Elim Chan (Born on November 18, 1986) Feminine Revolution in Conducting

 by Hermione Lai  November 18th, 2025

When one thinks of classical orchestral conducting, a specific image often surfaces. We tend to see a tall, authoritative male figure wielding a baton, commanding an ensemble of dozens in a symphonic ritual.

Into this traditionally male-dominated picture, Elim Chan enters not as an exception but as a sign of change. She is a conductor whose very existence challenges that old model, and whose career heralds a broader transformation in classical music.

Elim Chan

To celebrate her birthday on 18 November 1986, let’s explore how Chan’s trajectory, achievements, and identity contribute to a feminine revolution in conducting.  

Breaking Batons and Boundaries

Elim Chan

From Hong Kong-born beginnings, Elim Chan’s rapid ascent is itself noteworthy.

In 2014, she became the first female winner of the prestigious Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in works by Beethoven, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

As a reward, she served as assistant conductor with the LSO in 2015–16. Subsequently, she was appointed chief conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra for the 2019-20 season, and served as principal guest conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra from 2018 to 2023.

These milestones are significant, not only because she is a woman, but also because she is young, Asian-born, and stepping into roles that were rarely, if ever, held by women before.   

Shattering the Baton Ceiling

The world of orchestral conducting has for decades been dominated by men. Women conductors were few and often seen as exceptions or novelties rather than the norm.

Chan’s presence disrupts that pattern in multiple ways. Her appointment and visibility challenge the implicit assumption that the podium is an exclusively “male” domain.

Beyond symbolic significance, Chan has earned wide respect for her craft. Reviewers describe her as “a rare example of a young conductor at once brilliant and not in the least showing off.”  

Beyond the Spotlight

Elim Chan

Chan has acknowledged the dual pressure of visibility and scrutiny faced by women in conducting. And while the opportunities are increasing, “just one mistake, and, look, she’s not ready.”

Chan’s contribution goes beyond symbolism. Her conducting style has been praised for elegance, precision and emotional insight. Her approach, including clear beat, economical gestures, and sensitivity, draws favourable comparison to great conductors of past generations.

Her presence is not just a novelty. It is grounded in serious artistic merit. In so doing, she helps shift perceptions about what a woman conductor can do, not just who she is.   

Progress and Persistence

Chan herself recalls being inspired by female conductors in her early life in Hong Kong, and she has now become a role model for young female musicians and conductors. She has emphasised that women must “find their own way of leading, of being true to themselves, whether you wear a dress, or pants, have short or long hair. Authenticity is very powerful.”

While much progress has been made, Chan’s story also highlights that work still needs to be done. She commented that “not all orchestras are ready for someone like me,” as entrenched resistance remains.

Women are still under-represented in chief conductor roles, and mistakes or criticism can impose extra pressure. With novelty comes expectation, and Chan will continue to make bold artistic choices without being boxed in by identity.   

The Sound of Chance

Elim Chan

We could actually call Elim Chan a harbinger of change. Her presence at the top levels of orchestral conducting signals a rupture of the old model.

By excelling artistically, embracing her background and identity, and leading major orchestras, she proves that a feminine revolution in conducting is not just about gender, but about expanding what leadership in classical music can look like and who it can come from.

Celebrating Chan’s journey, we find a broader transformation where young musicians of all backgrounds can imagine themselves standing at the front. Her very existence on the podium is a bold statement, as the stereotype has been broken and a new agreement is being written.

Marion Bauer: The Composer, Educator, and Advocate Who Shaped American Modern Music

You have likely never heard her name, but Marion Bauer was one of the most influential musical personalities in American history.

Not only was she a pioneering composer in an era when professional women composers were often looked down on, but she was also a writer and critic who spent much of her career advocating for the work of other composers who are now firmly ensconced in the canon.

Through her music, her writing, and her tireless advocacy for new composers, she helped shape how twentieth-century America heard music. But after her death in 1955, her music largely disappeared from concert programs.

It shouldn’t have, and today we’re looking at why.

Marion Bauer’s Family and Childhood

Marion Bauer

Marion Eugenie Bauer was born on 15 August 1882 in the town of Walla Walla in present-day Washington state. She was the youngest of five surviving children.

Her father was a French immigrant who played in the band of the Ninth Infantry of the United States Army. Later, he became a shopkeeper.

Her mother was a polyglot who spoke seven languages. After her children aged past toddlerhood, she became a tutor and professor. Her children would inherit her passion for teaching.

