The classical music world has been dominated for decades, if not centuries, by the image of a lone, baton-wielding figure. And that figure is almost always white and almost always a man.
As so many sectors of American cultural society have diversified, the classical music world has been a little slow on the uptake. But there’s a conversation going on, and a shifting perspective, that hopes to flick the baton more toward those who’ve been left out, especially minorities and women.
That’s what Quire of Voyces Director Nathan Kreitzer had in mind when he decided to put together a program entirely of music composed by women, called Women’s Works: Celebrating Female Composers, he told the Sun via email.
“I had wanted to do a concert of women composers for a long time for many reasons, but chiefly because of their exclusion from most major positions in music: conducting, performance, and composition,” Kreitzer said.
The program, which Quire of Voyces will perform on June 3 in Los Olivos, features strictly a cappella sacred work penned by women.
Putting together an entire program of music composed by women isn’t difficult, he explained, but refining his search to sacred, unaccompanied vocal music was “a bit of a challenge.”
“Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and others would be obvious choices, but wrote exclusively accompanied secular works,” he said. “This was no doubt in part because of their exclusion from leadership roles in the church.”
One larger work by Imogen Holst (1907-1984) came across Kreitzer’s radar, her “Mass in A Minor.”
Listening to that piece left him “transfixed,” and he knew it was a “perfect match” for Quire of Voyces. The daughter of British composer Gustav Holst, Imogen was a prolific musician, teacher, composer, and conductor in her own right. Despite her impressive career and famous father, her work still isn’t easy to get one’s hands on.
“Finding the score, which has not been in print since it was composed, proved to be difficult,” Kreitzer said. “But once I was able to secure a copy of the composition, edited from the original manuscript, I knew I had enough material to fill a whole concert program.”
According to local musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason, Imogen Holst is one of several female composers who are known for their “familiar last name,” but who are often given cursory attention when it comes to concert programming and their place in music history.
“We hear about [them] because somewhere they’re related to a famous canonical composer with a famous last name, and most of the time they can be overshadowed,” she said.
There was Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847), sister of Romantic-era composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), who actually saw some of her songs published under her brother’s name. Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was an incredibly accomplished pianist and composer who married composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and was actually more popular than her now-lionized husband in their own lifetimes.
The problem of how music historians and those who decide on classical music programs skate over women is illuminated by the output of composers like Imogen Holst, Shaver-Gleason said.
“Through time, you get a little more support for women, but reading Imogen’s biography, it’s interesting to see just how into music she was,” she said. “It wasn’t just that she was the daughter of a composer who wrote herself, but she was also a teacher and organized festivals.
“Music was her life, and she was making it happen,” she added.
Representation truly matters most to those still around to appreciate and benefit from it, which is why Kreitzer wanted to include music composed by contemporaries who work in the classical vocal tradition.
He didn’t have to look far.
Emma Lou Diemer has called Santa Barbara home since 1971, when she moved there to teach music at UCSB. Before then, she was raised in Missouri where she became an accomplished keyboardist and church organist at a young age, moving on to study composition in college at the Yale Music School and then the Eastmen School of Music, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1960.
Kreitzer reached out to Diemer to commission a new work for the program, saying she was a “local hero” and “a natural choice for a commission.” Diemer chose to set a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam [Ring out, wild bells],” because she found the text was “compelling.”
“The various images that are in this particular excerpt are very inspiring,” she said. “It talks about ringing out the old and bringing in the new, and ring out the want, the care, the sin, the faceless coldness of the times.”
Diemer said she enjoys playing with imagery in vocal music, and evoking those images with sound. The piece premiered in early May when Quire of Voyces first performed the program at St. Anthony’s Chapel in Santa Barbara.
The chapel was the perfect place to interpret Tennyson’s “wild bells,” she said.
“I wrote places in the music where the sound carries on, like bells,” she said. “And that can only happen in a live room, it won’t happen in a dead room, and this particular space was very conducive to echo writing.”
Just like the composers�”male and female�”of yore, Diemer takes “into account the voices that you’re writing for and the space where it’s going to be,” she said.
Spending decades performing and composing for church, Diemer is more than familiar with vocal ensembles and what they can do. Some of her most well known works are sacred vocal pieces. Her set of madrigals, which include verses by William Shakespeare set to music, get a lot of play too.
“That’s a big inspiration for composers,” she said. “It’s the easiest thing you could write because you have the words, the idea, and the rhythm.”
Diemer mentioned the “women’s movement” of the 1970s and how it affected her career in music education and composition. She was included in some of the earliest “all women” programs.
At the time, she said, there were a few complaints that such programs excluded men.
“Since about the ’70s you had programs of women composers, which should not be unusual, because before that it was always all men composers,” Diemer said. “Some of us have benefited by being a woman composer because then we can get on those programs, but most of us, like myself, were not really concerned with that.
“It didn’t matter whether we were a man or a woman or whatever�”we just wanted to write music,” she added.
Diemer said that she’s glad to see the proliferation of women in popular music, including their “amazing” music videos, but said that the classical world is still working toward greater accessibility and representation for women.
She’s seen the cultural climate change plenty in her lifetime, Diemer said, even through the reception of her own works.
“I have done it so long, I’m 90 years old, and I’ve written an awful lot of music, so it’s been interesting to see what has happened to my music over the decades,” she said. “Has it lasted? Has it been recognized? Has anybody taken an interest in it? Have they published it? Have they recorded it?
“It’s really been a fascinating personal history, and every composer, if they live long enough, has been interested in that,” she said.
Managing Editor Joe Payne is ready to listen. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 24-31, 2018.