From Suite for Violin and Piano (2008) by Emma Lou Diemer

American composer and organist Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927) is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara: she taught music theory and composition there for two decades. She composed her three-movement Suite for Violin and Piano for violinist Philip Ficsor, who premiered the work on May 7, 2008, at the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library. “Summer Day,” the work’s opening movement, is cheerful, lyrical, and tonally adventurous.

From Das Jahr by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

In 1841, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) completed a cycle of piano pieces entitled Das Jahr (The Year). Containing a piece for each month of the year, this set was an interdisciplinary work: Hensel’s score prefaces each piece with a quotation from a German poem or hymn, and her husband, artist Wilhelm Hensel, adorned each piece’s opening page with a hand-drawn illustration. Fanny Hensel prefaced her somber music for July with a quote from Friedrich Schiller:

“The meadows thirst
For livening dew; people are languishing.”

From Three Visions by William Grant Still

William Grant Still (1895-1978) composed his piano suite Three Visions for his wife, Verna Arvey. She played the work’s premiere in 1936 in Los Angeles. Still’s daughter, Judith Anne Still, describes the suite as “the composer’s explanation of what happens to individuals, regardless of skin colour, when their time on earth is over. All are judged. Noble persons, who achieve in spite of obstacles and bigotry, find blessings and advancement in the realm of the spirit.” “Summerland,” the work’s ecstatic second movement, is a vision of heavenly afterlife, heard here in a version for string quartet.

By Amy Marcy Cheney Beach

Summer Dreams, Op. 47, is a suite of six pieces for piano duet which Amy Beach (1867-1944) composed in 1901. Like Hensel’s Das Jahr, the suite features poetic quotations at the head of each movement: music and literature enjoyed close ties in the minds of many Romantic composers. As the title implies, Summer Dreams explores fantasies. It opens with “The Brownies,” a dance of fairy sprites prefaced by a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The suite continues with a picture of a “Robin Redbreast;” a movement entitled “Twilight,” prefaced with poetry by Beach herself; “Katy-Dids,” with a quote from Walt Whitman; and an “Elfin Tarantelle,” again inspired by Shakespeare. The suite closes with a “Goodnight,” accompanied by lines from Canadian-American poet Agnes Lockhart Hughes.

By Frank Bridge

British composer Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was a multifaceted musician: he was a violist with the English String Quartet, a conductor of both classical and theater orchestras, and he taught composition to a young Benjamin Britten. Summer: A Tone Poem for Orchestra is one of several evocative tone poems Bridge composed on themes from nature and the change of seasons. Bridge completed Summer in 1915, and he conducted the work’s premiere on March 13, 1916 at the Queen’s Hall in London.

By Joaquin Rodrigo

Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) is well known for his guitar concertos, but his Concierto de estio (Summer Concerto) is for violin. A neobaroque work, Rodrigo’s concerto takes inspiration from the style and structure of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons; that famous set which first appeared in Vivalid’s Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8, published in 1725. Rodrigo’s 20th-century take on the Vivaldian formula premiered in Lisbon on April 16, 1944, in a performance by violinist Enrique Iniesta and the Orquesta Nacional de España.

By Zhou Long

Zhou Long (b. 1953) is a Pulitzer-prize winning Chinese-American composer, who was educated at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and Columbia University. Dr. Zhou is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. Words of the Sun is an exquisite work for unaccompanied chorus, setting a poem by Chinese poet Ai Qing. The choir Chanticleer commissioned the work, and it was published in 2002.

By Lena Johnson McLin

The Rev. Dr. Lena Johnson McLin (b. 1928) is a composer, a minister of music, and a legendary music teacher in the Chicago public school system. She has been called the “woman who launched a thousand careers.” Just a few of her famous students include Aretha Franklin, R. Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, and Metropolitan Opera baritone Mark Rucker. McLin’s compositions fuse gospel and classical styles, as can be heard in her joyful work for piano solo, A Summer Day.

From Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams by Jennifer Higdon

American composer Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) composed Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, a five-movement work for string quartet and piano left hand, in 1999. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society commissioned the work, and Higdon dedicated it to Gary Graffman and the Lark Quartet. In her program notes, Higdon draws a parallel between her eponymous poet and the piano within the quintet texture:

“What kind of dreams would a poet have? Because they presumably work in a world of imagination, would their dreams be different than what others might dream? Or are we all poets in our own dream worlds? The poet might be the main character or s/he might also be just a part of the fabric, observing from the sidelines. This also represents the pianist’s role within a piano quintet, prominent but also just part of the story.”

Higdon goes on to describe the second movement, “Summer Shimmers Across the Glass of Green Ponds:” “…here, the stillness is glasslike, as the dreamer sits by a pond, on a Summer’s eve, at twilight, watching the float, which does not even jiggle in the water, at the end of a fishing pole…even the fish are still.”

