Searching for a New “We”

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) knew that the American classical music industry was hostile to African American women. “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky,” she wrote in 1943, “I have two handicaps – those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” Price wanted the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to examine a few of her scores. And she wanted him to consider them objectively, without prejudice. Of course, when he returned her scores without comment, how could she know the reason for his rejection?

Although this episode is an infuriating tale of lost opportunity, Price herself was a skillful and strategic advocate of her own music who used multiple professional networks to succeed in an otherwise unwelcoming world. As musicologists Samantha Ege and Alisha Jones have shown, Price developed a strong community of African American women who enabled her to cross conventional racial and gender boundaries.

Meanwhile, Price had begun working closely with the famous contralto Marian Anderson, who programmed her compositions on a 1935 European tour and kept them in her international repertoire for another fifteen years. When Anderson would sing one of these compositions at a prestigious venue like Carnegie Hall or record them on a prominent label, editors would often approach Price with competing publication offers.

Price had applied for membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1934, but the organisation did not approve her application until 1940, causing her to lose any potential royalties from Anderson’s advocacy during that six-year period. Her connections to government-supported groups were essential during that period. After 1940, however, ongoing royalties enabled Price to return to the far less lucrative world of orchestral music – the world of Serge Koussevitzky and major private ensembles emerging from economic hardship. With her characteristic modesty, Price described her race and gender as impediments, fully expecting that Koussevitzky might reject her outright. But, with a decade of successes behind her, she was able to enter the conversation knowing that she needed Koussevitzky no more than Kousseviztky needed her.

— Douglas W. Shadle

As a young girl, Liza Lim heard the forest. Not some cultivated copse but the irrepressibly loud tropical jungle that is capable of filling great sweeps of land beyond its confines with sound. The composer, who was born in Perth in 1966 and whose name, incidentally, is pronounced like Lisa with a soft s, spent parts of her childhood in the Sultanate of Brunei, where her parents, both of them doctors of Chinese origins, worked for some time. Monkeys scampered around her garden and the rain forest lay just outside her sleepy town. What she heard, felt and experienced there still resonates in her music today. Liza Lim composes sounds that recall the screams of wild animals, and she draws melodic lines that branch out like aerial roots, sprawling forth as if their fine endings were perpetually searching for new connections.

How do forests think? When Liza Lim was composing a piece for the Australian ELISION Ensemble in 2016, her imagination was ignited by a book about the communication between people, plants and animals, written by the Amazon-explorer Eduardo Kohn. The work “How Forests Think” was followed by the ensemble piece “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus” in 2018, which deals with the Anthropocene, plastic waste, the past, present and disappearance. Liza Lim, who studied in Melbourne and Amsterdam and holds a chair for composition in Sydney today, is fascinated by complex issues. Her compositions address cultural identities, the destruction of the environment, femininity, magic and spirituality. However, while listening to her works, it is not necessary to reconstruct their underlying train of thought. These topics activate a musical imagination in Liza Lim that allows the listener to forget about thought, language and mathematical formulas. Similarly, her ensemble composition “Machine for Contacting the Dead” about musical instruments from an ancient Chinese burial site is not a pseudo-scientific attempt at reconstructing a long-faded ritual music. And yet, the composition, which will be presented at Musikfest Berlin by Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, can also be heard as an evocation.

At other times, it is the almost mundane things that release Lim’s creative energy. In “String Creatures”, a commissioned piece for the US-American JACK Quartet, the composer focusses on the apparently simple phenomenon of the string, and not only in the sense of the string of a musical instrument, but also a string of yarn, a thread, a chain, a lead and a dynamic sequence.

In all her intuitive, intellectual and cultural changes of perspective, Liza Lim is looking for something that hides behind things. Something that connects everything: connecting the rubbing of a finger across a metal string with the magical experience of an oscillation, the sound of a violin with the movements of a plant or the experience of timelessness with the song of ocean dwellers: “I am looking for a different kind of beauty”, she admits, a beauty that “has nothing nostalgic about it, but rather represents a kind of unfamiliar terrain.”

—  Martina Seeber

Was it an expression of profound piety when Ludwig van Beethoven composed his “Missa solemnis Op. 123”, which he himself described as his “greatest work”? Beethoven, this advocate of human rationality who never concealed his rejection of clerical hierarchies over decades? When he began to work on his opus magnum in 1819, he was going through a severe life crisis. He was nearly deaf and the drawn-out legal dispute over the guardianship of his beloved nephew Karl had been lost. In this situation, the professed champion of the enlightenment set out on a search for faith. He studied standard works on world religions and was in close contact with the Catholic theologian Johann Michael Sailer, whom he had met during his endeavours concerning Karl’s education. Beethoven was looking for comfort. In an 1821 letter to Archduke Rudolph, dedicatee of his “Missa solemnis”, he wrote: “God, who knows my inner self and the sacred diligence with which I fulfil my duties as a man […], will surely wrest me from these hardships at long last.”

Despite his search for faith and his declared desire to write “true church music”, Beethoven admitted that the “Missa solemnis” could also be performed as an oratorio. This finally occurred on 26 March (greg. 7 April) 1824 in St Petersburg, at the instigation of Prince Nikolaus Galitzin, Russian envoy in Vienna. In the Austrian capital, where due to Metternich’s censorship regulations the performance of Latin church music was only permitted in liturgical use and forbidden in the concert hall, one month later, only “Kyrie”, “Credo” and “Agnus” were performed as “Drei große Hymnen” and with an exceptional permission issued by the imperial censorship authority. But should the “Missa solemnis” even be played in a concert hall? For Beethoven, concertante performances can have been nothing but a compromise. As he wrote to his close friend Andreas Streicher in 1824, his intention was to “awaken religious emotions both in the singers and the listeners, and to render them permanent” with a music that had been created under the personal impression of a reverent trembling in the face of the divine.

However, the “Missa solemnis” invokes a kind of religiousness borne by the ideal of humanism, a kind that had already receded far into the distance at the moment the work was created – similarly, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” celebrates a humanism that apparently ensued from enlightenment but never became social reality. After the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was in dire straits: The young General Napoleon Bonaparte had ordered the occupation of the Papal States in Rome, the kidnapping of the aged Pope Pius VI and the imposition of the French administrative system on the city. Even the new Pope Pius VII, who had to be elected in Venice, was taken prisoner in 1809 with Napoleon, who had in the meantime been crowned emperor, once again pulling strings in the background. For a long time, numerous ecclesiastical princes had been found among the champions of enlightenment; one example is Beethoven’s first employer, Maximilian Franz, prince elector and Archbishop of Cologne. After the restoration implemented following the Congress of Vienna, however, there was no more room for anything that even remotely resembled revolutionary thought. At the time when Beethoven completed his “Missa solemnis”, therefore, the once seemingly realistic option of a Christendom informed by enlightened humanism had long become utopian. Thus, an “ideal” place of performance for this work presumably never existed.

— Harald Hodeige