. Allegretto; II. Lento and III. Perpetuum Mobile

The opening movement begins like a lullaby, with a sweet melody played by the soloist. After this is established Tailleferre plays with the Habanera rhythms, which are nuanced within the music. The harp sparkles through into its upper range as the dynamics also begin to creep up. The wave of different textures and timbres Tailleferre creates during just this movement is a real feast for the ears as the soloist moves up and down the instrument. The opening lullaby theme returns at the end of the movement before trailing off quietly.
 
The slow middle movement opens with a new theme which takes some time to properly unravel. Opposing rhythms between the harpists hands are at the centre of this theme as many different voices crossover one another. The dynamics are quiet, giving a mysterious atmosphere to the movement. The theme is explored in some depth in this movement, before the music concludes quietly.
 
The perpetuum mobile begins at a quick pace from the beginning. The agile harpist creates swells of notes that are accented by peaks and troughs of the melody. The sweet sound of the harp and the lightness of the string plucks plays well into the perpetuum mobile theme. Certainly the most virtuosic and challenging of the three movements, the finale comes to its climax, where the harp plays a bold syncopated figure before a big glissando finishes the sonata.


Here is a performance of Germaine Tailleferre’s Sonata for Harp featuring  Bridget Kibbey    Love is Come Again     self released


We will close today’s Four Centuries of Great Music with Julia Perry: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

Perry’s concerto reveals an expansive imagination, and her ability to derive all of this music from just two contrasting intervals  a major third and a major seventh is amazing.

It has been suggested that in a poetic way, the two intervals seem to represent her life and career: starting with a sweet major third with her early success, and then to an unfulfilled, yearning major seventh at the end of her career, with no compositional opportunities, financial hardship, terrible health, and yet the will and drive to continue to compose in the face of that adversity.

The work includes outrageous writing for violin - virtuosic and difficult and reflects her knowledge of the instrument.

Her final revisions of the piece, in 1977, were at a time when she could no longer use her right hand following a stroke, and had taught herself to compose and write with her left hand.


Here is a performance of Julia Perry’s  Concerto for Violin and Orchestra as performed by Curtis Stewart, violin and the Experiential Orchestra conducted by James Blachly from the album American Counterpoints.   Bright Shiny Things


Thank you for joining us on Four Centuries of Great Music and join us next week as we continue our series classical music works composed by women composers.