The life of a genius; Beethoven

We constantly hear about the genius of Beethoven, but this is more evident when we get a chance to look a little more into his life, the hardships he underwent and how his genius saved him. If you're looking for something to watch over the weekend check out the BBC's documentary on his life. Enjoy! 

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International Women's day: song of the day

Happy International Women's Day to all of you!

This date inspired me look up a couple of Latin American women composers, and my pick of the day is the Mexican composer María Grever.
Having studied a little bit about female lied composers I realized I didn't really know any Latin American art song composers and that had to change. Obviously I had heard many of María Grever's songs, but with my ignorance I always associated these songs with big names like Agustin Lara among others. Of course the reasons why I made this assumption are not good, and I want to dedicate my life to change this.
There are amazingly talented and equally powerful and expressive female composers, the reasons why they are not as prominent as male composers starts with the simple fact that we actually have to say "female composers", because the realm of composition is commonly associated with men. And this is due to many reasons starting with women's access to formal music education, lack of family and professional support to women composers, and a general idea that women composers are just not as good as men, because we rarely here about them.
Music History text books rarely talk about women composers, because they weren't as prominent. But why weren't they? Who writes history? Who compiles music anthologies?
So they exist in Latin America, and they are wonderful just like Clara Schumman or Fanny Mendelssohn were in Europe. So I invite everyone, especially women to go beyond our textbooks and listening lists on our syllabi, because this change will only happen if we are proactive and look for this information that is not given to us.
So now, back to the pick of the day.
María Grever. I won't pretend to be an expert on her music and biography so please go to: http://www.wildwomenofsong.com/downloads/wwos_mariagrever.pdf
The song I picked is "Mi secreto" of Grever herself singing. It's an old recording, but what a better way to get an idea of her beautiful mind than by hearing herself interpreting the piece. Even though she was known mostly for her Latin American boleros, this song has more cosmopolitan sound to it. I can hear in it a little bit of the contemporaneous cabaret style of France, as well as a very distinct Latin American sound. Please enjoy and let me know what you think. If you have more names you think I should explore I am more than open!

Happy International Women's day! http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/13/london-oriana-choir-women-composers

Women's contribution to Lied

When we have to ask ourselves “what contributions did women composers have on the development of such an important and prolific genre as German Lied” there is already an issue that comes to mind; the fact that women’s work and contribution in the past were not recognized on equal terms as those of men and were assumed to be different or in many cases nonexistent. However it is not something new for women’s contribution to culture to be ignored or relegated to domestic or second class contributions, unworthy of public appearance or even mention in history and musicology books.

The Nineteenth Century for women composers and musicians was a crucial time in history for women, not because there had not been women musicians in the past, but because of the socio-economic and technological changes in Germany and other parts of Europe that allowed more women to study, perform and compose music. The Industrial Revolution, together with the development of the pianoforte were key in allowing middle and upper-class women access to music performances, pianofortes, more participation in private performances, and in a few cases advanced music education and public performances.

Up untill the second half of the Eighteenth Century women had been overtly described and seen as inferior by important figures such as Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who in his treatise Émile described women as lacking creativity and genius. Of course these claims came from men who were unaware or disregarded the immense difference between the opportunities men and women had to develop creativity and genius. Women’s lack of participation and recognition in music was seen as a “proof of their biological inferiority” by men like Havelock Ellis who studied sexuality from a physician's point of view. There was also the issue of censorship of women’s works by men, a fact that sometimes forced women to pass as men in order to be published or be heard.

    Drastically smaller in number because of the obstacles above mentioned, many works by women in the Romantic period are comparable in quality, virtuosism and expressiveness to those of men. What made the Nineteenth Century a turning point in music history and, in particular, in the history of women participation was in part the expanding middle class and the invention of the pianofortes.  “Women began to cultivate their talents and tastes as amateur musicians. They had leisure to practice the piano and sing, and they began to provide an important market for music publishing companies, composers and piano makers..." (Gorrell)
    Women’s amateur music making in a domestic setting had long been accepted in Germany and it certainly increased with the widespread presence of pianofortes in middle-class homes. Women were in charge of entertaining guests and family by either performing themselves or organizing soirées, like the famous Sunday sessions the Mendelssohn family would host where both Fanny and Felix would play for a small audience. The difference between Fanny and Felix, was that for Felix this was only entertainment and not the limit of his musical life, while Fanny was kept for the most part from performing in public outside these soirées and publishing her works under her name.

