Remarkable Women
Over the entirety of music history, the stories of many women composers have been overlooked in favor of promoting their men counterparts. This section of Compositional Voices highlights three of the thousands of accomplished women who have carved their path in the world of classical music.
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Writing music her entire life, Florence Price made many breakthroughs as an African American and women composer during the height of racial segregation in 20th Century America.
A prolific Irish composer, but due to a lack of opportunity during World War II, many of her few published works are overlooked and rarely performed.
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An internationally acclaimed composer during her career, most of Perry's works fell into obscurity after her death. Now they are being rediscovered.
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Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father was a dentist, and her mother was a music teacher. Her mother encouraged her musical studies and Florence gave her first piano recital at the age of four (Portland Symphony Orchestra). Florence was a brilliant young woman. She graduated high school at fourteen and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating with honors and two diplomas in piano and organ. During her time in Georgia, she became the head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University.
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In 1912, Florence married Tomas J. Price. Having two daughters, they spent their family life in Florence’s home town of Little Rock and in Chicago after racial tensions in the South rose. They divorced in 1931, leaving Price a single mother and musician in the midst of the Great Depression.
She worked hard to make ends meet for her family but got her big break when her prize winning First Symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 (Savage). This was the first time a major orchestra performed a piece by an African American woman.
After her passing in 1953, most of Price's works fell into obscurity and she was nearly forgotten by the world. In 2009, a collection of her hand-written manuscripts was found in a home in St. Anne, Illinois and she was brought back into the light (Portland Symphony Orchestra). Now she is one of the most played women composers of color in the United States (IDC).
Ina Boyle was born in 1889 in Wicklow, Ireland. She was a brilliant and talented young girl, who started her first lessons in composition at age eleven. Boyle was a protege of Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and studied under him until the outbreak of World War (O'Keefe). Her works made news headlines during her life, but in modern times most music listeners are unfamiliar with her name.
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During her lifetime, she was the only female composer to have work published by the Carnegie UK Trust.
She was the first Irishwoman to write a symphony, a concerto and a ballet.
She entered two works to Sligo Feis Ceoil in 1913. She won first and second prize.
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Ina Boyle
One of the main reasons why her work remains in obscurity is because so little of her work was published.In her book, Ina Boyle 1889-1967: A Composer’s Life, Ina Beausang writes that there were many instances that Boyle’s manuscripts would be returned to her many times after sending them to conductors and performers. During the height of her composition career, the Second World War started. During this time, she was unable to make her usual travels to London and her career started coming to an end as “the demand for her music seem[ed] to have diminished.”
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Now, stacks of her manuscripts are kept in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. These works include symphonies, vocal, choral. and chamber music as well as an opera and several stage works.
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Most of these works are unperformed, and even Boyle herself never heard them.
http://www.artlifeculture.ie/?p=538, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Experience Boyle's Music
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Julia Perry
AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Julia Perry was born in 1924 in Lexington, Kentucky. Her compositional career was started in the early 1950s with her work Sabat Mater, which won her two Guggenheim fellowships.
According to Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and current president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so" (Guggenheim Fellows).
Perry went on to study under Nadia Boulanger in Paris and in 1965, “was the first Black woman to have a work broadcast by the New York Philharmonic” (Huizenga). Around this time, Perry experienced a severe decline in her health and finances. In a telegram that she wrote to the Philharmonic in 1965, she states that she is, “Unemployed at this time [and]... without the barest essentials” (Schumann).
After her death at 55 in 1979, most of Perry’s works fell into obscurity.
At the time of her death, she had only published a few works, but in today’s times, scholars have identified close to 100 of her manuscripts. Dozens of these scores cannot be performed or recorded because there is no established copyright holder. “According to Christopher Wilkins, the music director of the Akron Symphony, said, ‘all the work is protected; it just hasn’t been licensed, and can’t be until whoever controls it negotiates that’”.
Experience Perry's Music
The Orchestra Now (TÅŒN), conducted by Leon Botstein, and mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter performed Julia Perry's Stabat Mater in a livestreamed concert from the Fisher Center at Bard on November 14, 2021.
This work was also performed by the New York Philharmonic in November of 2023. J’Nai Bridges, who performed the “Stabat Mater” solo part, said of the piece: “I love the vocal writing. It’s intense, it’s very introspective, it’s very intimate and also very extreme" (Schumann). Dima Slobodeniouk, who conducted the program, described it as “logically and beautifully written".
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“Programming Julia Perry is about making room,” Bridges said. “Not just to tick boxes, but because we want to continue performing beautiful music".
In Homunculus C. F., Julia Perry showcases the innovation in her works.
This work is among her more avant-garde pieces but the variety of percussion sounds, come together to make a playful and fantastical finale.