Boldly Expressive! (2000)

Feminissimo! (2008)

Classical

— Clara Schumann (1819-1896)

Laura Kobayashi: At Michigan, all doctoral students go through pre-doctoral recital screenings. You bring in your entire list of repertoire that you’re planning on performing, and then you select from there certain pieces that you want to present to the faculty so that they can say, “Okay is this person playing it well?” So here’s the room filled with the entire string faculty: one female who was my advisor, the rest all men. I bring in this nice, typed program and it has all these women on it such as Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, and several lesser known women composers. One of the comments that came out of one of the faculty members was, “Really? There are all these women who have written pieces for violin and piano? Are they any good?” It was clear he was thinking, “Wow! I didn’t know women could write music,” or something of that sort. “Could this possibly be any good? As good as Brahms?” And I’m standing there, and Susan is sitting there at the piano, and we’re both speechless. I could see my advisor, steam is coming out of her ears as she’s thinking, “I can’t believe someone just said that.”

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Susan Keith Gray: I’ve been playing piano all my life, essentially. I grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, started piano at five. Then I think probably most pertinent to this, when I was ten or eleven I had a real interest in accompanying, or at least the adults around me felt that it would be good for me to do accompanying and various collaborative projects. So I got involved very early with playing for choirs: high school choirs, church choirs. I would play with friends. I was just always collaborating. Then I went to Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I studied piano performance, played concertos and solos. I was also assigned to accompany for five hours each week. When I finished there I went to graduate school at the University of Illinois and did the same sort of thing. I was a graduate TA, but also played a lot of chamber music. After that I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and freelanced for fourteen years. That’s where Laura and I met. At first I just had students, then also I did a lot of accompanying at the University of Michigan and lots of other places in the area. Finally in ‘86 I decided to do my doctorate in chamber music and accompanying. I studied with Martin Katz who is one of the world’s most famous collaborative pianists for singers, so that was a real experience. In ‘95 I finally got the job here in Vermillion at the University of South Dakota where I play with the Rawlins Piano Trio. Laura and I have continued to play together, we met in 1990 and I’ll let Laura tell that story.

Laura: I started violin at the age of four with the Suzuki method. The Suzuki teacher had just moved from Japan to Seattle. I went through all the ten books, graduated at the age of eleven with the ten books, she decided she needed to move me on. There was this teacher who heard me in a local competition in Seattle, so [my teacher] approached him, he was teaching at the University of Washington, and she said, “Would you take Laura? You seem to really enjoy her playing.” And he said, “Oh, I don’t take children.” And my teacher kind of insisted, she sort of pushed me on to him. I think he didn’t know what to do. So he says, “Well, okay, alright.” And my mother’s thinking, “Whatever.” Anyway, he was this Hungarian violinist with an extremely thick accent and sort of wild, crazy hair. I studied with him all the way through high school. But in the midst of that, there was a workshop that was held in the springtime, and I met my future teacher at this workshop, it was Dorothy DeLay from The Juilliard School. So again, same kind of thing: I play for her in the master class, I had no idea who she was, my teacher says, “Oh! She’s really famous! She studied with Galamian! And you need to go study with her!” I’m thinking, “I have no idea who she is,” and my mother too, we didn’t know anything. So my teacher went and approached her after the masterclass, and he said, “I would love for my student to study with you.” So two months later I’m getting put on an airplane, all by myself, to go to Aspen, Colorado for nine weeks to study with her. My parents are feeling, “AH!” Panic stricken. So I studied with Dorothy DeLay for four summers, I finished my high school years, went to Juilliard in New York to study with her and do my undergraduate.

Then I got out of New York, went to Yale and did my masters. When I was getting to the end of my masters I realized, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.” I had no idea. So I freelanced, I taught kids, I took auditions, then I got a job in a San Francisco opera company. That didn’t work out for me so well because I ended up with a really terrible left hand injury, so I was out of commission for about nine months. Couldn’t play the violin at all. Ended up having surgery to sort of correct the issue, it was a nerve entrapment problem. At that point I realized, “Okay, this is not for me, I have to do something else.”

A friend, Paul Kantor, had gotten a job at the University of Michigan, so I called him and he goes, “Well, why don’t you come back to school?” And I say, “Ugh, that’s the last thing I want to do.” And he says, “Well, we have this artist diploma thing. You can go back to school, do this artist diploma, and you can just figure out what you want to do. It will buy you some time.” So I came back to school. I didn’t know anybody but through various connections I got this wedding gig. So I get there, I meet Susan, we play for a few hours, and then after we’re done she goes, “Hey, here’s my business card if you need somebody.” So that’s how it started. The rest is history. Now I’m teaching privately in northern Virginia, right outside the D.C. area.

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Laura: In March of ‘93, my doctoral advisor at the University of Michigan said, “Okay, you need to figure out a theme, what do you want to do for your recitals?” And at that point Susan and I had started learning the Zwilich Sonata in Three Movements. She had written it in 1975 and it uses twelve-tone. I really latched on to it, I thought, “Wow, this is a really interesting piece.” So I said that to my advisor and she said, “I’m going to give you a couple of CDs of music by women composers.” One of them was a whole album by Dame Ethel Smyth and another was a compilation of different women composers. She said, “Go home, listen to this music, and read the liner notes.” So I was reading about these women and thought, “Wow! This is really interesting!” And the music was so good. So I came back and said, “This sounds like a really great project. Do you think I could do this project playing recitals of nothing but music by women composers?” She said, “Yeah, there’s plenty out there, Laura. Just start digging.” So that’s kind of how it began. My former advisor really inspired me to do this. Then in ‘93, Michigan received an enormous gift of boxes and boxes of music by women composers.

Susan: The University picked it up at an auction in Europe.