From Three Songs(1913) by Dame Ethel Smyth

It was no great secret that English composer Ethel Smyth loved women. Among the most important loves of her life was  Emmeline Pankhurst, whom the composer met in 1910. Pankhurst was the co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organization dedicated to women’s suffrage. Smyth became deeply attached to Pankhurst, and joined the suffragist movement, even composing the WSPU’s anthem, March of the Women.  

Along with several colleagues, the two spent two months together in Holloway Prison for their suffragist activism. In her autobiography, Female Pipings for Eden (1933), Smyth reminisced, “The ensuing two months in Holloway, though one never got accustomed to an unpleasant sensation when the iron door was slammed and the key turned, were as nothing to me because Mrs. Pankhurst was with us.” (Female Pipings for Eden,209)

Published in 1913, Smyth’s “Possession” is a setting of a poem by Ethel Carnie. The poem is a tender reflection on giving freedom to one’s beloved. Smyth dedicated the song to “E.P.” – Emmeline Pankhurst. 

by John Corigliano

Composed in 1988, John Corigliano’s First Symphony is a tribute to friends lost to the AIDS epidemic. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned the piece while Corigliano was serving as their Composer in Residence, and they played its premiere in 1990 under Daniel Barenboim. The work went on to win multiple awards, including two Grammys.

In his program notes for the work, John Corigliano reflects on the genesis of his First Symphony, and its symbolic structure.

“Historically, many symphonists (Berlioz, Mahler, and Shostakovich, to name a few) have been inspired by important events affecting their lives, and perhaps occasionally their choice of the symphonic form was dictated by extramusical events. During the past decade I have lost many friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic, and the cumulative effect of those losses has, naturally, deeply affected me. My Symphony No. 1 was generated by feelings of loss, anger, and frustration.

A few years ago I was extremely moved when I first saw ‘The Quilt,’ an ambitious interweaving of several thousand fabric panels, each memorializing a person who had died of AIDS, and, most importantly, each designed and constructed by his or her loved ones. This made me want to memorialize in music those I have lost, and reflect on those I am losing. I decided to relate the first three movements of the symphony to three lifelong musician-friends. In the third movement, still other friends are recalled in a quilt-like interweaving of motivic melodies.”

From Gay Life by David Del Tredici

American composer David Del Tredici has made a point of exploring gay experiences in his compositions: prominent works include his string sextet Bullycide and his song cycle, Gay Life. Composed between 1996-2000, the texts set in Gay Life include poems by Allen Ginsberg, Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, W. H. Kidde, and Michael D. Calhoun. The San Francisco Symphony commissioned the work and played its premiere on May 3, 2001, with baritone William Sharp and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Del Tredici subsequently arranged the cycle for voice and piano. “Personal Ad,” a setting of a poem by Allen Ginsburg, is the cycle’s third number.

In his program notes, Del Tredici explains, “Gay Life was initially envisioned as a cycle of eight songs, each touching on the ‘gay experience’ from a different angle. The music came to me in a burst — a burst, really, of gay pride. It began in august 1996 as a result of my experience at The Body Electric School’s weeklong retreat called ‘The Dear Love of Comrades’…

…Throughout the world, the ‘personal’ advertisement provides a time-honored method for potential lovers to meet each other. In the United States, such advertisements enjoyed a vogue a century ago; when they in recent years re-emerged in popularity, the gay community embraced the ‘personals’ with enthusiasm. In ‘Personals Ad,’ a businesslike, almost comical, setting is given to what is ultimately a touching poem, full of tenderness and the advertiser’s manifest sincerity. The subsequent interlude builds from near-stasis, heating up (incalzando) to the festive outburst of the fourth song.”

From 27 by Ricky Ian Gordon

27 is an opera by American composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek. Commissioned by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, it premiered in 2014 with American mezzo soprano Stephanie Blythe in the lead role. Gordon knew he’d be writing the opera as a vehicle for Blythe, and inspired by this great contemporary singer, he chose to cast her as Gertrude Stein. “I’ve Been Called Many Things” is Gertrude’s final aria, leading into the finale of Act V of 27.