Tragically, Marion’s father died when she was eight years old. Her mother moved the family to Portland, Oregon, to live near family.

Marion’s Early Careers

After the death of their father, Marion’s sister Emilie – seventeen years her senior and a formative influence throughout Marion’s life – took on responsibility for helping with the family, raising the younger children while working.

It was Emilie who began teaching Marion how to play the piano when she was a young girl, as soon as she could sit upright on the piano bench.

In addition to music, Marion also had a passion for writing. In the late 1890s, in high school, she became the assistant editor of the school newspaper.

Emilie shared the family’s passions and combined them to make a living, then left for New York City to become a music critic. Marion followed her.

In New York, Marion continued her piano studies with composer and pianist Henry Holden Huss, a composer who is acknowledged as a bridge figure between American romanticists and modernists. Marion’s music would later serve a similar role.

Studying in Paris

Nadia and Lili Boulanger

In 1905, French pianist and violinist Raoul Pugno gave a series of concerts across the United States. He met the Bauer sisters, and Marion offered to teach him and his family English.

Pugno proposed a trade: in exchange for the English lessons, Marion could return to France with him to study music in Paris.

In Paris, she began teaching English to sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger. In return, Marion became Nadia’s first American student.

A few years later, Lili would become the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome composition competition, while Nadia would become arguably the most influential music teacher of the twentieth century.

Further Studies and Songwriting

Bauer continued her studies in New York in 1907 and Berlin in 1910. When she returned to New York, she began focusing on composition.

She was especially interested in songwriting during this time in her artistic development. She later described this accidental specialisation:

“I was having trouble with my eyes and was making daily visits to the oculist. While waiting to be admitted to his office one morning, I found in a magazine a poem by Gouverneur Morris, and on a piece of scrap paper I scratched a staff and composed my first song.”

In 1912, the year she turned thirty, she signed a seven-year contract with publisher Arthur P. Schmidt for the rights to her songs.

The two would later quarrel as her style became more and more modern, and, in Schmidt’s eyes, less commercially valuable. She wrote to him in 1918:

“It is not stubbornness on my part not to write simple things. I can only write what I feel…”

Maturing as a Musical Communicator

By the early 1920s, Bauer had become not just a composer, but a node: someone who connected composers, performers, institutions, and audiences.

Composition was not Bauer’s only interest. She also enjoyed writing about music, creating lecture recitals, organising concerts, and arts administration.

She spent summers at the MacDowell Colony and befriended fellow composers, including Amy Beach, the first American woman to write a symphony.

Amy Beach

In 1921, she founded the American Music Guild, where members could hear their works performed and receive feedback from colleagues and the public.

Based on the feedback she received from the Guild, she decided to continue her studies in Europe. Between 1923 and 1926, she took another trip to France.

Returning to France and Facing Tragedy

André Gedalge at his home in Chessy, about 1908, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

She later wrote, “These were some of the richest years in my life from the standpoint of study and development. I studied fugue with Andre Gedalge for a season, and met many of the composers and musicians in prominence at the time.” (Gedalge had been a teacher of Ravel and Milhaud.)

Bauer was correct: this period was especially productive for her. She began writing more and more instrumental music during this time, including her string quartet and violin sonata.

Marion Bauer’s Violin Sonata   

In early 1926, she returned to New York when she received a telegram that her sister Emilie had been hit by a car. Emilie died from her injuries that March.

Marion and her sister Flora agreed to take over Emilie’s job as the New York correspondent for the magazine The Musical Leader, which they would continue to do together into the 1950s.

Teaching and Mentoring Musicians

Ruth Crawford Seeger

In 1929, the 47-year-old Bauer met and became a teacher and mentor to 28-year-old Ruth Crawford (later Ruth Crawford Seeger).

Seeger had been depressed after turning down a proposal of marriage, but Bauer comforted and encouraged her, saying:

“Work. You have a great talent. You must go ahead. I do not mean that you must not marry, but you must not drop your work.”

Bauer was right: Crawford would go on to become one of the most original American modernists of her generation.   

Crawford wasn’t the only composer with whom Bauer worked.

She began teaching at Juilliard and New York University’s Washington Square College (she was the college’s first woman on the music faculty). Her students began calling her “Aunt Marion.”

Writing Books About Music

How Music Grew by Marion Bauer/ Ethel Peyser © abebooks.com

Marion followed in her critic sister’s footsteps, writing articles and publishing six books.