Laura: It was everything from choral, to orchestral, to chamber music, to art song. There was sheet music like you wouldn’t believe, four or five big boxes stacked full of music. The librarian had it kept upstairs in the cage, the locked area, the reserves, so you have to have special permission to get up there. I brought down this gigantic stack of things that I found and I showed it to the librarian. I said, “Can I photocopy this stuff?” And he said, “Just look at the publishing date, you’re fine. Go ahead, do what you want.” So I was at the machine photocopying piano and violin scores of sonatas and short pieces. It was a “kid in a candy store” moment. It was so fun. I brought it all to Susan’s house and said “Okay! Let’s go through this stuff!”

Later on, we did a USIA [United States Information Agency] Artistic Ambassador tour of South America, which unfortunately the program has died out. Through that we met a couple people at the US embassy who worked in D.C., so we made a trip to the Library of Congress to spend an entire day looking for more music by women. Then after that it just kind of spiraled out of control. We just kept going with it.

Susan: We would sit and sight-read pieces because at that time the internet wasn’t available to us. Plus most of that music had never been recorded and was out of publication anyway. We would sight-read music and then pieces that we got interested in for whatever reason would go it into the “maybe” pile. We were in the earlier part of the wave to do this, and now it’s such an “in” thing to do. Composers of all different cultures and nationalities are also coming along on this wave. At the time that we were doing our research, there were lists of women composers, entire books listing female composers, and yet no one had heard of them. The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers was helpful to have. We could look up a composer and it was noted what they wrote, so we could start our search there and run across other pieces at the same time.

Our mission, in my opinion, was just intrigue and interest. “Wow, this stuff is out here. What else can we find?” Beyond that, like Laura was mentioning, people just looked at us and said, “Oh, well this can’t be any good,” or, “Oh, well this is just really second rate. That’s fine girls, just do your thing.” But on the other hand there were people who would be sincerely interested in what we were doing, and they hired us specifically because we were playing music by women composers. We’ve done it now for so long, for more than thirty years, and in some ways it feels really refreshing now because there are so many people putting out CDs by female composers. We’re just so far in the past now. But we were out there doing it a long time before a lot of these other people were doing it. So the mission still continues. We still keep talking about a third CD.

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Susan: In the 1800s, some women were allowed to have music composition teachers, but the general sentiment was, “You can be a wonderfully educated woman so that you can be a socialite in your community, but it’s not okay for you to write symphonies. Particularly, you can write salon music, you can write short pieces, you can write songs, but don’t try to compete with the big boys.” So there was definitely that problem. And generally, no, they weren’t getting commissions, they were just writing. Marie Grandval was well-to-do, so she could spend her time doing what she wanted to do, and writing what she wanted to write. She even wrote some operas.

And then you have somebody like Pauline Viardot-Garcia, she was one of the greatest singers of her generation, so her primary career was as a vocalist. But again she was also fairly privileged because she came from a long line of musicians, so she had that musical support as a singer. Her composing for a long time was sort of secondary. It wasn’t until she retired from singing that she began to write.

We came across the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, she’s on both CDs. We started with Sonata No. 5 on the first CD which we just loved. The fact that she’s written five sonatas, we realized, “Okay, there’s more to this.” So we kept learning them, and put Sonata No. 3 on the next CD. We’ve also learned Sonata No. 4, we just really love these Sonatas, and in fact No. 4 might be our favorite. Albany Records, they are more interested in recording stuff that has not been recorded. Bacewicz had been recorded by some people at a foundation or archive dedicated to her in Southern California, but when we listened and followed along with the score we heard a lot of inaccuracies in that recording. So we felt, “If this is the only recording out there, there deserves to be another more accurate recording.” These were famous people who recorded it, but they probably just sat down, sight-read it, and threw it together. So every once in a while we would record something that had already been recorded, but we do try to have premiers. There’s kind of a race to do this now: We’d get down the process, then suddenly somebody’s CD comes out and they just recorded what we were trying to record but they got there first.

Laura: For some of these women, there’s only “this much” known about them and that’s it, that’s all you can find. On the first CD we did the premier recording of Grandval’s “Grande Sonate.” We tried to do research to find out more about her — not only her life, but also more about any of her music. Unfortunately there’s not much known about her.

Another one is Signe Lund, the Norwegian composer. I found her by happenstance so we played her music in Norway at a conference. Afterwards, this Edvard Grieg expert came up and said, “I had no idea there were women Norwegian composers! I know about all the Norwegian composers past and present and I never knew these existed!” And Susan and I looked at each other thinking, “Hehehe, we got one on you.”

Then you have some of the later composers who are unique. For instance, Dame Ethel Smyth lived during the turn of the [20th] century. She participated in the march in London for the suffragettes and was thrown in jail for protesting. She was also one of the first known LGBTQ composers to come out and not be ashamed of who she was. And her music is brilliant. She wrote choral stuff, she wrote a couple operas, The Wreckers is her big one. But her instrumental music is brilliant. It’s very thick, it’s symphonic, it’s romantic, and it’s not this over the top music you might associate with the salon music Susan was talking about.

Smyth was never married and she didn’t have any children, so her estate was in control of this particular law firm in London. The law firm got in touch with us and said, “By no means are you going to be allowed to perform or record any of this unless we get the first rights of refusal, etc.” The letters and the faxes that I received and sent, the pile is huge.

Susan: Originally we actually got a “cease and desist” letter because we were performing the work and they told us to stop performing it. Which is absurd, I mean, why was it written?

Laura: Yeah, what’s the whole point? You want this music to be out there. You want people to know about how brilliant it is, that this person was an incredibly brilliant composer. Why not perform it? Why not have a corrected edition because there were mistakes in the original? I mean, it’s no different than Mendelssohn, Schumann, whoever, right? Why?