Music for the Fight for Women’s Rights

Cover design for the album being discussed

This coming Thursday, violinist Lara St. John will release her latest album on Ancalagon Records. The title is ♀she/her/hers, and it presents seventeen original compositions for solo violin written by twelve leading women composers. As of this writing, it appears that the album is only being released for digital download; and, as expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders.

Regular readers probably know by now that I am no stranger to recordings that focus on music composed by women, both past and present. However, St. John’s release was motivated by a larger mission to fight for women’s rights and historically marginalized groups. More specifically, she has a personal stake in this mission, stemming from her experience as a fourteen-year-old victim of sexual abuse that took place when she was a student and the Curtis Institute of Music.

With such a context she makes it clear that this is not “sit back and listen” music. Sadly, the Amazon.com Web page does not include a booklet as part of the download (and, for that matter, it does not identify the composers for the individual tracks). Fortunately, St. John has compensated by creating her own Web site for the album. This includes hyperlinks for information about the contributing composers and descriptive information for each track on the recording.

This is an album that demands that every listener find his/her/their own path of interpretative listening, and I feel it would be put of place for me to inject my own biases into the mix.