Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago I gave a talk for a piano teacher group at the Kawai Piano Gallery of Detroit, Michigan.
The room where I gave my presentation had colorful portraits on the walls. Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Brahms, Schumann, Debussy, Chopin: all famous composers, lining two of the walls and looking down at us.
I noticed them as I was setting up and preparing to speak, and it made me think about how familiar those faces are to us: even though I had never seen those particular portraits before, I could easily tell who was Schubert, who was Beethoven, who was Bach, who was Mozart, and so forth.
My talk was about the piano music of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. It struck me that most of us would not recognize her face if we saw a portrait of her. So much research has been done on famous composers, and of course, the classical music canon consists primarily of male composers.
Fanny Hensel was, by many accounts, equally talented as her brother Felix, and received the same musical training until around age 13. She composed over four hundred works, ran a biweekly musical salon in Berlin for years, and was admired by virtually everyone who heard her play. She published almost nothing during her lifetime, because it was considered improper for a woman of her station to do so.
Hensel died suddenly at age 41, while rehearsing for a private concert. Much of her music remained undiscovered and unpublished until the 1980's; since then the world has been growing familiar with her music and learning about her life... as well as getting to know her portrait.
As I gazed around the room at my session in Detroit, it wasn't lost on me that every piano teacher in that room, including me, was a woman and the 12 composers peering out at us from their portraits were all men.
This is something I think about a lot in relation to repertoire: the pieces we choose to learn shape our musical understanding in ways we aren't always aware of. If everything you play comes from the same thirty or forty composers whose portraits end up on walls, you're developing your ear and your musicianship inside a particular aesthetic worldview without even knowing it.
This is not a knock on the "name-brand" composers; I'm as big of a Beethoven fan as anybody else. But I grew up being taught that there were virtually no women or people of color among canonical classical composers because all the best music really had come from these few male European composers, who had been exposed to the best training and life circumstances. It was considered an unfortunate historical fact.
But recently I've been happy to see a huge upsurge in performances of classical music by composers from all backgrounds. Our students today are growing up playing and hearing music by composers from many different backgrounds, and concert programs are the richer for it.
If you're looking for music that is beyond the "traditional" canon, I'd recommend checking out works by the following composers: Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, Mel Bonis, Fanny Hensel, William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Amy Beach, Teresa Carreño, Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, and Grażyna Bacewicz. And many, many more!
You can learn about women composers at the website musicbywomen.org: this is a website with portraits, biographies, and musical examples by a wide variety of female composers and theorists.
The portraits on the walls of that room where I gave my talk represent greatness. But there is so much true greatness in the world of classical music. Our walls can and should include many more portraits.
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate