Dancing Bach’s St Matthew Passion

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Of all the famous compositions from the pen of Johann Sebastian Bach, the St John Passion and St Matthew Passion are truly some of the most remarkable masterpieces of religious music. Bach’s powerful settings detailing the last days of Christ’s life are retold by solo voices, double orchestra, and double chorus. The St. John Passion is more philosophical in nature, as the music explores the theological dimensions of the text. St. Matthew, on the other hand, is very close to an opera as it reflects on the events from the perspective of a humble faithful listener.

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion

In both works, the text is capable of telling the story all on its own, but Bach adds multiple layers of musical meaning that make it possible to enjoy the music on a number of levels. Bach’s music makes the text and the story come alive, and the compositional complexity and theological depth trigger a wide range of profound emotional responses.

As the Passions are sacred oratorios performed in churches and concert halls, they forgo some important visual elements associated with opera. There are no costumes or scenery, and there is no action. So what happens when one of the single greatest masterpieces of Western sacred music combines Bach’s powerful music and the passion narrative with spellbinding dance performances?John Neumeier

John Neumeier

Transforming the gospel into dance and expressing religious experiences and convictions, has been the life work of the American ballet dancer, choreographer, and director John Neumeier. After a career as a ballet dancer in the United States, Neumeier became director of the Frankfurt Ballet, and subsequently the chief choreographer at the Hamburg Ballet in 1973. He has choreographed more than 170 works, including many evening-length narrative ballets.

John Neumeier’s St. Matthew Passion

Neumeier premiered his St Matthew Passion as a medieval passion play in a Hamburg church before taking it to the Hamburg Opera House. Neumeier’s dancers, dressed in white, embody Bach’s human Passion, with the audience invited to physically and spiritually experience the drama of struggle and redemption. Each dancer expresses grief, doubt, and even aggression, which adds a powerful visual dimension and physical reality to the allegory. Neumeier focuses on the awe-inspiring complexity and universal appeal of Bach’s St Matthew Passion into a profoundly moving experience. 

Friederike Rademann

The German choral conductor and teacher Helmuth Rilling is best known for his performances of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries. He was the first conductor to have twice prepared and recorded the complete choral works of J. S. Bach on modern instruments. Rilling was a student of Leonard Bernstein in New York, and in 1954 he founded the internationally recognized Gächinger Kantorei, which joined forces with the Bach Collegium Stuttgart.

The Gächinger Kantorei is still the ensemble of the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, and it currently combines a baroque orchestra and a selected number of choristers. The ensemble is under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann, and his wife Friederike was a solo dancer at the Semperoper in Dresden. She has devoted herself to expressive dance and developed choreographies for a number of works by Chopin, Ravel, Schumann, and Bach, including the St. Matthew Passion. Her choreography includes the participation of one hundred schoolchildren, who connect and experience Bach’s monumental work as an artistic form of self-expression. 

Gloria Contreras

Gloria Contreras

Born in Mexico City, the dancer and choreographer Gloria Contreras was a student of George Balanchine. She taught choreography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and was director and founder of its choreography workshop. For Contreras, dancing was much more than just a profession, it is “a way of life that teaches a greater understanding of life itself.” Contreras adopted the neo-classical choreographic style of Balanchine, and utilized the music of Mexican composers in her work. However, she also left us a moving choreography of the St Matthew Passion.

Kamea Dance Company

The Passion settings of Bach continue to inspire contemporary ballet productions. One such interpretation, combining music with virtuosic dance movements, comes from the Kamea Dance Company from Be’er Sheva, in southern Israel and the choreographer Tamir Ginz. The title “Matthew Passion 2727” asks the question of what will have happened to this work 1000 years after its premiere in 1727, and what will happen on the way there. Ginz does not translate doctrines, world views, or political statements, but expresses universal human experiences such as suffering and envy, grief and betrayal.