In his program notes, Gordon reflects on his inspiration for 27: “When James Robinson asked me to write an opera for the great Stephanie Blythe, I thought immediately of a lifelong obsession, Gertrude Stein. At Carnegie Mellon University, at the age of seventeen, I picked up the book Charmed Circle just before catching a terrible cold, and read it in the course of a week in bed. I remember nothing that week but eating tangerines and reading about Gertrude and Alice and their milieu. I was mesmerized by their world. Gertrude was in many ways a perfect role model. She was committed to her own muse, ruggedly individual, unswayed by others’ opinions, and uninhibited in terms of being who she was, loving whom she loved, weighing what she weighed, having opinions and facing the repercussions of them bravely. She loved beauty and was constantly interpreting and reinterpreting what she thought was beautiful. Mostly, she believed in herself with such rigor it fascinated me. And her world – the habitués of her salon, Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, anyone who was doing anything of interest, thinking anything worth thinking – came through her Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, until finally, it was Alice who came through and stole her heart. I believe I was meant to write an opera about these two, about their world, because it what I wanted my world to be. When I left school, I held salons in my New York apartment. Everything I wrote, I premiered there.”

By Paula M. Kimper

Patience and Sarah: A Pioneering Love Story, by American composer Paula Kimper and librettist Wende Persons, is often identified as the first Lesbian opera. It premiered at Lincoln Center Festival in July of 1998, and has enjoy many productions since. The opera is adapted from the eponymous 1969 novel by Isabel Miller, which was itself inspired by true events: the love story between 19th-century American folk artist Mary Ann Wilson and her partner Florence Brundage.

The Paula Kimper Ensemble’s website on Patience and Sarah summarizes the opera’s story: “Set in Connecticut in the winter of 1816, the opera tells the powerful story of two young women who meet, fall in love and resolve to devote their lives to each other. The artist Patience White, sister to a middle-class Connecticut landowner, and tough-minded, adventurous Sarah Dowling, the daughter of a poor farmer, share a mutual dream of leaving behind their repressive lives to go pioneering together, defying their families’ attempts to prevent it.”

In this scene from a 2016 production by the Paula Kimper Ensemble, Patience and Sarah meet for the first time.

By Laura Kaminsky

As One is a chamber opera by American composer Laura Kaminsky and librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed. It was commissioned by American Opera Projects, and since its premiere in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it has become one of the most popular new American operas, enjoying more than two dozen productions: including a 2019 production the Portland Opera.

As One is an intimate portrait of a transgender character named Hannah. It is scored string quartet and two singers who embody one role. American Opera Projects explains, “As One is a chamber opera in which two voices—Hannah after (mezzo-soprano) and Hannah before (baritone)—share the part of a sole transgender protagonist. Fifteen songs comprise the three-part narrative; with empathy and humor, they trace Hannah’s experiences from her youth in a small town to her college years—and finally traveling alone to a different country, where she realizes some truths about herself.”

Photograph of Marion Bauer Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Marion Bauer (1882-1955) 

Marion Bauer was a significant American modernist composer, as well as a teacher and a music critic. She was Nadia Boulanger’s first American student, and became an influential pedagogue herself, teaching composition at New York City University and the Julliard School. Bauer was also a Pacific Northwest composer: she was born in Walla-Walla and her parents were married at Temple Beth Israel right here in Portland, Oregon!

In this video, the Portland Youth Philharmonic plays Bauer’s tone poem Sun Splendor in a 2016 performance at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Sun Splendor originally premiered in 1947, in a performance by the New York Philharmonic directed Leopold Stokowski. 

Photograph of Mana-Zucca courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mana–Zucca (1885-1981) 

Piano prodigy, singer, actress, and composer Gussie Zuckermann was born in New York City to a Polish immigrant family. She adopted her unique stage name in her teens. Mana–Zucca’s early successes included a Carnegie Hall performance in 1902 in a concert presented by Walter Damrosch, followed by a European concert tour, during which she met musical luminaries such as Teresa Carreño. Mana–Zucca was incredibly versatile: she wrote orchestral music, chamber music, and popular songs; she sang in musical comedies; she established a musical salon at her Miami home. In this video, you’ll hear three of her piano works: her Prelude, Op. 73; Bolero de Concert, Op. 72, No. 2; and Badinage, Op. 288. 

Photograph of Vally Weigl courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Vally Weigl (1884 or 1889-1982) 

Born in Austria, Vally Weigl studied musicology at Vienna University, as well as composition and piano. She and her husband, composer Karl Weigl, emigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape Nazi oppression. (Weigl’s sister, Käthe, would be murdered at a Nazi death camp several years later). In addition to composing, Weigl was an influential music therapist, serving at New York Medical College and publishing widely in her field.

Our Weigl selection is her New England Suite, composed in the 1950s. This lyrical, rapturous chamber work describes scenes from New England in four movements: “Vermont Nocturne,” “Maine Interlude,” “Berkshire Pastorale” and “Connecticut Country Fair.”  

