#NataliaOnAMission
Clara Schumann, Sofia Gubaidulina, Fanny Mendelssohn, Meredith Monk, Grazyna Bacezicz, Vivian Fung, Lili Boulanger, Alexandra Gardner, Joan Tower.
I hope many of you are by now familiar with my goal to create an equal platform for female composers. In this post I want to share some of the challenges I have faced in doing this important work, but also the rewarding experiences that make it all worth it.
Pianists are spoiled with such a wealth of masterpieces from Schubert, Brahms, Ravel, and other mostly male composers that no one could play through all of them in a lifetime. The path of least resistance and least risk for any performer is to select from these accepted audience favorites, for which the test of time has sifted out any mediocre works. It was only when I ventured out into new territory that I discovered how much energy and time it takes to find great works from less explored composers.
I spent the last few years building a repertoire of works, beginning with Clara Schumann and now including contemporary composers who I hope will become part of the established canon. This has been harder than I thought. Anyone can pull up Beethoven’s works on IMSLP and watch hundreds of performances on YouTube, both for free and in seconds, when deciding what to play. But for many works by women, there are no recordings, and the score is not in the public domain. I have to somehow find out about the piece, pay for it without knowing if I will ever play it, wait to receive it, learn it, and perform it before I can decide if I will keep it in my repertoire.
A piece takes on new life on stage, life that has often been unfairly denied to great works by women. We are only now in the “workshopping” phase for many of them. This is an important process, because audience reception is crucial to help performers discover which works speak to concertgoers. For example, one of my recent all-female programs brought clarity about two works that I had been performing. After I finished playing Joan Tower’s “Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman,” an audience member hollered, “yeah!” and others joined in. I had never seen that kind of reception outside of a jazz club. Another piece, by Amy Beach, continued to fall flat no matter how many times I performed it. I am learning as I go, gradually building up a large repertoire to choose from so that I can pair works by men and women around various programming themes.
In my live-streamed house concerts, I am pairing popular works by Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann with those by Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, among others. These are often unexpected pairings, like a recent performance of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert songs with a newly commissioned work by Alexandra Gardner. I hope that this setup can bring something new to audiences who may not have tuned in without seeing their favorites on the program. I believe that showcasing works by men and women side by side demonstrates that works by the latter have the artistic merit to hold their own, deservedly sharing the stage with the best male composers. I continue to expand my own horizons by incorporating unique sounds of Meredith Monk and works for prepared piano (the sound of the piano is altered by placing objects between the strings) by Vivian Fung into my programs, while honoring the women pioneers of the 19th century. My mission remains finding ways to present music that audiences want to continue hearing, the classics that also made me devote my life to music in the first place, while also introducing them to the unique and brilliantly imaginative world of the new generation.