Composer Galina Ustvolskaya: The Shostakovich-Trained Iconoclast

By Emily E. Hogstadt, Interlude

Composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) has been called “the lady with the hammer” and is known for her connection to Dmitri Shostakovich.

Galina Ustvolskaya and her dog

But she was so much more than this. She was also fiercely independent, staggeringly talented, and completely unafraid. She not only refused to fit in a musical mold but threw out that mold entirely.

Today, we’re taking a look at the life and times of Soviet composer Galina Ustvolskaya.

Ustvolskaya’s Childhood

Galina Ustvolskaya was born on 17 June 1919 in Petrograd to an unmusical family. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother was a teacher from impoverished nobility.

Her childhood was lonely and full of financial pressures.

“I would wear an old coat of my father’s (which was too long for me) and his muffler, which I gave to a young friend. I loved to give gifts, although we did not have anything to spare. Since childhood, I could not tolerate these kinds of pressures.”

Her desire for financial security would later impact her career choices.

She loved music deeply from an early age. When she was young, her parents took her to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, but the family had to leave when she started crying. “I want to be an orchestra,” she told them.

Time with Shostakovich

Ustvolskaya studied at a school for young people associated with the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1939, when she turned twenty, she joined Dmitri Shostakovich’s composition class. That year, she was the only woman in that class.

Shostakovich was intrigued by her and in awe of her talent. “I am convinced that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will achieve world fame and be valued by all who hold truth to be the essential element of music,” he wrote once. He also said, “It is not you who are under my influence, but I who am under yours.”

He valued her opinion so much that he asked for her feedback on his own compositions. He also used a theme from her clarinet trio in his fifth string quartet (from 1952) and his Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti (from 1974, toward the very end of his life). 

Ustvolskaya studied in his class twice – once from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1947 to 1948. That six-year break coincided with the war, as well as the devastating two-and-a-half-year siege of Leningrad.

A month into the siege of Leningrad, Shostakovich was evacuated to Moscow and Ustvolskaya to Tashkent, the current-day capital of Uzbekistan, along with others linked to the Conservatory. In 1943, she worked in a hospital in the city of Tikhvin, two hundred kilometers from St. Petersburg.

Galina Ustvolskaya

She later made it very clear that she was not keen on an association with Shostakovich. She called his music “dry and lifeless” and wrote to her publisher, “One thing remains as clear as day: a seemingly eminent figure such as Shostakovich, to me, is not eminent at all, on the contrary, he burdened my life and killed my best feelings.”

Her distaste for him may have been rooted in extra-musical reasons. She later claimed that Shostakovich proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down.

Later, she went even further: “There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead,” she once proclaimed. 

Ustvolskaya and Soviet Propaganda

From 1947 to 1977, she taught composition at the Leningrad Conservatory. She didn’t think of herself as a particularly talented professor – composition was her true calling – but teaching was a way to make a living.

In February 1948, a resolution went out from the Soviet government, accusing some composers of Formalism (i.e., failing to compose music that fully supported the state).

After this, she split her creative self into two parts. One composed propaganda pieces acceptable to Soviet leadership, while the other wrote secret avant-garde works that she knew might never be heard. 

Writing music to please the authorities was soul-destroying, but she was apparently very good at it. Her tone poem Stepan Razin’s Dream opened the Leningrad Philharmonic’s 1949 season, to acclaim. She was even nominated for the Stalin Prize.

However, in 1962, she hit her limit. From that time on, she vowed to only write what she truly wanted to write, and she worked to destroy all traces of everything she ever wrote for political reasons.

Fortunately, later in the century, the Soviet Union started being easier on modernist composers, and allowing them to share some of their more controversial music. Ustvolskaya slowly began sharing some of the music she’d been keeping hidden.

Ustvolskaya’s Later Years

Galina Ustvolskaya

By the 1970s the Leningrad Union of Composers began presenting evenings of her music, and critics were impressed.

Her music has several distinguishing features, including extreme dynamics, unusual instrumentation, and brutal and relentless repetition.