Two of the most striking were 1925’s How Music Grew and 1932’s Music Through the Ages, both co-written with Ethel Peyser.

These two books traced the history of music in an approachable way. Music Through the Ages became a popular text in schools for a long time, influencing countless American music lovers in the mid-century and beyond.

In 1933, she wrote Twentieth Century Music: How It Developed, How to Listen to It. She described the book as “an attempt to guide the rapidly growing army of listeners in concert halls and over the air, through some of the paths along which the music of the twentieth century is traveling.”

Embracing New Music and New Media

Starting in the 1920s, she began giving innovative lecture-recitals across America and Europe.

Unsurprisingly, her favourite topic was modern music and enhancing people’s enjoyment of new music.

As she once wrote, “So many people come with unfounded prejudices toward modern music. All I ask is that your dislike be based on understanding.”

At the same time, the new technology of radio was developing. Bauer immediately grasped its educational potential, and she began giving presentations over the radio in 1927.

At a time when radio was bringing music into millions of American homes, Bauer was helping shape how those listeners understood the unfamiliar sounds of modernism.

Performances of her music on the radio were also common.

Her Later Compositions

Despite all of her pedagogical and literary activities, she didn’t stop composing.

She wrote increasingly large works in the 1940s, writing a Symphonic Suite for String Orchestra, a piano concerto, and a symphony, among other works.   

In 1947, the New York Philharmonic performed her symphonic poem Sun Splendor. It was only the second time that the orchestra had ever played a work by a woman.  

Her Final Years

Marion Bauer

She retired from teaching at New York University in 1951. She then received an honorary doctorate from the College of Music “for distinguished professional services and outstanding achievement in Music Education.” It would be the only formal degree she’d ever received.

On 6 August 1955, she attended a gathering of composing friends from the MacDowell Colony. Three days later, she died of a heart attack. She was seventy-two years old.

By the time of her death, she had shaped generations of composers and listeners alike – even if her own music would take decades to be rediscovered by the same institutions she helped build.

The Most Overtly Erotic Works in Classical Music

 by Emily E. Hogstad  May 28th, 2026

Western classical music is often thought of as cerebral or abstract, but throughout its history, composers have repeatedly been inspired by themes of desire, sensuality, and physical longing.

Because the overt depiction of sex was socially taboo during much of the genre’s history, eroticism in classical music has traditionally been relatively subtle. Rather, it tended to surface indirectly through the use of harmony, orchestral colour, rhythm, and the like.

But over time, composers became increasingly bold. By 1919, one avant-garde work for solo soprano was much more explicit than most pop music heard today.

Today, we’re looking at seven works that chart the evolution of the portrayal of eroticism in classical music: from sublimated longing to performative sensuality to outright explicitness.   

Few pieces in Western music history are as saturated with sheer erotic tension as the Prelude to his opera Tristan und Isolde.

At the time he was writing Tristan, Wagner was embroiled in an extramarital affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the wealthy patron who was supporting him.

Mathilde Wesendonck

That sexual tension seeped into the work. Here Wagner shies away from depicting sexual fulfilment; instead, he constructs, in painstaking fashion, an almost unbearable state of unresolved desire.

The opening harmony – the notorious “Tristan chord”, which became 19th-century shorthand for romantic pining — never resolves in a satisfying way.

Ludwig and Malwine Schnorr von Carolsfeld in the title roles of the original production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 1865.

Phrases tilt and yearn forward, dissolve, then begin again.

The end result is a musical experience of longing that feels more physical than almost all of the classical music that came before it.   

Debussy‘s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) was inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé‘s symbolist poem L’après-midi d’un faune.

In Mallarmé’s poem, the faun narrator awakes from an erotic dream, then drifts into very explicit daydreams. He toes the line between sleep, fantasy, and reality until it’s impossible to discern which one he feels most intensely.

Nadar: Stéphane Mallarmé, 1890

The famous opening flute solo in Debussy’s musical version of the story feels more like breathing than melody: languid, suspended, outside of the boundaries of traditional musical timekeeping.

From there, the music continues to avoid a clear pulse and a firm structure, instead unfolding in a series of sensuous gestures that suggest touch, heat, and longing.

This work quietly redefined what eroticism could sound like in the hands of a savvy orchestra.  

Debussy’s treatment of the Chansons de Bilitis is even more explicit than his setting of the story of the restless faun.

