Filmmaker Sheila Hayman’s new documentary, “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn,” premiered last month in London, takes as its subject Hayman’s great-great-great-grandmother, the prolific composer Fanny Hensel. The film provides the rare experience of viewing a documentary devoted to one woman composer, its thorough research portraying Fanny as both a musical genius who composed masterpieces and a […]
Tag: Women in Music
Posted inEssay
How to Measure Love
New music mourns with a strange and violent passion. Each announcement of the death of a major composer sparks a river of public grief that is always torrential at its mouth—floods of tributes, letters, anecdotes, love notes, lessons, all offered in the reification of the dead. In the days that follow, the artist’s work receives […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Kaija Saariaho Playlist
The world lost a bit of its wonder on June 2, when Kaija Saariaho died at the age of 70 following a battle with glioblastoma. Diagnosed with the aggressive brain cancer in early 2021, Saariaho gave no major announcement about her health, nor did she document the two years of treatment that followed. When she […]
Posted inInterview
Breaking Points
Cassandra Miller is all process. It’s not the same word that Steve Reich thought a gradual, directional inch through time, but something more all-encompassing, that goes far beyond any finished product. In the past few years, process and its verb-y associates–transcribing, improvising, collaborating, balancing, musicking–have become the primary concerns in Miller’s creative life. Though this […]
Posted inPages Turned
Aesthetic Camouflage
What do you do?” The Outline asked in 2019. “I’m a podcaster–vlogger–model–DJ,” they replied, rhetorically and hyphenatedly. The gig economy has brought with it a host of new containers (like the egregious “multi-hyphenate”) to describe artists who traverse multiple creative pursuits—artists who a generation ago might have been called a dandy, a flâneur, or, more […]
Posted inEssay
Out of the Woods
In the studios at Maida Vale, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers are warming up for a world premiere recording. It’s an opera that once graced the stages of Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Berlin State Opera. But the piece has gone without a professional performance for […]
Posted inPages Turned
Fabric of Her World
“As with Ethel, Rebecca’s friendships were the very fabric of her world,” writes the musicologist Leah Broad in Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Queer academia’s gleeful dismantling of history’s “just friends” trope has ventured as far as the Gen Z mainstream, with Atlanta TikToker Oublaire’s sage reminder that “History Hates Lovers.” (“Historians […]
Posted inEssay
Clothing the Future
Drummers, as a species, are generally granted asylum from the dictates of onstage formal dress. Their counterparts in classical percussion, however, are not so liberated: When Mike Truesdell, then a graduate student in percussion at the Juilliard School, arrived backstage to a fall 2011 solo performance in a t-shirt, he was promptly asked to change. […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Weather Patterns
“You are the sky,” says the Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “Everything else is just the weather.” Chödrön offers this as a guide for dealing with strong emotions—a more tangible variation on “this too shall pass.” Emotions arise and, while they feel like they may fully inhabit every pore of our body, they rarely leave […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
The Sex Lives of Women Composers, Ranked
We are regularly bombarded with information about Schumann’s syphilis, Mozart’s interest in rimming, and Tchaikovsky’s unfortunate love for his nephew. But what about the kinky exploits of women composers in history? In the name of gender equality in music, I have ranked the sex lives of 30 women composers in absolutely objective order of worst […]