The website Ustvolskaya.org writes, “Ustvolskaya’s music is unique, unlike anything else; it is exceedingly expressive, brave, austere, and full of tragic pathos achieved through the most modest of expressive means.” 

Unfortunately, for years, hardly anybody outside the Soviet Union heard it. But in 1989 her work was performed at the Holland Festival, and it made a big impression on audiences.

She was living as a bit of a hermit by the 1990s, but she traveled to Amsterdam to watch performances of her work. Although she hated interviews, she agreed to one with journalist Thea Derk. But when the time for the interview came, she nearly backed out, and only agreed to partake after she was assured she could answer questions with monosyllables, without elaboration. (Luckily, Derk was able to get more than that out of her.)

She was asked how she liked the performance she’d heard. “Not very much,” she said bluntly. She elaborated: “The acoustics were not favourable, so that the piano didn’t come out properly, and the five double basses should have been placed more to the front. Moreover, the ensemble, recruited more or less ad hoc from members of the Concertgebouw orchestra, hadn’t as yet properly mastered the score, and the reciter wasn’t adequately amplified. But yesterday it was better and I hope it will again be better tonight.”

Ustvolskaya’s Death and Legacy

A perfectionist iconoclast to the end, Galina Ustvolskaya died in 2006 in St. Petersburg. She was eighty-seven years old.

In 1998 she gave a description of her life to an interviewer that serves as a kind of thesis statement about her music:

“The works written by me were often hidden for long periods. But then if they did not satisfy me, I destroyed them. I do not have drafts; I compose at the table, without an instrument. Everything is thought out with such care that it only needs to be written down. I’m always in my thoughts. I spend the nights thinking as well, and therefore do not have time to relax. Thoughts gnaw me. My world possesses me completely, and I understand everything in my own way. I hear, I see, and I act differently from others. I just live my lonely life.”

Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912): The Father of Ukrainian Music

By Georg Predota, Interlude 

Mykola Lysenko

The political conditions in 19th century Europe spawned a rapid growth of Nationalism and Patriotism across the continent. “The pride of conquering nations and the struggle for freedom of suppressed ones gave rise to strong emotions that inspired the works of many creative artists.” We are well aware of countless composers working within this forceful stream of romanticism, ranging from Smetana and Dvořák in the Czech Lands, Edvard Grieg in Norway, Jean Sibelius in Finland, Elgar and Delius in England, Albeniz, Granados and Falla in Spain, and a whole Russian national school established by Mikhail Glinka.

Mykola Lysenko, 1869

As in many other parts of Europe, the emergence of a national spirit in Ukraine resulted in a movement that cultivated popular Ukrainian culture. At the head of this Ukrainian movement for national musical identity we find Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), widely considered the father of Ukrainian Music. “Beyond providing the inspiration for a national compositional school and founding numerous choirs across the proto-Ukrainian countryside, he is also a national hero whose music academy in Kyiv was a hub for intellectuals, poets and musicians.” Lysenko composed his patriotic hymn in 1885, during a period when Ukrainian culture and language was once again suppressed by the government of Imperial Russia.

Mykola Lysenko: “Prayer for Ukraine” 

Lord, O the Great and Almighty,
Protect our beloved Ukraine,
Bless her with freedom and light
Of your holy rays.

With learning and knowledge enlighten
Us, your children small,
In love pure and everlasting
Let us, O Lord, grow.

We pray, O Lord Almighty,
Protect our beloved Ukraine,
Grant our people and country
All your kindness and grace.

Bless us with freedom, bless us with wisdom,
Guide into kind world,
Bless us, O Lord, with good fortune
Forever and evermore.