Photograph of Vivian Fine courtesy of VivianFine.com

Vivian Fine (1913-2000) 

American composer and pianist Vivian Fine enrolled at Chicago Musical College at a mere five years of age, and as an adult, she went on to study with Ruth Crawford Seeger and Roger Sessions. Her work as a collaborative pianist for New York dance companies led to several dance compositions, including one for Martha Graham. Among Fine’s many accomplishments, she taught at the Julliard School, New York University, and Bennington College in Vermont, and she helped found the American Composers’ Alliance. Vivian Fine composed her Piece for Muted Strings (Elegiac Song) in 1937, and it premiered in March of 1939 at a League of Composers concert in New York City. The work is a response to the Spanish Civil War: Fine was strongly opposed to Franco’s Fascist regime. Fine designated the work “for the children of Spain.”  

Photograph of Miriam Gideon courtesy of the Milken Archive

Miriam Gideon (1906-1996)  

Miriam Gideon was particularly drawn to sacred music. Her father was a Reform rabbi, and her uncle, whom she visited every summer as a child, was the director of music at Temple Israel in Boston. Gideon studied composition with Lazare Saminsky and Roger Sessions, as well earning degrees from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she also taught for forty years. Gideon holds the distinction of being the first woman commissioned to compose a setting for Jewish liturgy. In addition to her many sacred and choral works, Gideon’s instrumental pieces, like this Air for Violin and Piano (1950) display a compelling, expressive, freely atonal musical language. 

Photograph of Judith Shatin by Peter Schaaf, courtesy of JudithShatin.com

Judith Shatin (b. 1949) 

Judith Shatin is a composer equally at home in traditional classical sonorities and electronic music. A graduate of the Julliard School and Princeton University, Shatin is Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia and the founder of the Virginia Center for Electronic Music. Shatin’s Hark My Love (1991) is a tender piece for choir and piano, dedicated to Shatin’s husband.

In her program note, Shatin writes, “Hark My Love is a setting of verses from the Song of Songs in Marvin Pope’s translation for the Anchor Bible (verses 8-10, 14, 16-17). This richly-textured symbolic text sparked my musical imagination, and the lyrical translation and rhythmic flow of this translation seemed especially apt for musical interpretation. I tried to capture something of the spirit and content of the word in the musical flow and text setting.”

Photograph of Shulamit Ran courtesy of the Milken Family Foundation

Shulamit Ran (b. 1949) 

Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran wrote her first songs in Hebrew when she was a child growing up in Tel Aviv. Ran studied at the Mannes School of Music, and she serves on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Her many accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for music. Our playlist features Ran’s Birds of Paradise, a work for flute and piano commissioned by the Chicago Flute Club’s 25th Anniversary Commission. In her program note for Birds of Paradise, Ran writes, “My decision to name this 12-minute work Birds of Paradise was based purely on the imagined vision of a fantastical bird of many bright and amazing colors and the ability to soar high and in different speeds, conjured up in my mind.” 

Photograph of Julia Wolfe by Peter Serling, courtesy of JuliaWolfeMusic.com

Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) 

Julia Wolfe is an American composer whose eclectic style draws on classical, folk, minimalist and rock musics. In 2015, her oratorio Anthracite Fields, about Pennsylvania coal mining, won the Pulitzer Prize for music. The oratorio was part of a series she has created about the American worker, which continued in 2019 with Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth. Scored for women’s and girls’ choirs and orchestra, this composition explores the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a tragedy in which 146 garment workers perished due to the lack of safety precautions taken by factory management. Wolfe commemorated the fire’s victims by scoring the piece for exactly 146 vocalists. 

In her program note, Wolfe explains, “I had been thinking about immigrant women in the workforce at the turn of the century. They fled their homelands to escape poverty and persecution. The garment workers arrived to these shores with sewing skills. Many of the women wound up working on these huge factory floors — hundreds of women sitting at sewing machines. Fire in My Mouth tells the story of the women who persevered and endured challenging conditions, women who led the fight for reform in the workplace.” 

Photograph of Lera Auerbach by Friedrich Reinhold, courtesy of LeraAuerbach.com

Lera Auerbach (b. 1973) 

Lera Auerbach is a leading contemporary composer and a versatile artist: she is also a concert pianist, visual artist and poet. Her catalogue includes symphonies, string quartets, ballets and operas: she frequently explores traditional genres in a contemporary voice. Aurebach’s 1999 set of 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano is part of a tradition laid down by Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which explored each major and minor key in preludes and fugues for keyboard. Chopin’s 24 Préludes extended this tradition in a curious way: Chopin’s “preludes” were not a prelude to anything else, simply standalone miniatures in forms of his own devising. Chopin’s take on preludes gave composers a genre that offers a great deal of freedom. Auerbach first dove into this tradition with her 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41 (1998), and she explored it further in her 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano, Op. 47.