Chicago Sinfonietta Records Women Composers

courtesy of Naxos of America

The full title of a new album released a little over a week ago by Chicago-based Cedille Records is Project W: Works by Diverse Women Composers. This was the result of a project planned by the Chicago Sinfonietta and its current Music Director Mei-Ann Chen. It involved scheduling newly commissioned works by four women composers, Jennifer Higdon, Clarice Assad, Jessie Montgomery, and Reena Esmail, over the course of the ensemble’s 30th Anniversary season and then recording those pieces for release on the Cedille label. Chen also provided the album with an “overture” in the form of the three-movement suite Dances in the Canebrakes, composed for piano by Florence Price (1887–1953) in 1953 and subsequently arranged for orchestra by William Grant Still (1895–1978).

As might be expected, the album serves up a diversity of rhetorical stances. The final selection is Higdon’s Dance Card, a five-movement suite of dances that delightfully complements the Price suite. These are both high-spirited compositions; and, from a personal point of view, I found myself far more interested in the diversity of dance forms than I was in the fact that both of the composers were women and that Price was African-American. Granted, this is my own approach to being selective about the “cultural baggage” I bring to any performance. After all, I have never described Yuja Wang as a “woman pianist;” and the first time I saw Jessye Norman on a PBS broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I was paying more attention to her interpretation of Richard Wagner’s music for Sieglinde than I was to the color of her skin.

Nevertheless, two of the commissioned works were clearly conceived with connotations that were social as well as musical. The more explicit of them was probably Esmail’s “#metoo,” whose very title clearly suggests the sort of baggage she brought to her acts of composition. Indeed, the accompanying booklet notes make it clear that Esmail’s connection to that hashtag is a personal one, personal enough to let her own text speak for itself:

The harm itself happened when I was in high school and college, but I only began to admit it — even to myself — in 2015, when I first wrote honestly about it in words. And one of the first things I put in this writing was that I was hoping at some point that I could express those emotions, which were still so raw at that point, in an orchestral work. This piece, #metoo, written almost three years later, is that work.

This is a situation in which, quite honestly, I am not sure whether any account of my own listening experience will bring much relevance. I can, of course, write objectively about the rhetorical devices Esmail engaged in her process of composition; but those devices are simply part of a surface structure that should not be confused with the “deep structure” of her own mindset.

Assad’s composition, on the other hand, offers a somewhat more accessible balance between the objective and the subjective. The title is “Sin Fronteras,” which translates best as “without borders.” She was born in Rio de Janeiro, daughter of the Brazilian guitarist Sérgio Assad, whose own parents had emigrated from Lebanon to settle in Brazil. She has been living in the United States since 1998 and will say that her home is “The Americas.”

My own approach to “Sin Fronteras” was to regard it as a tone poem, which, over the course of a single uninterrupted movement, explores several different cultural contexts. The overall impact, however, is that of a unified whole, rather than a construction of interlocking parts. The transitions between those parts may be “border-like;” but they are not defined by “walls of separation.” In other words the music amounts to giving the composer an opportunity to express her own thoughts about those who respond to difference as a reason for building walls and those more inclined to seek out the unifying attributes of the human race. “Sin Fronteras” may be as “politicized” as “#metoo;” but its political stance is less involved with personal wounds and more an optimistic quest for celebrating similarities rather than resisting differences.

The Assad and Esmail compositions are separated by yet another dance-based piece. The title of Montgomery’s piece is “Coincident Dances.” Montgomery lives in New York, and one way to approach her composition is as a reflection on living in an environment in which cultural diversity is normative. As the booklet explains, her score casts a wide web across highly diverse cultural influences; yet, for all of their differences, those influences inhabit a single musical composition with little sense of discontent.