Mykola Lysenko among the Ukrainian civic leaders in Kharkiv

Ukraine has long struggled for independence, with the borders shifting countless time as different conquerors fought over a land rich in natural resource and culture. A short-lived revolution in 1919 was brutally suppressed and the Soviet occupation inflicted one tragedy after another on the Ukrainian people. During the famine of the 1930s, millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death because of the criminal policies of Joseph Stalin. We must add “the Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine, when the Final Solution was first implemented in cities whose wealth and cultural standing depended entirely on the vast Jewish population – cities like Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk; the deportation of the Hutsul people in the 1930s and the deportations of the Crimean Tatar population from the beautiful Crimean peninsula, at the command of various Russian heads of state, starting with the Tsars, repeated under Stalin and then once again in 2014 after the Russian occupation. And we all know about the atrocities being committed under Vladimir Putin right now. 

Lysenko’s music score

Lysenko was born in Hrymky, a village near the Dnipro River between Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk. He came from an old aristocratic family, tracing his lineage back to the Cossacks of the 17th century. Received his rudimentary musical education from his mother, he left for boarding schools in Kyiv and then Karkiv, and he took piano lessons with Panochini and studied theory with Nejnkevič. From 1860 Lysenko studied at Kharkiv University and Kyiv University, joining a number of Ukrainian student societies and church choirs. Ukrainian folk music became his passion, and he began “his life-long ethnographical work of collecting and studying Ukrainian folksong.” Earlier, as a child, he had been deeply impressed by the music of peasant singing, and his nationalist sympathies were greatly stimulated by a volume of poetry by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko. Lysenko had been given this volume of Shevchenko’s poetry by his grandfather, and his imagination was fired by words of freedom for the oppressed, especially Ukrainians. A prophetic figure in the Ukrainian Enlightenment, Shevchenko expressed the plight of the Ukrainian people in poetry in the early eighteenth century and “even today holds the status of national hero, as a symbol of the spirit of resistance.” When Shevchenko’s body was brought to Ukraine after his death in 1861, Lysenko, at the age of 19, was a pallbearer at the poet’s funeral. 

Mykola Lysenko with teachers of Lysenko Music and Drama School

After graduating in 1865 with a degree in natural science, Lysenko entered the civil service as an arbitrator in land-ownership claims for former serfs, but two years later this particular job was made redundant. As such, he was looking to further his musical studies and he attended the Leipzig Conservatoire, with his most prominent teachers including Ferdinand David, Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Reinecke and Ernst Wenzel. In Leipzig, Lysenko began to fully understand the importance of “collection, developing, and creating Ukrainian music rather than duplicating the work of Western classical composers.” In fact, he was determined to establish a Ukrainian national school of music, and to best express his fervent patriotic and political ideals through music. He returned to Kyiv in 1869 to work as a music teacher and conductor, and continued to collect, publish and study folk music. After taking orchestration lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg between 1874 and 1876, Lysenko returned to Kyiv and was active as a private teacher before opening his own school of music and drama in 1904.

Mykola Lysenko, 1900s

Being a descendant of the 17th century Cossack leader Vovgura Lys, the story of “Taras Bulba” held special significance for Lysenko. The story of this romanticized historical novella by Nikolai Gogol featuring Taras Bulba and his two sons Andriy and Ostap going to war against Poland. Taras is eventually captured, nailed and tied to a tree and set aflame. Even in this state he calls out to his men to continue the fight. Lysenko worked on his opera Taras Bulba during 1880-1891, but it was his insistence on the use of Ukrainian for performance that prevented any productions during his lifetime. He steadfastly refused to allow the opera to be translated. He did play the score to Tchaikovsky, who reportedly “listened to the whole opera with rapt attention, from time to time voicing approval and admiration. He particularly liked the passages in which national Ukrainian touches were most vivid… Tchaikovsky embraced Lysenko and congratulated him on his talented composition.” As modern critic wrote, “The opera marks a great advance on the composer’s earlier works with its folklore and nationalistic elements being much more closely integrated in a continuous musical framework which also clearly shows a debt to Tchaikovsky. But the episodic nature of the libretto, which may be due to some extent to political considerations during its revision in the Soviet era is still a serious problem. 