The lyrics came from a work by his friend, poet Pierre Louÿs. In 1894, he published a celebrated translation of newly discovered Sapphic works by Sappho’s contemporary, the courtesan Bilitis. It turned out that Bilitis was entirely his own invention and that Louÿs had been lying to readers about the poetry’s origins; nevertheless, he fooled some established scholars.

In the second of the three poems that Debussy set, the narrator’s lover describes in detail the night they spent together.

Last night I dreamed. I had your
tresses around my neck. I had your hair like a black
necklace all round my nape and over my breast.

And gradually it seemed to me, so intertwined
were our limbs, that I was becoming you, or you were
entering into me like a dream…

Debussy responds to the suggestive text with music that veers between extreme delicacy and wholehearted, demonstrative passion.   

Eroticism rarely appears in classical music as a marital or domestic experience, which is precisely what makes Richard Strauss‘s Symphonia domestica so striking.

Over the course of this 45-minute tone poem, Strauss depicts twenty-four hours of family life in lavish orchestral detail.

That includes the nighttime – and moments clearly intended to represent intimacy between spouses.

Richard Strauss

The music here is exuberant and occasionally almost embarrassingly personal. The melodies representing Strauss and his wife wind graphically around each other for about six or seven minutes; take from that what you will. (If you want to hear, the love scene begins around 19:20 in the performance above.)

Unlike works that associate eroticism with transgression or danger, Symphonia domestica presents physical intimacy as a joyful, deeply satisfying, even productive experience, central to the ordinary human experience. It was an unusually frank public stance for its time.   

Soon after depicting his own love life in music, Strauss turned to dramatising Oscar Wilde’s retelling of the Biblical story of the princess Salome, who uses her sexuality to bewitch the evil King Herod and order the head of the prophet John the Baptist on a platter.

If any single moment in classical music history up to this point qualifies as overtly erotic, it is Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils.

Oscar Wilde

Written as a striptease, the music luxuriates in excess: lush orchestration, swelling climaxes, and destabilising chromaticism. Here, desire becomes so intense that it becomes grotesque, blurring the line between arousal and horror.

And yet Strauss gave the rather bewildering instruction that the dance should be “thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat.” Perhaps he thought that all of the necessary eroticism was contained within the music itself, and that to add any more in the dance would be overkill.

Needless to say, not many productions have followed his advice. The dance and the opera ended up being explicit enough to provoke widespread outrage – and occasional censorship.

Ravel – Bacchanale from Daphnis et Chloé (1912)

Ravel‘s ballet Daphnis et Chloé culminates in a radiant Bacchanale that depicts erotic fulfillment as communal ecstasy.

Léon Bakst’s set design for Act 1 of “Daphnis et Chloe”, 1912

After a series of misadventures, the goatherd Daphnis falls in love with a shepherdess named Chloé. The couple represent rural purity and wholesomeness, and it takes them a long time to recognise their desires.

Finally, at the end of the ballet, after long stretches of anticipation and awakening, the music bursts into motion and rhythmic release as the couple celebrates conquering the obstacles that have kept them apart.

Maurice Ravel in 1925

Unlike Strauss’s Salome, this eroticism is not kitschy or corrosive. It is celebratory and even awe-struck, suffused with orchestral colour and intoxicating momentum.

In this retelling, sex is depicted as part of the natural world, aligned with feelings of light, joy, and triumph.

Schulhoff – Sonata Erotica (1919)   

Composer Erwin Schulhoff‘s Sonata erotica ends the tradition of euphemism in classical music entirely.

Written for a breathy female solo voice, the piece consists of exaggerated, notated vocalisations intended to mimic sexual sounds. Trust us: the result is more explicit than even most modern-day love scenes. (You certainly don’t want to listen to the performance above at work!)

Erwin Schulhoff

Schulhoff’s aim here is partly satirical – he’s mocking Romantic excess in music – but given the time period, the work is also clearly pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate, or even possible, for a musician to portray about sex on the concert stage.

Sonata erotica also marks a breaking point in the history of sex portrayed in classical music. After centuries of sublimation, Schulhoff finally brought into the open what the art had been suggestively circling, in one way or another, for hundreds of years.

Conclusion

Taken together, these works reveal how Western art music gradually moved from encoded longing to an open acknowledgement of lovemaking.

Even before Schulhoff, when sex could not be shown in any kind of overt way, it was heard through tension, instrumentation, rhythm, and more.

Eroticism has always existed in classical music; what changed over time was how openly composers were willing to depict it.

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