On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On music Women of Notes By John Simon WHY ARE THERE SO fewwomen composers of note? Have there not been through the ages more accomplished women than men on the piano, harpsichord,...
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...The purpose, function, and nonprofit slatus orthis orgamzaQon and the exempt status for Federal income tas purposes has noi changed during preceding 12 months 13...
...Most impressive are "The Tiger," on the Blake poem, with which Clarke tinkered till the end of her life...
...The greatest difference between them was in their music...
...7.045 No copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale...
...12 Tax Status: For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized io mail at special rates...
...Our second pioneer female composer is the very attractive Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979...
...It is dark, like the song, where night, representing death, overwhelms the dusk...
...Her family could not afford to send her abroad, so she received what little formal training she had in Boston, where the Cheneys had moved...
...Beach, harking back to Wagner and Brahms, composed rather conservatively in all genres...
...Two— as prescribed anonymous—compositions deadlocked the six-member jury...
...Once again Inuit themes are used, along with recastings of some Beach art songs that include one on a text by Heinrich Heine...
...60), 11 of them...
...This is a work of great dignity and restraint, with a piquant component of mild dissonance...
...She particularly admired Ernest Bloch (The Daily Telegraph once speculated that "Rebecca Clarke" was a pseudonym of Bloch's), but she composed only songs, chambermusic and a few choral pieces, not symphonies and operas...
...A brisk Finale concludes the suite...
...New York 10OO1 7B Contaci Person ? Shapiro Telephone- 212-807-8240 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher (noi printer...
...The third work is the late Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (op...
...That and ITS companion, "Hermit Thrush at Mora," are two of the glories of Virginia Eskin's recital of Beach piano music (Koch International 7254...
...Give Me Not Love" (op...
...If ever music sounded thoughtfully circumspect, this is it...
...Issue Date for Circulât!on Data Below September/October 2001 15...
...In the piece's central slow section, the flute achieves a melancholy grandeur not usually in the compass of that lightsome instrument...
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...Additional nature sketches of delicate lyricism are the scherzino "A Peterborough Chipmunk,' "Young Birches" and the enchanting "A Humming Bird" (all op...
...She performed all over the world, sometimes with such luminaries as Casals, Rubinstein, Thibaud, Heifetz, and Myra Hess...
...Beach's middle period is represented here by the one-movement Quartet for Strings (op...
...Like the Piano Concerto, it is in a dark key and shuttles between the elegiac and the rebellious, but always with a melodic richness that is as much Beachian as Brahmsian...
...Clarke quarreled with her father, who kept bringing his female conquests to the family home, was thrown out and disowned by him, could no longer afford to study, and by her mid-20s had to make it on her own...
...Some of these songs are seductively beautiful, such as "Sly One" on a text by Yeats, and "Tears" by Anonymous...
...45) of 1900...
...For this piece Beach borrowed three Eskimo melodies, showing once again her internationalism...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 1,465...
...The last movement, Allegro con fuoco, does however reveal intense emotion elegantly controlled, with Diane Pascal's violin by turns forceful and mellow...
...3. Filing Date: September 30, 2001 4. Frequency of issue...
...Block persuasively detects an autobiographical scenario, with the piano part representing Amy, and the orchestra her restrictive mother and husband...
...Shortly thereafter the 18-year-old married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a 43-year-old doctor who had treated her hand...
...copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months, S30 No copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale, 635...
...copies each issue durmg preceding 12 monihs, 925 No copies of single issue published nearesl to filing dale...
...11 Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I per cent or more of total amouni of bonds, mortgages or other securities· None...
...Or Owner Barbara Shapiro, Business Manager...
...A. Beach, her breakthrough pieces were the Grand Mass in E flat (op...
...In it, the father is burying his daughter, symbolizing Henry's repression of Amy's wish to concertize...
...From start to finish, the soloist and orchestra are vying with each other...
...There are two other lullabies, of 1909 and 1918, respectively, one youthfully, the other maturely, enchanting, but both unpublished...
...1), dedicated to Henry, who wrote the words...
...the gifted Clara Schumann (1819-1896) deferred to her husband, Robert...
...Sure enough, when the Boston Symphony revived the concerto in 1917, again with Beach as soloist, it was a resounding success...
...The septuagenarian composer is at the summit of her powers, youthful melodiousness balanced by ripe sobriety...
...61) is a pretty enough duet...