Grave of Mykola Lysenko

During his lifetime, Lysenko arranged roughly 500 folk songs, including both solos and choruses with piano accompaniment, and a-capella choruses. Focusing on the tonal and harmonic characteristics of Ukrainian folk songs, he “fashioned arrangement of various types of songs based on a specific Ukrainian cultural tradition.” In fact, Lysenko was adamant to clearly demonstrate the differences between the folk music of the Ukraine and that of Russia. He had been drawn to musical folklore from an early age, and made the first musical-ethnographic studies on the blind kobzar—an itinerant Ukrainian bard singing to his own accompaniment and playing a multi-stringed bandaura of kobza—Ostap Veresai in 1873. He expanded his research into other regions, and his ethno-musicological projects included a monograph on Ukrainian folk music instruments. In addition, Lysenko wrote over 120 art songs to lyrics of Taras Shevchenko as well as Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Heinrich Heine, Oleksandr Oles, Adam Mickiewicz and others. A compilation of Lysenko’s works was published in 20 volumes in Kyiv between 1950 and 1959. 

Mykola Lysenko monument

Lysenko was a capable concert pianist, and among his numerous compositions for the piano we find a sonata, two rhapsodies, a suite, a scherzo, and a rondo alongside a long list of smaller forms such as Songs without Words, nocturnes, waltzes, and polonaises. In these works he often uses the melodies and rhythms of Ukrainian folk songs, imbued with the musical style and spirit of Frédéric Chopin. Mykola Lysenko is acknowledged as the founding father of Ukrainian music, and during his lifetime he was at the center of Ukrainian cultural and musical life in Kyiv. He gave piano recitals and organized choirs for performances in Kyiv and tours through Ukraine in 1893, 1897, 1899, and 1902. On the occasion of a celebration marking 35 years as a composer, funds were raised that enabled him to open a Ukrainian School of Music “in opposition to the Russian Musical Society’s school in Kiev.” Lysenko inspired countless young Ukrainian musical minds, and his daughter Mariana followed in her father’s footsteps as a pianist, and his son Ostap also taught music in Kyiv.

Charlie Chaplin: The Fiddle and the Tramp

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Did you know that Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977), probably the most famous and most important actor in the silent film era, was a committed amateur violinist who also composed a number of his film scores? Long before Chaplin contemplated an acting career, he turned to music to escape the abject poverty of his youth. Charlie grew up in the London district of Kennington with his mother, who had no means of income. As a result, the young lad was twice sent to the Central London District School for paupers. When his mother was committed to a mental asylum, Charles and his brother were sent to live with their estranged father. Charles Sr. was a severe alcoholic who died at age 38 from cirrhosis of the liver.

Charlie Chaplin in The Vagabond, 1916 © Limelight Magazine

Given the dismal state of his upbringing, it is not surprising that Chaplin was looking for a way out. And initially, Chaplin turned to music. “I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act,“ he writes. “Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left-handed with the bass-bar and sounding post reversed.” Practicing his violin from between four to six hours a day, and combining it with his acting talents, Chaplin had become a rising talent in the English music hall by age 16. And soon his fortune changed as the prestigious Fred Karno Company signed him to an extended contract. On his second American tour, Chaplin was scouted for the film industry and began appearing for Keystone Studios in 1914. For his second camera appearance, Chaplin selected the “Tramp” costume with which he became identified, and by 1926 he was a global phenomenon.

Despite an insanely busy filming schedule, Chaplin always found time to play the violin. A press release of 1917 suggested, “Every spare moment away from the studio is devoted to this instrument. He does not play from notes excepting in a very few instances. He can run through selections of popular operas by ear and if in the humor, can rattle off the famous Irish jig or some negro selection with the ease of a vaudeville entertainer. Chaplin admits that as a violinist he is no Kubelik or Elman but he hopes, nevertheless, to play in concerts some day before very long.” Chaplin’s ambitions to appear on the concert stage seem to have cooled by 1921, as he suggested in an interview. “I used to play my violin a great deal up to a couple of years ago, but since then I’ve hardly touched it. I simply have lost interest in such things.” Maybe realizing that he could not seriously compete on the concert stage, Chaplin turned his attention to writing film music.

