Few pieces within the contemporary classical repertoire concern themselves solely with pregnancy, a fact of which I am all too aware as someone living a double life as a music writer and a reproductive rights activist. Examples of womb-centric compositions include chamber and orchestral works by Dai Fujikura, in which he appropriates and musicalizes his wife’s pregnancy experience—substituting his voice for her own—and “Why We Bleed,” a chamber opera by Sky Macklay, sung from the perspective of a feisty uterus, which musicalizes and dramatizes the experiences of pregnancy prevention, mediocre sex, and menstruation. And in Éliane Radigue’s 1973 “Biogenesis,” the composer and then-soon-to-be grandmother sounded out her “hymn to the perpetuation of life” via the sounds of overlapping heartbeats, including that of a gestating fetus.
Unlimited access to our
