140 Years Later: Recording the World Premieres of Historical Women Composers
On 28 February 2025, Voces8 Records released the world premiere of three songs that I recorded with tenor Thomas Elwin, as part of our concept album Le Vase Brisé (The Broken Vase). An achievement we’ve celebrated with many a clink of crystalware!
But as we celebrated the birth of our album, and reflected on the concept behind it (brokenheartedness, healing, and the inspiration we took from the Japanese art of kintsugi in which broken pottery is repaired with gold, thereby rendering it even more valuable than the original unbroken object), I’ve also been pondering ways in which this release is very belatedly breaking glass in the ceiling that overshadows female musicians.
These world premiere recordings are of music that was published more than 100 years ago. In fact, it has been 141 years since Clemence de Grandval published her Six Poésies de Sully Prudhomme (1884) from which we recorded Le vase brisé and Soupir. And the third song Au bois dormant was published 126 years ago in composer Augusta Holmès’s Paysages d’amour (1899).
How, and why has it taken so long for someone to record these works? And how did Thomas and I become the ones to finally make it happen?
A brief background…
During the pandemic, Thomas approached me with the initial idea behind Le Vase Brisé and asked me if I’d like to record it with him. The Liszt settings of Petrarch sonnets would be at the core of the album, and Thomas wanted to explore what songs to programme alongside this cycle.
Thomas is one of those lovely allies who is not only happy to sing while a woman plays the piano (something female collaborative pianists can’t take for granted, even in 2025!), but also genuinely values a partnership of ideas and a collaboratively-created project. (For more on what an anomaly this is, and the gender gap in art song pianism, see Chanda VanderHart’s Too Many Frocks and Elanora Pertz’s Lied the Way.) Thomas and I wanted the track list of Le Vase Brisé to represent a gender balance, and although we collectively share a few decades spent in education in prestigious musical institutes, we emerged from those places with honours, accolades… and a knowledge of music written almost exclusively by dead white men.
It was time to take a deep dive into the work of historical women composers.
The research
Happily I quite enjoy researching, and in lockdown, when I couldn’t go to a physical library, I felt immensely grateful for the IMSLP online library, and in particular for the groundbreaking work of the Boulanger Initiative and the Donne Foundation who have collectively signposted the work of historical women composers and made many of their scores accessible to musicians across the globe.
After many joyous hours of discovery, Thomas and I had collated a longlist of repertoire that could have filled at least 20 albums, and when lockdown was lifted, we got together to sing and play through some of it, eventually narrowing our programme down to Clemence de Grandval, Augusta Holmès, Pauline Viardot and Lili Boulanger. On the boys’ team, Reynaldo Hahn, Henri Duparc, Paolo Tosti and Vincenzo Bellini joined Franz Liszt. Although we selected each song for the role it would play in the dramaturgical arc of the album’s story, it just so happened that of the 17 tracks on the album, 8 are composed by women and 9 by men.
Selecting de Grandval for the title track
With the programme confirmed, recording sessions booked and Voces8 Records on board to release the album, it was time to give it a name. We tossed many ideas back and forth, but nothing felt right. Suddenly during a train journey through the southern English countryside, it came to me. I reached for my phone, impatiently swiped away a text from Thomas inviting me to his birthday drinks, and wrote, “Name the album Le vase brisé… it’s about how relationships can both heal and break parts of us, and how our identities are shaped by the people we have spent time with. We could have some kintsugi on the cover?”
Less than a minute later, Thomas replied, “This is a wonderful idea.” We discussed how we can become more whole after experiencing heartache, and how painful experiences can transform us into better selves. Only later as my train rolled into the station did I remember I hadn’t RSVP to his birthday drinks!
And so Clemence de Grandval’s song that had lain virtually unnoticed for 141 years became the title track of our album. The photographer Clare Park agreed to create the album artwork, complete with kintsugi-inspired veining.
But why only now?
The classical music writer Dr Lucy Walker wrote the liner notes. Of the songs by de Grandval and Holmès, Dr Walker wrote:
“Along with the well-known names, there are songs from composers who – while popular in their own lifetime – are rarely heard today. Augusta Holmès was a French composer of Irish descent (she was originally named ‘Holmes’ and added the accent on becoming a French citizen). She became known for writing large-scale orchestral works, sometimes with an overtly political or nationalist nature, and – like Wagner – for writing her own libretti and poems for her songs. Her style is assertively individual; at times her robust form of expression seems on the brink of bursting through the modest confines of a song. Clemence de Grandval similarly composed across a wide range of genres, including opera, yet her music has been largely neglected in recent decades. Her songs display a distinctive sophistication, harmonic subtlety, and close attention to the text.”
These composers were widely celebrated during their lifetimes. So what went wrong? Why have their works been subsequently neglected by performers and recording artists? I’m no historian, but happily researchers have shed some light on the subject. According to a Guardian editorial from September 2023, “In 1987, a retired urban planner from South Africa listed 5,000 female composers in a two-volume encyclopaedia that was a labour of love. Seven years later, the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers featured only 875. The gap is telling.”
In her commentary on another historical composer Rebecca Clarke, researcher and writer Leah Broad goes further. “Although famous in her day, by the time Clarke died in 1979 very few people knew she had ever been a composer at all. She was sometimes mentioned in the same breath as her husband, the pianist James Friskin. … Her entry in the 1980 Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians read, in its entirety, ‘See James Friskin’. But in 1927, her entry in the same dictionary had been extensive, listing all her major works including the Sonata, her Piano Trio (1921) and Cello Rhapsody (1923) and a substantial quantity of songs. Like so many women composers, Clarke’s music was slowly excised from the historical record and is only now reclaiming a place in concert halls.”
“Reclaiming a place”
It has been an enormously rewarding endeavour to play a part in “reclaiming a place” for Clemence de Grandval and Augusta Holmès. When Holmès’s Au bois dormant came out as a pre-release single, it was selected for Spotify’s Classical New Releases playlist. Within hours, thousands of listeners from across the globe were listening to this work for the first time in the history of recorded music. My Spotify tracker showed it playing not only in these composers’ native France, but all over Europe and as far afield as Brazil, Argentina, India, North Macedonia, Canada, New Zealand, Turkey and Taiwan. The day the album was released, the title track Le vase brisé played on BBC Radio 3 to an estimated 800,000 listeners. It may have taken 141 years, but these exquisitely-crafted songs are finally being heard.
What’s next?
Later this year, I will be recording music by Zoë Martlew, Odaline de la Martinez, Natalie Klouda, Ingrid Stölzel, Ethel Smyth, Jasmine Morris, Dawn Avery and Undine Smith Moore – many of these works also entering the world of recorded music for the very first time. On stage, I’ll be playing works by these composers alongside Cecilia McDowall, Louise Farrenc, Madeleine Dring, Althea Talbot-Howard, Elizabeth Maconchy, Germaine Tailleferre and Margaret Bonds. In the classroom, I’ll be directing a project at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama on the songs of Libby Larsen, in honour of her 75th birthday.
And although these projects keep me busy (at times, frenetically so), they feel like a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of work still to be done to excavate and promote the music of historical women composers. I don’t expect the glass ceiling to disappear in my lifetime, particularly given worrying current geopolitical trends. But I’m confident that I’m a small part in a strong community of musicians steadily etching their own cracks into it. And that gives me immense strength and pride.