Charlie Chaplin: Smile 

Chaplin had always been interested in composing, and he even started a music publishing company in 1916. Although this venture was not successful, he composed all his scores to motion pictures starting with City Lights in 1931. Since he was not a professional musician, he needed help in creating his scores. Chaplin would sing or play his tunes to the composers Davie Raksin, Raymond Rasch or Eric James, who would further develop and score the tunes. Chaplin composed three hit songs, among them “Smile” written for Modern Times in 1936. Impressively, Chaplin also received an Oscar for his theme to Limelight, awarded “Best Original Score” in 1973. As for his violin performances, Chaplin played twice on screen. In The Vagabond of 1916 he uses his violin to seduce a gypsy girl, and in the autobiographical Limelight of 1952, he played a faded music-hall star. Chaplin was a close friend of Jascha Heifetz, and at a party Heifetz picked up Chaplin’s violin and was unable to play it. Chaplin took the instrument and played some Bach, remarking, “You see! I am made inside out and upside down. When I turn my back on you on the screen you are looking at something as expressive as a face.”

Charlie Chaplin: The Fiddle and the Tramp

By Georg Predota, Interlude

Did you know that Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977), probably the most famous and most important actor in the silent film era, was a committed amateur violinist who also composed a number of his film scores? Long before Chaplin contemplated an acting career, he turned to music to escape the abject poverty of his youth. Charlie grew up in the London district of Kennington with his mother, who had no means of income. As a result, the young lad was twice sent to the Central London District School for paupers. When his mother was committed to a mental asylum, Charles and his brother were sent to live with their estranged father. Charles Sr. was a severe alcoholic who died at age 38 from cirrhosis of the liver.

Charlie Chaplin in The Vagabond, 1916 © Limelight Magazine

Given the dismal state of his upbringing, it is not surprising that Chaplin was looking for a way out. And initially, Chaplin turned to music. “I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act,“ he writes. “Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left-handed with the bass-bar and sounding post reversed.” Practicing his violin from between four to six hours a day, and combining it with his acting talents, Chaplin had become a rising talent in the English music hall by age 16. And soon his fortune changed as the prestigious Fred Karno Company signed him to an extended contract. On his second American tour, Chaplin was scouted for the film industry and began appearing for Keystone Studios in 1914. For his second camera appearance, Chaplin selected the “Tramp” costume with which he became identified, and by 1926 he was a global phenomenon.

Despite an insanely busy filming schedule, Chaplin always found time to play the violin. A press release of 1917 suggested, “Every spare moment away from the studio is devoted to this instrument. He does not play from notes excepting in a very few instances. He can run through selections of popular operas by ear and if in the humor, can rattle off the famous Irish jig or some negro selection with the ease of a vaudeville entertainer. Chaplin admits that as a violinist he is no Kubelik or Elman but he hopes, nevertheless, to play in concerts some day before very long.” Chaplin’s ambitions to appear on the concert stage seem to have cooled by 1921, as he suggested in an interview. “I used to play my violin a great deal up to a couple of years ago, but since then I’ve hardly touched it. I simply have lost interest in such things.” Maybe realizing that he could not seriously compete on the concert stage, Chaplin turned his attention to writing film music. y

Chaplin had always been interested in composing, and he even started a music publishing company in 1916. Although this venture was not successful, he composed all his scores to motion pictures starting with City Lights in 1931. Since he was not a professional musician, he needed help in creating his scores. Chaplin would sing or play his tunes to the composers Davie Raksin, Raymond Rasch or Eric James, who would further develop and score the tunes. Chaplin composed three hit songs, among them “Smile” written for Modern Times in 1936. Impressively, Chaplin also received an Oscar for his theme to Limelight, awarded “Best Original Score” in 1973. As for his violin performances, Chaplin played twice on screen. In The Vagabond of 1916 he uses his violin to seduce a gypsy girl, and in the autobiographical Limelight of 1952, he played a faded music-hall star. Chaplin was a close friend of Jascha Heifetz, and at a party Heifetz picked up Chaplin’s violin and was unable to play it. Chaplin took the instrument and played some Bach, remarking, “You see! I am made inside out and upside down. When I turn my back on you on the screen you are looking at something as expressive as a face.”

