Musical Discoveries

Amy Beach (1867-1944)
Quartet for Strings (in one movement), op. 89 (1929)

When the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston gave the first performance of Amy Beach's Mass in E-flat in 1892, she was immediately counted among America's most important composers. In 1896, the New York Symphony Society, with Beach's Gaelic Symphony, also put works by a woman on its program for the first time. Beach, who was inspired from a young age by birdsong and other sounds of nature, developed primarily through self-study. When she married, her husband did not allow her to perform as a pianist more than once or twice a year, but he did encourage her to compose "big" pieces. Her compositions included her Celtic symphony, choral works such as Jubilate for the Womans Building at the 1894 World's Fair in Chicago and a Piano Concerto , but she also wrote chamber music, always trying to break new ground. In her 1929 Quartet for Strings in one movement , which was not published until 1994, she incorporated the three Inuit melodies that define both the theme and the structure of the one-movement string quartet, which, because of its successful integration of art and folk music, is appreciated as a truly "American" sounding string quartet of unusual beauty. 

Wenneke Savenije

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944)
Sérénadeaux étoiles, op. 142 (1911)

French pianist and composer Cécile Chaminade was famous during her lifetime, but after that she was soon forgotten. Chaminade was taught music at home and gave her first concert at 18, after which her compositions also gradually attracted attention. Bizet called her "My little Mozart," Saint-Saëns and Chabrier encouraged her to continue above all else, and Queen Victoria was among her ardent admirers. Chaminade toured Europe and debuted in the United States in 1908 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and her own Concertstück, after which as many as two hundred Chaminade Music Clubs were established in America. After her father's death in 1887, Chaminade had to support herself and her mother with the proceeds from compositions and recitals. She shifted her focus to chamber music, which soon earned her criticism that her music did not "exceed the level of salon music. Wrongly so, for Chaminade's classically based oeuvre includes impressive orchestral works, ballets, an opera, solo concertos and choral works. She composed in a post-romantic idiom, kept away from modernist techniques and, because of the clear elegance and accessibility of her chamber music, appears "typically French. Her Sérénade aux étoiles for flute and piano was dedicated to Adolphe Hennebains (1862-1914), first flutist of the Paris Opera. With its chromatic melody lines and bell-like piano sounds, the piece published in 1911 actually sounds like a shimmering ode to the stars.

Wenneke Savenije

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
Trois Pièces pour violoncelle et piano (1911)

- Modéré

- Sans vitesse et a l'aise

- Vite et nervusement rythmé

French composer, conductor and educator Nadia Boulanger managed to completely escape the stigma of "a woman who composes. She successfully developed into "a composer who happens to be a woman. Her students in Paris included Daniel Barenboim, Aaron Copland, Philipp Glass and Astor Piazolla, among others. As a composer, she was most active during her younger years. Top musicians successfully performed her works all over the world. Boulanger's 1911 Trois Pièces for cello and piano was originally composed as an organ work, but transcribed for cello by Boulanger himself. The "post impressionistic" work is composed of three movements: the mysterious Modéré, in which the cello delicately makes its entry over trickling effects in the piano; Sans vitesse et a l'aise, a peaceful lament with lullaby-like melodies, and the frenetic finale Vite et nerveusement, in which Boulanger allows the cello to make great leaps over chords in the piano, which sort out the effect of sound waves. The lyrical middle section explores the timbre of the cello throughout its range, then the piece ends in an epic conclusion. Some passages allude to the unmistakable influence of Debussy and Fauré.

Wenneke Savenije

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)
Mirrors (1997)

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died June 2, 2023, profiled herself as a free spirit from the beginning. Trained by teachers who adhered to serialism, she sought her own experimental path: "You were not allowed to use pulse or tonal-oriented harmonies or melodies in the early 1980s. But I don't want to write music through negations. Everything is allowed, as long as it is done with good taste." Saariaho researched computer analyses of the sound spectrum of individual notes produced by different instruments. She developed techniques for computer-assisted composition, experimented with "musique concrète" and wrote pieces combining live performances with more electronic music. Her piece Mirrors for flute and cello, based on the principle of symmetry and mirror images in music, was composed in 1997 during the height of the CD-Rom era. Saariaho states in the score that there should always be a mirror between the musicians in one or more of the following musical dimensions: rhythm, pitch, instrumental gesture or timbre. Through CD-Rom, she also tried to actively involve users in the piece. In live performances, the flutist and cellist have the space to make artistic decisions about what mirrors they want to create and how they will achieve those effects. The original score shows Saariaho's own mirror images through rhythms, pitch and gestures.

Wenneke Savenije

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Lullaby (1909)

Rebecca Clarke studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and achieved what she called "my one whiff of success" in 1919, when her Viola Sonata won first place in a competition. Clarke lived much of her life in the United States, although she was born and educated in Britain. Her music is notable for its passion and power and encompasses a range of twentieth-century styles, including Impressionism, Post-Romanticism and Neoclassical. Although she wrote nearly one hundred works (songs, choral works, chamber music and music for solo piano), only twenty pieces were published during her lifetime. When she died in 1979 at the age of 93, they had all long since been published and out of print. Remarkably, once love was involved (first with a married man, later with a teacher at the Juilliard School in New York), Clarke hardly ever got around to composing. Clarke wrote a whole series of lullabies between 1909 and 1918 for two instruments, including violin and piano, viola or cello and piano, and violin and cello. The lovely idea of rocking or singing a child to sleep clearly resonated with her romantic and dreamy nature and her particular way of expressing herself in music.

Wenneke Savenije

Clara Schumann (1819-1896)

Piano Trio in g, op. 17 (1846)

- Allegro moderato

- Scherzo: Tempo di Menuetto - Trio

- Andante

- Allegretto

During her lifetime, Clara Schumann was especially famous as a piano virtuoso and later a piano pedagogue. But as a composer, she stood in the shadow of her husband Robert Schumann, who, while expressing great admiration for her Song Cycle, op. 13, which appeared in print in 1844, but then still stated, "Clara has written a number of smaller pieces, as fragile and rich in musical inventiveness as she failed to do before. But having children and a fantasist as a husband does not combine with composing. She lacks sustained practice. That often touches me because in this way so many a beautiful inspiration is lost that she cannot realize." With an increasingly depressed husband and eight children to care for, Clara had it anything but easy, but nevertheless she continued to compose from time to time. Her only Piano Trio in g, op. 17 was written in 1846 in Dresden, while she was enduring a miscarriage and watching her husband grow increasingly ill. The four-movement work is regarded as Clara Schumann's masterpiece as a composer and in its classical structure and romantic style shows affinity with Schumann's Piano Trio, op. 63. Clara herself noted in her diary about composing, "There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creating, if only because it wins you hours of self-forgetfulness, when you live in a world of sound."

Wenneke Savenije