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Program Notes
Women in music history are few and far between. This absence has been part of my consciousness for as long as I’ve considered myself a composer, and it weighs heavier when I throw myself into musicology research as I have this year. There are records of women composers and performers in history, but for one, they are far less numerous than men, and for another, we have precious little about their lives written by their own hand. Before the 19th century, passing mentions of these women in the correspondence of better-remembered men are the most we can hope for to learn about their lives. Their own thoughts, feelings, and inner worlds are lost to time forever.
This piece was written concurrently with a couple research papers on this topic. Where the research was an opportunity for me to put forth carefully articulated thoughts, this music is my raw emotion as I processed how the research made me feel. It begins with a fugue, a term descended from the Latin fuga: “a running away, act of fleeing.” Each instrument comes in with a restatement of the subject, chasing the previous voice which diverges into free counterpoint. But when the fugue is exhausted, the piece turns into a mournful lament that eventually builds into a joyous dance. There is great sorrow in processing how history treats these women (or refuses to treat them), but there is also great joy in finding what we can discover. Not all is lost forever. Even in the cases where there is truly no record that a woman lived, she did still live. She must have laughed, loved, cried, grieved, and made her way in the world the best she could. She did all these things whether or not we know about her today. That is still worth celebrating.