In honor of Women’s History Month, DRAM would like to highlight some of the many talented female musicians and composers in the DRAM catalogue.
Click on any of the links below to view the liner notes or listen to the associated album.
Many of these exceptional artists are featured on numerous recordings within DRAM. We hope that the list below, far from exhaustive, will serve as an entry point into the oeuvres of these artists and their peers, awakening curiosities and fostering further appreciation of, and exposure to, women in music.
Beth Anderson: Swales and Angels
You have to brush the twentieth century aside to hear it, but the eternal truths that Schiller underlined come back to refresh us in Beth Anderson's music. It's not that the century doesn't find expression in her music, nor that she is unconnected to her time…. Conceptualism, minimalism, chance music, speech music, flowed around her and she participated fully. But as she gradually evolved her own idiom, she was guided by a natural simplicity in her "mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as movement"--and a simple grace.
Amy Beach: Grand Mass in E-Flat Major
Mrs. H.H.A. Beach was a famous, influential and admired composer during the early part of this century. A pioneer on many fronts, she was the first American woman to compose a symphony, the Gaelic Symphony, premiered in 1896 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. While on tour in Europe in 1914, she was hailed by one critic in Berlin as "the leading American composer." As more of her prodigious output is made available through recordings, people are becoming aware of her significance as a composer of works of great scope and beauty.
Margaret Brouwer: Light
As a composer who started out as an orchestral player, Brouwer had an advantage that many of her colleagues never experience: absorbing the panoply of sounds around her. Her life as a performer helps to explain the clarity of her writing, as well as her fascination with the distinctive colors of instruments alone and in myriad combinations. Brouwer's music possesses an almost childlike sense of enchantment and fantasy. It is immediately accessible without sounding glib or simple, the result of the composer's painstaking effort to employ sophistication and complexity within an organic unfolding of ideas.
Gloria Coates: Orchestral Works
Gloria Coates is of a modernist generation for whom music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time. At the same time, she is capable, as few members of her generation are, of limiting her materials and welding a work into a single gesture.
Ruth Crawford: Various Works
“My music is experimental,” Ruth Crawford said in 1933. Indeed it is - her small but choice oeuvre ranking as a major contribution to the experimental tradition in American Music. Crawford, along with HenryCowell, Carl Ruggles, Edgar Varese and Dane Rudhyar, were called "ultra moderns" in the 1920s - the formative decade for early American modernist music.
Vivian Fine: Various Works
By age five it was apparent that Vivian was a gifted musician. Probably Fine would have become a concert pianist had she not begun theory lessons with Ruth Crawford, who suggested that Vivian, thirteen at the time, write a composition. The result impressed Crawford, and it was not long before friends such as Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and Imre Weisshaus, recognized and supported this teenage talent. This compact disc is a retrospective overview of Fine's music featuring works in almost every genre and from throughout the various phases of her career.
Miriam Gideon: Chamber Music Selection
As in visual art, in music there is an equivalent--and equally important--development, which we call atonal expressionism. The work of Miriam Gideon stands out as a major and individualistic realization of this style. One of the characteristics of abstract expressionism is that it is highly intense and personal; nonrepresentational art, free of references to the outside world, must of necessity build from its own premises and reflect an interior emotional world. This experience is exactly what we find in Miriam Gideon's music. There is a drama and lyricism here, highly controlled yet nevertheless personal, economical yet full of fantasy.
Joan Labarbara: Shamansong
Joan Labarbara's career as a composer/performer/sound-artist explores the human voice as a multifaceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries. She has created works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra, and interactive technology, developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation, and glottal clicks that have become her "signature sounds."
Anne LeBaron: Sacred Theory of the Earth
Anne LeBaron, a composer and musician at the forefront of innovation, is recognized for her work in the electronic, instrumental, and performance realms. Her compositions embrace an extraordinary array of subjects, ranging from contemporary adaptations of Greek and South American myths, to a current probe into extinction - addressing not only endangered species in the natural world, but also vanishing icons of popular culture.
