Four Centuries of Great Music March 31, 2024 Music of Women Composers Episode 5

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are concluding our series of music by women composers to celebrate women’s history month.  

Jennifer Higdon is an American composer born in Brooklyn NY but raised in Atlanta, GA and Seymour, Tennessee.  Higdon  studied flute performance at Bowling Green State University but was encouraged to pursue composition.  Higdon earned an Artist's Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music and obtained both a Master of Arts and a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania.  She received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, Viola Concerto in 2018, and Harp Concerto in 2020.

Today we will be listening to her “Concerto 4-3”.  “Concerto 4-3” is a three-movement concerto, featuring 2 violins and a bass, which uses the language of Classical music, with certain bluegrass techniques incorporated into the fabric of the piece: emphasis on offbeats, open strings, and slides.

The work is divided into three movements, with the option to perform a cadenza between the first and second movements which this performance by the group Time for Three, Nick Kendall (violin), Charles Yang (violin) and Ranaan Meyer (double bass), takes advantage of.

The movement titles refer to rivers that run through the Smoky Mountains (where growing up,  Higdon heard quite a bit of bluegrass): “The Shallows”, “Little River”, and “Roaring Smokies”. She wanted to reference the Smokies, because East Tennessee was the first place that she really experienced bluegrass.


The first movement, “The Shallows”, incorporates unique extended techniques (or as I call them - techniques outside of the standard users manual for the instrument) that mimic everything from squeaking mice to electric guitars. These sounds resemble parts of the mountain rivers that move in shallow areas, where small rocks and pebbles make for a rapid ride that moves a rafter quickly from one side of the river to the other.

The second movement, “Little River”, is slow-moving and lyrical, very much in hymn-like fashion. This movement reflects the beauty of Little River as it flows through Townsend and Walland, Tennessee. At times there is real serenity and a majestic look to the water, with no movement obvious on the pure, glassy surface.

The third movement, “Roaring Smokies”, is a rapid-fire virtuosic movement that shifts and moves very much like a raging river (those wild mountain waters that pour out of the mountains). It is fun to swim in those cold waters, but your attention must always be alert, as danger lurks...the water goes where it wants and will take you with it.

Jennifer Higdon:  Concerto 4-3 -
Jennifer Higdon:  Concerto 4-3 - I.  The Shallows
Jennifer Higdon:  Concerto 4-3 - II.  Little River
Jennifer Higdon:  Concerto 4-3 - III.  Roaring Smokies

Time for Three & The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Xian Zhang    Letters for the Future    Deutsche Grammophon


Hélène de Montgeroult: Piano Sonata No. 9 in F-Sharp Minor Op. 5, No. 3

Hélène de Montgeroult was a French composer and pianist born in 1764 in Lyon and studied with the great piano masters of pre-revolutionary France. Recognized as one of the best fortepiano performers and improvisers of her time, she was also a published composer.  She was described as “the missing link between Mozart and Chopin”.  She married a Marquis so became a Marquise and was the toast of Paris solons and performance venues.  During the French Revolution she lost all her money, her estate and most of her friends.  It is said that she escaped the guillotine, by performing an improvisation on the fortepiano based on the Marseillaise in front of the Revolutionary Tribunal.  

She continued to compose, teach and perform.  In the 1830s her health began to decline and she died at her son’s home in Florence Italy in 1836.

Her Opus 5 sonatas were published in 1811 is in 3 movements

Hélène de Montgeroult: Piano Sonata No. 9 in F-Sharp Minor Op. 5 No. 3 - I. Allegro Spiritoso
Hélène de Montgeroult: Piano Sonata No. 9 in F-Sharp Minor Op. 5 No. 3 - II. Adagio non troppo
Hélène de Montgeroult: Piano Sonata No. 9 in F-Sharp Minor Op. 5 No. 3 - III. Presto

Here is a performance of Hélène de Montgeroult: Piano Sonata No. 9 in F-Sharp Minor Op. 5, No. 3 by Sarah Cahill from her album The Future is Female, Volume 3 “At Play”   First Hand Records


Let’s open this second hour of Four Centuries of Great Music on which we are concluding our series of music by women composers to celebrate women’s history month with Marion Bauer  and her Six Preludes for Piano, Op. 15

Marion Bauer did receive some prominent performances during her lifetime, but even considering the relative neglect women composers faced at that time in the first half of the 20th century, she did not then, nor does she now, get even the attention or frequency of performances that her contemporaries Amy Beach or Ruth Crawford Seeger receive. Her influence during her lifetime lay more in the areas of teaching (with many years on the faculty of New York University and the Juilliard School) and as an organizational leader within the community of composers (for example as a co-founder of the American Music Center and the American Composers’ Alliance).

But her music is well worth rediscovery; among those Americans writing piano works in the first half of the 20th century she occupies a middle ground between the very tonal, Romantic style of the German-trained composers like Foote, versus the more radical mavericks like Henry Cowell or Leo Ornstein. Much of this can be attributed to a couple of extended stints of study in France; Bauer in fact was the very first in a long line of American composers who went to study with Nadia Boulanger, and like her contemporary Charles Griffes, was clued in to some of the directions new music in France was taking in those pivotal first couple of decades of the 20th century.

For example, echoes of the harmonic sensibility of Debussy or Ravel can be heard in the second and fifth of Bauer’s Preludes. From a very different perspective, Bauer also seems to have known her Scriabin, if the sixth and final Prelude of the set, with its propulsive and passionate mood, is any indication. Others in the set show Bauer’s keen ear for intriguing textures, for example the opening Prelude written for the left hand alone, or the third prelude, a whirlwind for the two hands written in unison two octaves apart, the tonality somewhat adrift until the final and rather shocking D Major cadence. With performers of the present day beginning to truly mine the repertoire of underrepresented composers of the past, we are fortunate that Marion Bauer’s music (in many different genres) is being brought to light once more.

5. Prelude No. 1 (for left hand) 2:48
6. Prelude No. 2 2:36
7. Prelude No. 3 1:10
8. Prelude No. 4 2:27
9. Prelude No. 5 2:32
10. Prelude No. 6 2:15

Phillip Bush, piano    Concord    Neuma Records


Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel and her brother Felix grew up as child prodigies. While they were both encouraged to compose, only Felix was allowed to publish his work and perform in public. Although Fanny continued to compose for salons and private concerts, her father scolded her if her music was too ‘ambitious,’ and advised her to prepare herself for domesticity and marriage. In 1829 she married the artist William Hensel, and continued to compose privately. 1846, the year of her Vier Lieder (‘Four Songs’) for piano, was her most prolific, in part because she had met a young pianist who expressed enthusiasm about her work. She uses the word Lieder here in the same way as Felix in his Songs Without Words: to signify that they are lyrical works for piano. After her death in 1847, at the age of 41, the publisher Breitkopf and Härtel started to distribute her music, beginning with her Vier Lieder, Op. 8.  She actually wrote 3 sets of 4 songs without words.

Felix Mendelssohn & Fanny Hensel Songs Without Words (Complete Edition)
63 4 Songs for Piano, Op. 8_ No. 1 in B Minor (Allegro moderato)
64 4 Songs for Piano, Op. 8_ No. 2 in A Minor (Andante con espressione)
65 4 Songs for Piano, Op. 8_ No. 3 in D-Flat Major (Larghetto)
66 4 Songs for Piano, Op. 8_ No. 4 in E Major (Presto)

Next is Fannie Charles Dillon’s 8 Descriptive Pieces, Op. 20: No. 2, Birds at Dawn

Fannie Charles Dillon was a composer in the first half of the 20th century was born in Denver in 1881, studied with Leopold Godowsky in Berlin, and settled in Los Angeles.  Dillon described Birds at Dawn written in 1917 as “a description of the bird ensemble to be heard at earliest dawn, any morning of springtime, in the highest altitudes of the Sierra Madre Mountains of California.”

Here is a performance of Fannie Charles Dillon’s Birds at Dawn
Sarah Cahill     The Future is Female, Vol. 1:  In Nature    First Hand Records

We are closing today’s episode of Four Centuries of Great Music which concludes the series of episodes featuring the music of women composers celebrating women’s history month as we opened the series five episodes ago with the music of Florence Price.  Here we have  her Fantasie Nègre No.1 in E minor and Fantasie Nègre No.2 in G minor performed by Samantha Ege, piano from the album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price
Lontano Records

You have been listening to Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No.1 in E minor and Fantasie Nègre No.2 in G minor performed by Samantha Ege, piano from the album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price

Thank you for joining us today on Four Centuries of Great Music and join us again next Sunday at 3pm when we start catching up on some new classical music album releases.