...The four-movement Sonata in A minor for piano and violin (op...
...Whereas Beach was monogamous, Clarke seems to have had a checkered sexual career, including a long and wrenching affair with the married singer John Goss...
...12,250...
...New York, New York 10001...
...Furthermore: Beach was largely self-taught...
...Unlike Beach, too, in marriage she gave up composing for her remaining 35 years, although like Beach, she lived out her later life in America...
...The opening Allegro moderato contains some of the most ingratiating music Beach ever wrote: The Scherzo, a perpetuum mobile turning into a vivace, is sprightly and thrilling (Mother's impact was clearly a dazzling one), but it leads into that gloomy Largo, nonetheless comprising snatches of memorable melody...
...In England, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy and Judith Weir carved out reputations...
...No copies of single issue published nearesl to filing date...
...Amy Mercy Cheney (1867-1944) was bom in West Henniker, New Hampshire, a piano prodigy and budding composer by age four...
...The sonata begins with an Impetuoso of a wonderfully yearning, nostalgic quality...
...America Joan Tower and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich...
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...and "The Aspidistra," to a satirical poem by Claude Flight, where the very music mocks Victorian proprieties...
...Even much, much later, the talented Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) receded behind her brother, Felix...
...There is a stark, lean quality to the music, as Adrienne Fried Block, the leading Beach expert, observes, with emphasis on dissonant harmonics and contrapuntal texture...
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...It exudes that self-contained melancholy that is a frequent Clarke trait, before trailing off in a wistful diminuendo...
...Enchanting, too, is the very moving "Epilogue" (1921), initially written for violin, then reworked for cello and piano...
...the words are by Henry but it is dedicated to Amy's mother...
...The second movement, Scherzo, quotes from another Beach art song, "Empress of Night" (op...
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...He permitted her one or two charity concerts a year: For the rest, she was to stay home and compose...
...So the concert pianist's loss became the composer's gain...
...The older and envious British composer Ethel Smyth attributed her success to her sexual hold over men...
...Beach had a domineering mother...
...But they were intended to be amateurs practicing a feminine skill they would use to entertain polite company, impress eligible bachelors, and eventually instruct their own children...
...The next must-disc is the already noted ASV 932...
...Her parents reluctantly allowed her to make her debut as a concert performer at age 16, and critics declared her "plainly a pianist to the manor born and bred...
...Shelley Applelon, President, 275 Seventh Avenue...
...Scribbling a poem or novel, drawing or painting, were genteel pursuits easily fitted in between women's household chores...
...On the CD, it is performed by Joanne Polk and the English Chamber Orchestra under Paul Goodwin...
...The final movement, Adagio-Agitato, picks up themes from the two preceding it in a magisterial development section, and ranges through just about every known emotion before coming to an abrupt, forceful conclusion...
...copies of single issue published nearest to Tiling date, 1,805 3 Sales Through Dealers and Carriers...
...the third, Allegro vigoroso, fluctuates between swirling percussiveness and understated introspection...
...Russia gave us Sofia Gubaidulina and Galina Ustvolskaia...
...as thai of each individual owner If Ihe publication is published by a nonprofit organization, give its name and address...
...No copies of single issue published nearest lo filing dale, 11.240...
...Among the other offerings, "Scottish Legend" displays Beach's ability to also invent an ethnic melody...
...The Finale, marked Allegro con scioltezza (i.e., with fluency, freedom of motion) is the happy resolution, despite a lento section that briefly recalls the sadness of the third movement...
...Anticipating the practice of Olivier Messiaen, she took down the bird's song and played it back on the piano...
...But even in these tuneful Romantic works a certain astringency peeps through, and is quite pronounced in the Prelude, Allegro & Pastorale (1941), for the unusual combination of clarinet and viola, and the same year's Passacaglia on an Old English Tune, for cello and piano...
...32) of 1896...
...And to think that the great Grove Dictionary had no entry on Clarke until its 2001 edition, that the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music ignores her completely, and that Tower Records, though it stocks some of her discs, does not have her in the computer where customers can search out what is available...
...The same disc offers the most moving—and certainly the most popular— chamber work by Beach, the 1907 Piano Quintet in F sharp minor (op...
...And once having learned them, why would they use them differently, or less well than men...
...Good as the Bloch Suite for Viola is, I would have cast my tiebreaking vote for Clarke...
...685 No copies of single issue published to nearesl filing date, 495 c Free Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means) Average number of copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months, 145...