Independently of the role of women, the importance of this soirées in the context of the Nineteenth Century lied is that  “it was in the intimate setting of the middle-class home that the lied was performed..." (Gorrell) In the beginning of the Nineteenth Century women were now “becoming an important segment of the public that was replacing the nobility as prime patron of the arts." (Gorrell)

Women were also now exposed to music more often than before through concert subscriptions in cities like Liepzig, home soirées, and by having more access to pianofortes and musical scores. Women were able to learn the music and some of them experimented with melodies and taught themselves how to compose, some others like Fanny Hensel or Clara Wieck had the advantage of coming from musical families and receiving music education from members of their family from an early age.

    Relegated to the roles of housewives these two women, who are two of the few well known Romantic female composers, were kept from developing to their full potential like men in their families did. Clara Wieck, for instance, began her musical studies with her own father who taught her piano and composition, encouraging her to compose and perform her own music. She was a child prodigy and an amazing mature pianist, however when she married Robert Schumann, with whom she had eight children, she had limited time to practice and compose herself as she had to take care of the family.  Additionally, Schumann did not allow her to play while he was composing. He “was reluctant to share her with the rest of the world and also did not wish to live in her artistic shadow.” (Gorrell)
    Most concert pianist in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century would include at least one composition of their own on a program and Wieck was not the exception having been encouraged by her father to do so from an early age. Despite this support and encouragement, she received from her father, she lacked confidence in her skills and musical abilities,  which is understandable given the general attitude towards women in the arts, and the strict expectations of women to fulfill their duties and responsibilities at home with their family. She said:

I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose - not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to? It would be arrogance, though indeed, my Father led me into it in earlier days. (Gorrell)

However, Wieck was a fortunate woman for the time to have the education and support from her father and to a certain extent of her husband as well. Schumann despite being controlling of Wieck said that “children and a husband... do not go well with composition. [Clara] cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many tender ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.” (Gorrell) Having listened to many of Wieck’s compositions Schumann decides to publish a volume of lieder together.

Wieck’s song style is “sophisticated and challenging, illustrating not only her talent but the quality of her musical education. She possessed a rich and varied harmonic vocabulary, and her piano figurations are pianistically well conceived." (Gorrell) Her lied works could undoubtedly be compared to that of any other composer at the time as she followed the style of the time. Just like her husband Schumann, her lied compositions were known for the independence of the vocal lines and piano, with both playing different expressive functions within the same story. She would use the piano to expand on what the voice was stating, or to explore the depth the story by drawing a picture of the places and moods the poem would go through that were not necessarily expressed in the text. She would do this by means of harmonic structure or word painting.

Wieck’s experience is definitely a privileged one compared to so many other women we do not even hear about nowadays and whose works never were recorded or kept by their families or patrons. Fanny Hensel in the other hand had a similar musical education, but as she matured as a woman and a musician obstacles began to appear in her life. She did not receive the same support from her family for publishing her works as her brother Felix Mendelssohn did, despite the fact that her music had been complemented by personalities of the time such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and their teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter.

Mendelssohn, however, admired her sister’s work and decided to publish some of her compositions on two of his publications, however with no attribution to Hensel. “Both collections received favorable reviews after their publication, and critics usually cited Fanny’s songs as being particularly lovely.” Publishing under somebody else’s name like Hensel, sharing a publication with a renowned composer like Wieck, or being endorsed by a renowned male composer were the main ways in which women managed to get their works published and develop their careers as composers.

Josephine Lang for instance is known today because she was endorsed by Mendelssohn. "Although his endorsement may be the primary reason that she has not been forgotten, and examination of her music should secure her a respectable place in the history of the art song." (Gorrell)

Despite the common discouraging attitude towards women development in the high art of composition the women above mentioned along with other such as Luise Reichardt and Corona Schröter had a great number of compositions to contribute to the Lied repertoire with their own individual voice in the same genres and styles as their male contemporaries.

Despite the changes in attitude towards women’s participation in the high arts nowadays, history has been written by those in power, and music recorded and published by them as well. Our goal as female music students, performers and academics should be to dig deep, be proactive in our search for repertoire and sources to learn about the history of music that even today is neglected in history courses and books. Even today “the canon of excellence in western art music includes no female Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart... [which] perpetuates the bastion of innate male superiority.”

Sources:

Bowers, Jane M, and Judith Tick. Women making music : the Western art tradition, 1150-1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Gorrell, Lorraine. The nineteenth-century German lied. Pompton Plains, NJ; Milwaukee, Wisc.: Amadeus Press ; For North American sales, Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005.