Eight of the Greatest American Women Composers

By Emily F. Hogstadt, Interlude

The history of American classical music is dominated by names like Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, and others.

However, not all of the composers who contributed to American classical music have been men! On the contrary, many of the best composers in American history have been women.

Today we’re looking at the lives and work of eight American women composers.

Amy Beach (1867-1944)

Amy Beach is widely considered to be the first major American woman composer.

Amy Beach

She was born Amy Cheney in 1867 in New Hampshire. From the beginning, it was clear she was a prodigy. At the age of just four, she composed waltzes in her head while out of the house, then returned home to play them on piano.

She began formal piano lessons with her mother at the age of six. A couple of years later, her family moved to suburban Boston. At fourteen, she briefly studied harmony and counterpoint. This would be her only formal compositional training.

She made a brilliant orchestral debut at 16. But two years later, in 1885, her performing career came to a halt when she married a doctor named H. H. A. Beach, who was twenty-four years her senior.

A condition of the marriage was that she could only perform in public twice a year, and she had to donate any money she earned to charity. Because of this, she began gravitating toward composition.

In 1892, she had her Mass in E-flat Major premiered at the Handel and Haydn Society.

Four years later, the Boston Symphony premiered her Gaelic Symphony, marking the first time a major American orchestra had played a symphony by a woman.

Four years after that, the Boston Symphony premiered her piano concerto.

In 1910, she was widowed, a change in circumstance that granted her freedom to pursue a performing career.

Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867-1972) 

Margaret Ruthven Lang was born in Boston to musical parents. Her father was a conductor, pianist, and composer and ensured that she had a good musical education.

In 1886, she went to Munich to study violin. After she returned to America, she studied composition with professors from the New England Conservatory of Music.

Margaret Ruthven Lang

In 1893, the Boston Symphony premiered her Dramatic Overture, marking the first time a major American orchestra had played a woman’s work. (It just barely beat out Beach’s Gaelic Symphony.)

Sadly, Lang had fierce self-doubts and destroyed many of her manuscripts. It seems likely that her orchestral works were among these.

After her father’s death in 1909, she became less involved with music and more interested in religion, becoming a devoted Episcopalian. Her final work, Three Pianoforte Pieces for Young Players, was published in 1919.

However, she lived for decades more and ended up setting a patron record at the Boston Symphony, having been a subscriber there for 91 consecutive years. She died just short of her 105th birthday.

Florence Price (1887-1953) 

Florence Price was born to a Black family in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher.

From an early age her musical talent was apparent. She gave her first public piano performance at the age of four, and she had her first piece published when she was eleven.

Florence Price © University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections

She graduated from high school at the age of fourteen and then enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music.

After graduation in 1910, she returned to Little Rock to teach and start a family. She married a lawyer named Thomas J. Price in 1912 and had three children with him.

To escape the ever-present domestic terrorism of the Jim Crow era, the family moved to Chicago in 1927. Surrounded by the artists that made up the Chicago Black Renaissance, Price returned to her musical career.

She also made a big life change when she divorced in 1931. She remarried the same year to an insurance agent named Pusey Dell Arnett, but the relationship fizzled out. During this time of transition, to make ends meet, she played organ at movie theaters and roomed with friends.

In 1932, her hard work paid off when she won the Wanamaker Foundation Award for her Symphony in E-minor. The following year, the Chicago Symphony performed the symphony, making it the first time a Black woman had seen her work played by a major American orchestra.

