Lina Gonzalez-Granados, conductor
But first to conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados, here in Santa Fe from Colombia, and cellist Christine Lamprea. I went to their concert interested, as always, in the question: how does a woman conductor or a woman performer differ from a man?
The first issue, of course, is to level the playing field so that women have the same opportunities for education and performance as men, particularly difficult given the iron grip of the traditional music schools.
Both Gonzalez-Granados and Christine Lamprea have benefitted from the traditional training that was once denied to women in the music field. And they are both being given opportunities across the country to perform, often after winning blind auditions. Blind auditions, though, don’t work for conductors, for obvious reasons.
In the case of both women, I was immediately struck by their uninhibited use of their bodies. As she conducts, Gonzalez-Granados at times embraces her orchestra with sweeping gestures of her exceptionally long arms, then warns them off, then points a single finger on her right hand to bring one player in. When she is not using her left arm, it hangs, totally relaxed. There is never a moment in the music when she is not fully engaged, bending, stretching, casting her enormous smile on her players. All musicians now use their bodies more expressively than in the past—and sometimes wear eye-catching gowns, as well—but this woman’s degree of engagement and intensity was something I had not witnessed before.
Christine Lamprea, cellist. Photo by Amanda Westcott.
By contrast, I read the story of Florence Price, the first African-American woman composer to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra in 1933.
Born in 1887 in Little Rock, she first performed on the piano at four, then saw her first composition published when she was eleven, Her parents’ middle-class status—her father was a dentist, her mother a music teacher who guided her—did not shield her from the horrors of living in a racist society. When she was accepted as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, she pretended to be Mexican to alleviate bias, graduating with honors and returning to Little Rock to marry. But a lynching there in 1927 drove her to Chicago, now a single mother of two small daughters. To make a living, she played the organ for silent films and composed jingles for radio commercials, this last under an assumed name.
Her break came when she won the Wanamaker Award for her Symphony in F minor, premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But by the time of her death in 1953, she and her music were forgotten. Boxes of her compositions were left to deteriorate in an abandoned house. Only the insight of the new owners prevented her life work from ending up in a dumpster.
But what courage and persistence she showed, always required as it is required now by the two brilliant women I just saw perform. As Florence Price, although formed by the European music of her period, always included references to African music, so Gonzalez-Granados and Lamprea include the magnetism and strength of their female bodies.
Truly, we are blessed.
Florence Price. Photo: G. Nelidoff/Florence Price Papers, University or Arkansas Libraries
Well, here I am again, commenting on your pieces. As so often, I’m surprised to find here no comments on a piece. But we all have our own interests and passions.
When I was 42, I went to the Bay Area and found a powerful women’s community — most feminists, many lesbian, many hetero, and later other burgeoning groups to appear and keep on appearing nationally. There was no end to things in the women’s, and feminist movements in the Bay Area that were new to me.
The many small modern companies there did not surprise me. I knew that in America women had created modern dance, and so had formed and directed their own groups and choreographed for them. I knew that ballet was ruled by men company directors and choreographers, women being only dancers.
In ballet only Marie Rambert and Agnes de Mille had created their own companies, for which they did the choreography. Anna Pavlova was the first ballerina to tour on her own with her (male) partner and an accompanist, which was a very small “company”.
I knew, too, that men had refused women positions in “their” (men’s) symphony orchestras from the start except for the rare harpist, violinist or flutist. Women were absolutely excluded from the manly sections — brass and percussion in the major orchestras. But I did not know that there had always been women who’d composed instrumental music until I discovered the jewel of that time in the Bay Area, the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic. I’d never heard a composition by a woman played by ANY orchestra, live or recorded. Until I heard BAWP play concerts of music only by women and saw living composers sitting onstage with the (woman) conductor after the concerts, talking about their work and dialoguing with us in the audience.
On one concert BAWP played one of Florence Price’s compositions, and so I learned about her life and work in music. I was so pleased to see you writing here about FP and the conductor’s and cellist’s performance of her composition. Post-60’s and 70’s-80’s feminism, young women have been able to force their way into training and minor positions in music, as conductors, composers and soloists. It’s good to see, but for the most part men are still “not seeing” what they have been and still are doing to keep women out of “their” music. And they refuse to “broaden” (ahem) the curriculum which university students (musicians-in-training, teachers and professors) study.
In the Bay Area I was astounded and furious to discover that there had also always been serious women visual artists, striking a match to what would be another lifelong passion for me. But which most people know nothing about either.
When women do get a chance to catch a glimpse of women’s talents and artistry
it is the thrill which you described in this piece — the same thrill that blacks and other “kept out” groups feel when they/we see ourselves up there onstage, on the museum walls, at the bookstore podium, on the radio, on screens, broadening (pun intended) the world. I would love it if the people who read your pieces, Sallie, would become intrigued by The Kept Out and start searching for them. It makes the world a so much more exciting and happy place.