Reich, Nancy B. Clara Schumann : the artist and the woman. Ithaca [N.Y.]: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Tillard, Françoise. Fanny Mendelssohn. Portland, Or.: Amadeus Press, 1996.

"Má vlast: The Moldau" - Bedrich Smetana.

I have decided to share a music pick as often as possible. I'll shoot for "pick of the day" since I am constantly listening to beautiful music, analyzing it and learning it. I might as well take advantage of music school and share beauty with all of you. I will also do my best to share a little bit of what I have learned from each of the pieces. Feel free to comment. 
Today's pick is "Má vlast: The Moldau" by Bedrich Smetana. 
I simply love it, but as I learned more about the piece and Czech Nationalism I came to appreciate it even more. Nationalism was an impulse to unify people by creating a national identity through common language, tradition and institutions. In Czech nationalism as well as many other expressions of nationalist music in other countries, composers used folk songs and folk tales for their plots, and compositions.
There were two main currents in Nationalism; the nationalists and the westernizers.
Smetana was a nationalist, meaning he was interested in expressiveness and simplicity in the music rejecting western techniques like counterpoint.
In "Má vlast: The Moldau" you can hear rhythms and melodies that reflect Czech people of the time. It might sound more complex that just a folksong, but compared to what other composers such as Dvorak were working on this was simpler and closer to the country's roots.
Enjoy!

Decidí publicar en mi blog una canción diaria, o al menos esa es mi meta por el momento. Quiero aprovechar que estoy constantemente estudiando nuevo repertorio y analizando y aprendiendo de distintos compositores y musicos para poder compartir un poco de la belleza que es la música. Haré lo posible por compartir algún dato interesante de las piezas que escoja. 
La obra que escogí el día de hoy es "Má vlast: The Moldau" del compositor checo Bedrich Smetana.
Me fascina, pero cuando aprendí acerca del nacionalismo checo aprendí a apreciar aún más lo que esta música significa. El nacionalismo fue un impulso de unificar al pueblo creando una identidad nacional por medio de un idioma común, tradiciones e instituciones. En el nacionalismo checo como en el de otros paises los compositores compusieron y usaron canciones populares, cuentos y la misma historia para escribir sus libretos y componer música.
Hubo dos corrientes principales en el nacionalismo, los occidentalistas y los nacionalistas. Smetana fue un nacionalista lo cual quiere decir que se interesaba más en la expresividad y simplicidad de la música rechazando entonces las tecnicas de composición occidentales como el contrapunto entre otras.
En "Má vlast: The Moldau" se pueden escuchar ritmos y melodias que reflejan tradiciones checas de ese entonces. La música puede sonar más compleja que una simple canción popular, pero comparado con otros compositores de la epoca como Dvorak, la música de Smetana refleja los sonidos checos de una manera más popular.