Florence Price died in 1953 of a stroke. She has been experiencing a revival over the past few years in America as audiences are rediscovering her charming, deeply moving work.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger was born in Ohio in 1901. Her minister father died young and her mother was forced to open a boarding house to make up for the loss of his income.

In 1907 she began piano lessons, and after high school, she settled on a musical career.

In 1921 she moved to Chicago and began attending the American Conservatory of Music. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees there between 1921 and 1929.

After her graduation, she became the first woman composer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. She used the money to study in Paris and Berlin.

In 1932 she married her composition teacher, Charles Seeger, who was fifteen years her senior. From 1933 to 1943 she had four children with him.

Her most famous works date from between 1930 and 1933, when she was writing fearlessly modernist works that embrace dissonance and serial techniques.

She died of intestinal cancer in 1953.

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) 

Margaret Bonds was born Margaret Majors in Chicago. Her parents were a Black doctor and his church musician wife, who divorced when she was four. She took her mother’s maiden name and became known as Margaret Bonds.

Margaret was a prodigiously gifted child who wrote her first piece of music at the age of five. In high school, she studied composition with Florence Price and William Dawson.

Margaret Bonds

In 1929, when she was sixteen, she began studying at Northwestern University, where she earned her master’s degrees in piano and composition. The atmosphere at the school was deeply racist and difficult for her to endure.

While at Northwestern, in 1933, she soloed with the Chicago Symphony, becoming the first Black person to ever do so.

In 1939, with her degrees from Northwestern in hand, she moved to New York City to go to Juilliard. She married a probation officer in New York in 1940.

Bonds was good friends with poet Langston Hughes and they collaborated on a variety of creative projects over the years.

She also spent time creating projects that would uplift Black artists and the wider community.

In 1964 she composed one of her most ambitious works, the Montgomery Variations, which graphically portrayed the violence and resilience of the 1960s civil rights movement. She dedicated the work to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1966, she moved to Los Angeles, where she died in 1972.

Julia Perry (1924-1979) 

Julia Perry was raised in Kentucky and Ohio.

She studied voice, piano, and composition at Westminster Choir College. She continued her postgraduate studies at the Berkshire Music Center and Juilliard.

Julia Perry

In 1952 she traveled to Paris to study with legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. She spent a little over five years in Europe, then returned to America, where she became a teacher herself.

She preferred to write for voice, and wrote several incredible works in vocal genres, including her Stabat Mater. But she also wrote great works for instrumental ensembles, too, including twelve symphonies, two piano concertos, and a violin concerto.

At the time of her death she was working on an opera, which remains unfinished.

Jennifer Higdon (1962-) 

Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a painter and his wife, and raised in Georgia and Tennessee.

She didn’t listen to much classical music as a child, and only began playing an instrument in high school, when she started learning percussion and flute.

Jennifer Higdon

She attended Bowling Green State University for flute performance and began studying composition there. She later earned her master’s degree and PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied under George Crumb.

In 1994 she became a professor at the Curtis Institute of Music, the most selective music school in America.

Her compositional style is tonal and accessible; it’s sometimes called neoromantic. Her music has received popular and critical acclaim. She has won three Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (they were awarded for her percussion concerto, viola concerto, and harp concerto). In 2010 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Jessie Montgomery (1981-) 

Jessie Montgomery was born to a composer and a playwright in New York City in 1982. She earned her bachelor’s degree in violin performance from Juilliard, and her master’s degree in film and media composition from New York University.

She values diversity, arts education, accessibility, and uses her music to engage with ideas and issues surrounding equity and social justice.

Jessie Montgomery

Her work blends all kinds of musical influences from all around the world, including countries like Mexico, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, and genres like swing, samba, and even techo.

In 2021, she was named the Chicago Symphony Composer-In-Residence.

Today she is one of the most frequently performed new music composers in America.