Clerestory Celebrates the Nineteenth Amendment

Yesterday afternoon in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Clerestory presented the San Francisco performance of the second of the three programs in its 2019–2020 season. The full title of the program was Suffragist: Music Celebrating Women Trailblazers; and it was prepared in celebration of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, whose adoption was certified on August 26, 1920. For those that have not yet made the connection, that Amendment states:

The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

With only one exception all of the a cappella performances of the ensemble were compositions by women composers. The program was divided into seven thematic sections, and suffrage itself was not the primary issue in most of those sections. Because this was a celebration of an event in American history, it was a bit amusing that the program began with Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” which became the official anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the leading suffragist organization in Britain. Ironically, this was also the only piece of music that was familiar to me, since it had been adopted as the theme music for the Masterpiece Theatre broadcast of Shoulder to Shoulder, a dramatization of the British suffragist movement, in the summer of 1976. (Yes, it was programmed to be broadcast in conjunction with the bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

The entire concert lasted about an hour. All of the fifteen selections were relatively brief and consistently engaging, The most sophisticated was Anne Hege’s setting of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which extended the diversity of Stevens’ perspectives with perspective of her own emerging from breaking with the ordering of not only the short thirteen verses but also that of the lines within those verses.

Photograph of Alma Mahler probably taken around the time of her marriage to Gustav Mahler (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The most fascinating was the selection by Alma Mahler, “Die stille Stadt” (the silent town). Before she met Mahler, Alma Schindler had been studying composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky (as well as having an affair with him … no surprise there). However, after the wedding Mahler made Alma give up composition, relenting only at the end of his life in helping to publish some of her works. In “Die stille Stadt” one can appreciate the lush rhetorical dispositions that can be found in Zemlinsky’s compositions, suggesting that Mahler might have viewed his wife as a potential rival or even a threat.

The only male composer was Phillip Paul Bliss, whose late nineteenth-century tune was arranged for this Clerestory program by John Kelley. The words were written by Harriet Robinson and Mrs. A. B. Smith and amounted to a “pro and con” perspective on women’s suffrage. Concluding the program, the “dialog” was realized by tenor Kevin Baum and soprano Tonia D’Amelio with choral accompaniment provided by the remaining Clerestory vocalists. The argument was vigorously assertive, but the woman’s point of view prevailed in the final verse!