Reflections on ethnographic works

The act of writing an ethnography can be seen as the presentation of observations gathered through fieldwork, and the successful ethnography is that which creatively explores ways of recreating the experience of the field. An ethnography or anthropological text becomes a vehicle for anthropologists to give meaning to what was observed in the field. According to Rabinow these “ ‘facts’ of anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are already themselves interpretations” (Richards). “Doing ethnography is like trying to read a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.” (Geertz) Therefore, a successful ethnography will go beyond the categories of the ethnographer to recreate life as experienced in the field. Anthropological “fieldwork is the distinctive method to collect data, but anthropology is the means to carry home, as it were.”(Hastrup) “The anthropological text is a controlled communication that the author uses to persuade or critique, invent, justify, or reaffirm a theoretical position” (Gudeman & Rivera). Therefore it is important to pay significant attention to the analysis of the ethnography itself, “the figures and metaphors, the historical position of the ethnographer and its impact upon the text produced, and the shifting, reflexive relation between observer and observed” (Gudeman & Rivera). In this way, anthropology is not an objective experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz). It is more like art or discourse through which we try to make sense of the experience in the field. “If you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do” (Geertz). In anthropology practitioners do ethnographies, so we have to understand what an ethnography is. Ethnographic texts describe something observed, give meaning to actions or practices registered by means of a “thick description”, a description of a human behavior that registers not just the behavior, but the complex context as well so that the behavior can become meaningful to an outsider. (Hastrup) The “experience in itself is not necessarily creative. To be so it has to be transformed and mediated, and we are back at the problem of how to transplant life from context to text in a way which does not kill it” (Hastrup). And it is with the goal of giving meaning to the actions and practices observed, that anthropologists come up with new words, resort to storytelling or become artists in order to create another dimension that cannot be seen through the lenses of our own culture. The use of creative vehicles to recreate field experiences is not meant to represent facts. For instance the “storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work... does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again” (Benjamin). “But according to recent "textualists, [like Geertz]" the claim to have had the "experience" of "being there" is itself a rhetorical figure, a culturally and historically dated ideology used to justify the authority of the text in which it appears (Gudeman & Rivera). But it is through fieldwork, through engaging in real conversations, that the ethnographer has the opportunity to recognize a discourse constructed in ways that sheds new light, that challenges, that enriches her own stories, her own texts and, if creatively used, will enrich the conversations from the past and the ones being registered in the ethnographic text. Hastrup makes a distinction between being a writer, or being an author to describe the task anthropologists have. She explains that a writer simply states the facts observed, while the author finds creative ways to explain the field experience through “thick description”. However, it is important to understand that “the author does not write fiction even though he creates reality. The border between fiction and creation may be difficult to draw, but the point is that the author of ethnographic texts ha[s] internalized an alien (un-)reality, which he [or she] then externalize[s] in the aim of making it accessible” (Hastrup). In the early twentieth Century, Malinowsky presented the idea that isolating oneself of one’s culture and completely diving into the native culture generated a better and deeper understanding of the culture studied. Later Rabinow critiqued this approach stating that not only the ethnographer is “learning about the informant’s culture, but the informant as well sees a glimpse of his culture as viewed by an outsider” (Richards). In this way the ethnographer impacts the people she engages with while doing fieldwork and generates changes of which she should be aware, while at the same time in the best examples, the ethnographer understanding and conversation is enriched. This occurs both to the outsider and the insider, just like fish immersed in the water, we seldom objectify our own culture. When we mirror ourselves in others and allow to view ourselves from and with the other’s point of view, we become aware of the metaphors, the very universe of meaning that provides us with and identity and our communities with a history and a future. With this in mind Rabinow recognizes that “both the anthropologist and his informants live in a culturally mediated world, caught up in ‘webs of significance’ they themselves have spun. This is the ground of anthropology; there is not privileged position, no absolute perspective, and no valid way to eliminate consciousness from our activities or those of others” (Richards). And it is not a one way street. Like in any conversation, both interlocutors are changed. The creativity or rhetorical forms used by anthropologists is now receiving more attention as one argument states that anthropologists draw upon their “own culture’s form of persuasion and canons of expository style, [which] significantly control the way one culture ‘reads’ another” (Gudeman & Rivera). Not only do ethnographers try to categorize or pigeonhole the experiences based on their own, but the culture being observed already has their own models that describe their reality. Fieldwork can also change the original hypotheses and theories anthropologists bring to the field. Observations made in the field can overflow definitions, concepts and theories forcing anthropologists to redefine old terms or use new ones to describe what was observed. This is the case of “Conversations in Colombia” where the economics notion of means of production is overwhelmed by the local notion of “base”. The ethnographer explores the local notion and contrasts it with the “Western” or the academic notions originally used to frame field observations, enrich our understanding or both. The process of writing an ethnography is then a process of “sorting out the structure of signification” (Geertz). Not only the structures found in the fieldwork, but that of the practitioners themselves. Anthropologists then need to be prepared to switch their objects of study or modify and create categories, as the observations in the field and the local explanations, metaphors, models and universes of meaning illuminate the original notions or challenge and displace them. Ethnographers assume that categories and models are not universal, including the generalizations and universals notions of the discipline which are understood as yet another cultural product. With this understanding, both the ethnographer’s as well as the local assumptions and conceptual frameworks can be better understood. “Ultimately, the aim of the anthropologist is not to prove, but to understand. However, what anthropologists view as the path to understanding has changed considerably over time” (Richards). Sources: Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller”, n.d. http://www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, 1973. Gudeman, Stephen, and Alberto Rivera. Conversations in Colombia : the Domestic Economy in Life and Text. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hastrup, Kirsten. “The Challenge of the Unreal - of How Anthropology Comes to Terms with Life.” In Culture and History. Copenhagen, 1987. Richards, Rebekah. “Changes in Anthropology Fieldwork over Time.” Blog. Anthropology @ Suite 101, January 30, 2010. http://rebekahrichards.suite101.com/changes-in-anthropology-fieldwork-over-time-a195889.