...Though transformations of the Inuit material bend its character, sufficient local color remains...
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...Beach married early, was made to concentrate on composing, and took in her widowed mother...
...Eskin is a sensitive pianist, as becomes clear with the very first work, the early and deliriously lilting Ballad in D flat (op...
...40): the doleful "La Captiva," tender "Berceuse" and frolicsome "Mazurka...
...From the same period as the Quartet comes Theme and Variations (op...
...The "Hermit Thrush" pieces were written at the MacDowell Colony, where Beach would compose sitting on the porch facing the woods, and where of an evening a hermit thrush serenaded her...
...A Pproach Clarke first by Midsummer Moon, a superb recording from Dutton Laboratories (Dutton 7105) that serves up a cross section through her sundry short items...
...Two years later, she played a Chopin concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra to great acclaim...
...H.H.A...
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...Chinese Puzzle" (1921) manages to evoke an Oriental atmosphere in just 72 seconds, and "Grotesque" is as spiky as its companion viola-andpiano piece, "Lullaby" (1917), is gentle...
...A family photograph of the four Clarke siblings and their parents shows six grimly unsmiling people...
...Now the late Romantic mode has yielded in part to the 1920s modern style, featuring a good bit of dissonance...
...New York, New York ??0?1...
...10,225 d Free Distribution by Mail (Samples, complimentary, and other free) (I I Outside-County as Slated on Form 3541: (2| ln-County as Staled on Form 3541 (3) OtherClasses Mailed Through the USPS...
...Let us hope that more Beach will soon be recorded and performed...
...Born in Harrow of a German mother and transplanted American father, she grew up British...
...France produced Cécile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger and Germaine Tailleferre...
...But Mrs...
...The men's world of professional music was pretty much a club closed to women...
...In later life she reverted to "Amy Beach," then back again to "Mrs...
...11325 No copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 10.860...
...Editor Myron Kclatch, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 19001...
...150), a 1938 reworking of some old material—a process Beach described in her diary as "great fun...
...Her husband, like her mother, did not think it seemly for Amy to be a public performer...
...34) is an excellent example of the passionately lyrical yet at times almost pop-songishly sentimental mode the 29-year-old was still post-Romantically reveling in...
...6), which Chopin would not have been ashamed to sign...
...Still, from the end of the 19th century on, things looked up for women composers...
...b. Paid and/or Requested Circulation: 1. Paid/requested Outside-County Mail Subscriptions Slated on Form 3541 (include advertiser's proof and exchange copies): Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...on CDs both forms of her name are usually given...
...The disc Empress of Night (Arabesque Z6738) begins with the Piano Concerto in C sharp minor (op...
...Coolidge commissioned Clarke's Rhapsody, her only nod ever to a woman composer...
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...copies each issue during preceding l2months...
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...Clarke did not take up the violin till the ripe old age of eight...
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...Why would women be less able to learn harmony and counterpoint, instrumentation and orchestration—the grammar and syntax ofthat language...
...Clarke supported herself as a viola player in some notable chamber ensembles, and as one of only six female members of British symphonic orchestras...
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...Enterprising readers should also check the Three Pieces for Cello and Piano (op...
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...The first movement, Moderato ma apassionato, is a rather brainy commentary on passion...
...Especially noteworthy is the Coolidgecommissioned Rhapsody for Cello and Piano (1923)—still, amazingly, unpublished—featuring the nervous restlessness, sudden leaps of mood, and surprising dissonance amid songfulness and soulfulness that characterize so much of Clarke's music...
...Even so, the judges were stunned when they learned a woman won second prize...
...Average no copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months...
...Mrs...
...Statement of Ownership...
...At this point the soloist, especially in an initial waltz that returns at the end, takes the unquestioned lead as the concerto concludes on a note of triumph...
...Estent and nature of circulation, a. Total no...
...7 Complete mailing address of kncwn office of publication (not printer) 275 Seventh Avenue...
...104), with Eskin joined by Kathleen Supov...
...Her oeuvre comprises over 300 of every kind including the chamber opera Cabildo (op...
...Perhaps the best introduction to the three phases of Beach's creativity is Morning Glories (Arabesque Z6747), with Joanne Polk at the piano and the all-female Lark Quartet stylishly performing...
...to that must be added, as Liane Curtis wrote, "her typical modesty, good nature, and sense of humor even in the face of being treated unfairly...