Ursula Mamlok: Chamber Music of Ursula Mamlok
“I began composing as a child,” says Berlin-born composer Ursula Mamlok. “Right from the beginning I was playing my own tunes on the piano, complete with accompaniments. It was all done instinctively. My piano teacher would write down my compositions because I didn't know how to write music at that time.” Mamlok's instinctive gifts and impeccable ear are balanced by an exacting self-discipline and craftsmanship that are still at the core of her music. The five chamber works on this recording, spanning the 1960s through the 1980, display Mamlok's lean, superbly economical style.
Mystery: The Songs of Lori Laitman
Lori Laitman graduated magna cum laude, with honors in music, from Yale College, and received her M.M. in flute performance from the Yale School of Music. Her compositional focus was initially writing music for film and theatre; in 1980, she composed the score to The Taming of the Shrew for the Folger Theatre in Washington. Since 1991, she has concentrated on composing for the voice. The works on this CD, for voice with a variety of accompaniments, reveal Ms. Laitman's ability to capture and highlight the spirit of each individual poem.
Annea Lockwood: A Sound Map of the Hudson River
Lockwood’s extensive body of work includes tape pieces, instumental and vocal music, mixed-media performance works, installations and sound sculptures. A Sound Map of the Hudson River is an aural journey from the source of the river, Lake Tear of the Clouds in the high peak area of the Adirondacks, downstream to the Lower Bay and the Atlantic.
Pauline Oliveros: Ghostdance
The theme of Ghostdance centers on our relationship to the spirit world—to the voices and stories of our ancestors, both recent and ancient. The world of daylight and the senses confronts the realm of memory, dream and death. Drawing upon the cultural palettes of Mexico and the United States, the work evokes this mysterious middle world through movement, sound, text, music and visual design, creating a landscape of inter–actions, collisions and revelations.
Eliane Radigue: Songs of Milarepa
Eliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied electroacoustic music techniques at RTF under Pierre Shaeffer and Pierre Henry, before accepting residencies at NYU, Iowa University, CalArts and Mills College. In 1975, Radigue became a disciple of Tibetan Buddhism. After four years of study, she began a large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the 11th century Tebetan master Milarepa, one part of which is represented by this disc.
Joan Tower: Black Topaz
As a composer, Joan Tower prefers to let her music speak for itself. Articulate about music in general, and used to exploring compositions with her students at Bard College, she nevertheless resists explaining her own music; writing program notes "is torture for me," she says. What, after all, can words say that music can't express much better itself?
Chen Yi: Sparkle
Chen Yi is recognized as one of the most important and talented composers of her generation. Her orchestral, chamber and vocal works are widely performed in the U.S. and abroad. Of her music, she says, “I express my feelings through my music which combines Chinese and Western musical materials and medium….The inspirations and ideas behind the pieces are mostly Chinese. But the instrumentations of the pieces usually came from the musicians in America who suggested or commissioned them.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Symphony No. 1
In a preface to the printed score of Symphony No. 1, Zwilich speaks of some of her central musical concerns that link her music to the past and the present and send it searching into the future. She addresses formal and harmonic issues that appear in more than one period of the history of music; she speaks of her commitment to the joy of performing and to the musicians who perform her music. Out of her personal synthesis of these and other factors comes music that is her own
Compilations
Lesbian American Composers
CRI salutes the eleven composers on this disc for their music and all that goes into it. As they say for themselves in their notes which follow, their gender and sexuality are but parts of their whole persons. But we also salute their bravery in standing as proud lesbians in a profession and in a society where just being a woman can sometimes still be a detriment. The artists range in age from their 30s to their 70s and have backgrounds in mainstream composition and teaching, as well as in performance art and ritual, film scoring and Broadway.
New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women in Electronic Music - 1977
It’s becoming difficult to recall the U.S. music scene without a prominent contingent of women composers, now that Joan Tower, Meredith Monk, Shulamit Ran, Chen Yi, and Joan La Barbara among others appear with increasing regularity in classical music venues. But when the present anthology was released by Tom Buckner's pioneering label 1750 Arch LP in Berkeley in 1977, nothing comparable was available.
Songs from the Heart: Works by American Women Composers 1900-1920
“At the turn of the century, nice women didn't appear in public, fraternize with men outside the family circle, publish under their own names, or study anything unrelated to the home arts. Women interested in music theory and composition were looked on as deranged.” The recordings on this album offer a glimpse into the musically creative world of women during this time, despite the opposition they faced.