...Beach played the piano and composed by age four...
...The next movement, Vivace, does prodigies with an obsessive four-note phrase that keeps growing in expressiveness...
...9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing edilon Publisher American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc., 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001...
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...The thrush responded and a duet ensued, with the thrush (or a relative) also showing up for a morning session...
...There are moments of acute beauty and others of an aggressive intensity that has been called Lisztian...
...It is nobly performed on this Arabesque CD by Polk and the Lark Quartet, and perhaps even better on an ASV disc, about which later...
...Until fairly recently, women's competence as serious composers was widely, indeed almost universally, doubted...
...Though Clarke and Beach are sometimes featured on the same CD, their personal and professional lives differed...
...94% 16 Statement of Ownership will be printed in the September'October 2001 issue of this publication- 17 Signature and Title of Editor...
...80), magisterially performed by the distinguished flautist Doriot Anthony Dwyer and the Manhattan String Quartet (Koch International 7001...
...and h (Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 12,250...
...On the same disc Christopher O'Reilly beautifully plays one of Beach's finest piano creations, the 1921 "A Hermit Thrush at Eve" (op...
...Management and Circulation I Publication Title: The NewLeader.2 Publication No 00286044...
...Average no copies eash issue during preceding 12 months...
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...Clarke was fundamentally a modernist, knew every major British composer, and such foreign ones as Ravel, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky...
...After a somewhat tentative Prelude, we get the lively "Old-Time Peasant Dance," followed by the meditative "Ancient Cabin" that builds to a lusty climax and, typically for Beach, dissolves into dreamy lyricism...
...It seems to me akin in spirit to an 1891 version of Rachmaninov's First, which could not have been known to Beach...
...Publisher, Business Manager...
...The first movement, Allegro moderato, quotes from Amy's song "Jeune fille et jeune fleur," actually sung once by Henry Beach at an amateur recital...
...The Donkey," to the dazzling Chesterton poem, set with condign wryness...
...Milchcl Leviias, Secretary, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001...
...It begins with the title piece for violin and piano (1924), almost uncharacteristically lilting, as is the melodious concluding piece, "Morpheus" (1918), for viola and piano...
...Clarke's Piano Trio of 1921 was similarly edged out, this time by a nonentity...
...The third movement, Largo, is based on yet another early song, "Twilight" (op...
...Further fetching piano music is played by Joanne Polk on By the Still Waters (Arabesque Z6693...
...She became a leading member of the Second School of New England Composers, along with Arthur W. Foote, George W. Chadwick, John K. Paine, and Horatio W Parker...
...5) of 1892, and the "Gaelic" Symphony in E minor (op...
...Next conies the Finale, drawn from the last line of "Twilight...
...copies ofsuigle issue published nearesl to filing date...
...The well-nigh idiotic libretto by a woman friend was surely no great help to Beach...
...These exquisite miniatures are decently played by Robert Weirich (Koch International 7281...
...All players here, led by the outstanding violinist Lorraine McAslan, are compelling...
...Composing required long sessions at the piano, money for study, entrée into masculine circles, and the acquisition of performers and publishers— hard things for women to come by...
...Beach resumed her concert career full blast, composing in the summers after 1921 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire...
...Not until she was 58 did she marry a Juilliard piano teacher, James Friskin, whom she had known as a fellow student at RCM...
...Finland Kaija Saariaho...
...149...
...But it is "By the Still Waters" that most truly communicates Beach's intimacy with nature...
...Managing Editor None 10 Ownerdfthc publication isowncd bya corporation, give the name and address of the corporation immediati)· followed by ihe name and addresses of al) stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of the total amouni of stock...
...From 1911 to 1914 she concertized in Europe and then all over the United States, mostly playing her own compositions...
...85), set to a mediocre poem by Longfellow...
...The two pieces charmingly convey both the birdsong and the composer's elaborations of it...
...This raises a question: Is women's music somehow different from men's...
...Have there not been through the ages more accomplished women than men on the piano, harpsichord, spinet, virginals, and whatnot...
...Few were the serious women composers able to write more than an occasional song or piano piece...
...The violist Michael Ponder described her as having had a "highly focused mind, caustic wit and captivating energy...
...The abbess and mystic Hildegard von Bingen (10981178) is an impressive early example...
...some authentic Macedonian tunes are imaginatively developed, alternated, combined, and transfigured...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
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...Ne«· York...
...Not insignificantly, almost all of Beach's 300-plus works were published, while many of Clarke's 80-odd remain unpublished to this day...
...But the only song of real interest here is "In the Twilight" (op...
...2, no...
...Let's examine the careers of two pioneer women composers...
...Known now as Mrs...
...The Trio is a curious piece, its feelings, as it were, lucidly scrutinized under glass, or recollected in austere tranquillity...
...others are powerfully disquieting, notably "The Seal Man," to a prose text by John Masefield, where Clarke approaches sprechstimme, and "Eight O'clock," to an A. E. Housman poem about an execution...
...It derives some of its material from the last movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet (op...
...Still, the piece has a remarkable cohesiveness, with brilliant development and canny transitions...
...The good humor must have come in handy in 1919, when her Viola Sonata was entered in the prestigious Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Competition...
...Coolidge (possibly knowing the candidates' identities) cast the tiebreaking vote for Bloch's Suite for Viola...
...Yet music, however abstract, is an acquirable language...
...275 Sevenlh Avenue, New York, New York 10001...
...In the song, as in the concerto, the accompaniment is atypically overpowering...
...275 Seventh Avenue...
...2, no...
...She was to say, "Both in composition and in piano playing there seemed to be such a strong attraction that no other life than that of the musician seemed possible for me...
...j. Ftercenl Paid and/or Requested Circlulauon (15c/15g ? 100...
...Even her grand melodic outpourings arise, not from emotional agitation, but from some vast inner stillness, and they are most telling as they ebb into quiescence and stillness...
...Except for a couple of duets, that 1932 work, though nicely recorded (Delos 3170), leaves me completely cold...
...Clarke was admitted to the Royal College of Music (fancier than the Academy), where the distinguished Sir Charles Stanford accepted her as his only female student and made her switch from the violin to the viola...
...Widowed in 1910, Mrs...
...and the remarkable Alma Schindler Mahler (1879-1964) was forbidden to compose by her jealous husband, Gustav...
...7,040 2 Paid ln-County Subscriptions (Include advertisers' proof copies and exchange copies): Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 1,935 No...
...Together with three instrumentai pieces, The Cloths of Heaven (Guild 7208) presents Clarke's 25 most mature art songs, eloquently rendered by the soprano Patricia Wright, with fine accompaniments on piano by Kathron Sturrock, and violin by Jonathan Rees...
...the second, Andante molto semplice, is ruminatively introverted...
...The disc also offers six of her songs, starting with an early setting (op...
...3) in French of a poem by Chateaubriand "Jeune fille et jeune fleur"—a cosmopolitan gesture from a 16-year-old Bostonian, but rather undistinguished...
...Along with other good solo selections, the disc includes the Suite for Two Pianos on Irish Melodies (op...
...The disc comprises works by three other composers as well, but the 21 minutes of Beach make it a must...
...Christopher Johnson, Clarke's executor, has got it right: "Her most expansive and explosive passages are precisely felt, clearly stated and exactly placed...
...Finally, there is the "Cortege" (1930), Clarke's only solo piano piece, of great, almost disturbing, originality...
...Besides Beach's Piano Quintet, it contains Clarke's two masterpieces, the aforementioned Viola Sonata and the Piano Trio, exemplarily played by the pianist Martin Roscoe and members of the Endellion Quartet...
...September 30, 2001 I certify lhai all mformanon furnished on this form is true and complete...
...Bimonthly 5. Number of issues published annually 6 Annual subscription price S42 00...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale...
...128...
...Full name American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc...
...92, no...
...Clarke had a tyrannical father, who promptly removed Rebecca from the Royal Academy of Music when her harmony teacher proposed to her...
...A somber text —wife and child anxiously awaiting the return of a sailor from the sea—is matched with a tough, angular melody not bereft of lyrical moments, and is dramatically rendered by the able Charlotte Helikant...
...The concerto is dedicated to the great Argentine piano virtuoso and composer Teresa Carrefio, who consoled Amy about her initially unenthusiastic reviews, explaining that critics can't judge properly on a single hearing...
...This begins with Variations on Balkan Themes (op...
...No copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale, 1,335.4 OtherClasses Mailed Through the USPS: Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...g. Tola] Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15f...
...The work supports its 38-minute length with ample assurance and ought to be a concert staple...
Vol. 84 • September 2001 • No. 5
