Netflix has released a new short documentary titled “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” which delves into the legacy of the American double bassist Orin O’Brien. 

Now aged 87 and recently retired, O’Brien became the first woman to join the 104-piece New York Philharmonic full-time in 1966. 

In the film, O’Brien reflects on her appointment to the orchestra by Leonard Bernstein, and her preference for being a supporting role to her family, students, friends, and colleagues. 

“The Only Girl in the Orchestra” ultimately captures O’Brien’s significant contributions to classical music and the doors she helped open for the many female musicians. 

This documentary was made by the Emmy award-winning documentary producer and director and Orin’s niece, Molly O’Brien.

“In making The Only Girl in the Orchestra, I was surrounded by a multi-generational team of mostly women ranging in age from early twenties to mid-seventies, who were all equally passionate about Orin’s story,” Molly wrote. “The Only Girl in the Orchestra is an attempt at capturing Orin’s passion, essence and perseverance…bottling it and offering it to audiences as a visual perfume.”

“This movie tells the story of Orin O’Brien, the very first woman to join the New York Philharmonic in history — and a cherished member of our orchestra family,” the NY Phil posted on Instagram. “We’re so proud to celebrate her legacy and the barriers she broke for women in classical music. Don’t miss this inspiring film, now streaming on Netflix!”

To watch the film, click here. 

The movie trailer can be viewed below. 

Born in Hollywood to actor parents, O’Brien studied with Milton Kestenbaum, who was principal bass of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and with Herman Reinshagen, who was associate principal of the NY Phil and a double bass teacher at the Institute of Musical Art (now The Juilliard School). 

In New York, she continued her studies with Frederick Zimmermann and graduated as a scholarship student from Juilliard. From 1956 to 1966, she was a member of the NYC Ballet Orchestra. 

During this time, she also performed in the American Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Musica Aeterna, and many other ensembles. 

Additionally, she played in numerous chamber music festivals, including the Marlboro Music Festival recordings with Pablo Casals. Her chamber music performances have included the quintets of Schubert and Dvořák with the Guarneri Quartet. 

As an educator, O’Brien has given masterclasses at the Peabody Institute, Tanglewood Festival, New England Conservatory, and Yale University, plus has been on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) since 1969.

She also teaches at the Mannes College of Music and The Juilliard School, where she was co-chair of the double bass department from 1992 to 2002. In 2012, she published Double Bass Notebook, a guidebook for young music professionals. 

Among her distinctions include the MSM President’s Medal for Distinguished Faculty Service, and the Special Recognition for Teaching Award from the International Society of Bassists.

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Multi-GRAMMY® Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center, and Conductor Laureate of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra. As Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Falletta became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.

This year, at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's Women in Classical Music Symposium, Falletta was given the Award of Excellence —which recognizes a woman in the field who has paved the way for others and is investing in the future of the industry.

Falletta will return to Dallas in March 2025 to lead the DSO and the Dallas Symphony Chorus in concerts during the American Choral Director’s Conference.

We sat down with the conductor to get an in-depth look into her life and ask for her expert advice.

Congratulations on receiving the Award of Excellence! How does it feel to get the award?

I feel very special because I've admired the Dallas Symphony for years.

When the Women in Classical Music Symposium first started, it was an amazing idea! They may have been one of the first to codify it and say, “We want to work with women conductors, help them, and serve as a central place for them.” I feel very honored to be part of it in that way.

Is there a highlight of your career that you could pinpoint? 

It's hard to say, but I think it's every time I've been to Carnegie Hall with my orchestra — the first time with the Virginia Symphony, then a few times with the Buffalo Philharmonic. There's always feeling of, "Okay, we have come to the top of the mountain and we did it together."

Congrats on 25 years with the Buffalo Philharmonic. What has the ensemble meant to you and your career?

It's been the most transformative years of my life and it's also been the kind of orchestra that allowed me to grow as a musician. Hopefully, a conductor is growing all the time and learning as they go. But who teaches you? Your musicians. They may not do it in words, (although sometimes they do) but in how they play. They are constantly giving you a lot of information and feedback.

In Buffalo, over the 25 years, I've had the chance to welcome many new people to the industry. It’s been a joy to shape the orchestra so that new artists come into our village, our family, and get the opportunity to learn our sound and our way of making music.

It's been beautiful and we have done something truly special together.

You’ve helped commission and premiered countless new works in your career. Why do you prioritize this — specifically for female composers?

This goes back to my early days of conducting when I led an orchestra called the Women's Philharmonic in San Francisco. Every instrument was played by a woman, and at that time, it was kind of hard to find a woman playing tuba and bass trombone, but we'd had them, and they were great.

We played only works by women, which meant that we did a few classics like the Amy Beach Symphony and the Fanny Mendelssohn Overture, but most of the time we played new works. We had composers come, often hearing their orchestral work for the first time, and I realized how important it was to all of us. We felt like we were doing something that was going to stick. I think that changed my whole perception of new music.

How did you become connected with the Women’s Philharmonic?

They were looking for a woman conductor and there weren't very many of us then. When they first called me, I was working with the Milwaukee Symphony as their associate conductor and I was still in school at Juilliard.

They said, “We'd like you to come out and do a concert with us, but we only play music by women.” This is embarrassing, but I said to their wonderful executive director, “What music by women?”

All my life, I had just studied everything they taught you in school — from Bach to Mozart, all the way up to the 20th century. And they were all men. Luckily, she didn't hang up the phone and I went and conducted the Beach Symphony for the first time.

After that, I was totally hooked. I spent over 10 years with them and it was a great part of my life. Not only did I learn how to learn new music — how to develop your own interpretation without a set performance practice —  but I also learned that we were giving new repertoire to the world. This became a mission for us and I feel really that that was a transformative time of my life.

For young female conductors, what advice do you give them to succeed as a conductor in our industry?

You have to be true to who you are. Everyone has this image of the "snooty" male conductor walking up to the podium wearing a cape, refusing to talk to anyone. That's not the way it is. You have a lot of authority when you’re on the podium, of course, since you have to coalesce 90 very gifted musicians, and somehow you have to find a way to get everyone on the same page.

But, you have to do that while also being genuine. Some conductors are just funny and that's great, use that! Some conductors are very spiritual, etc. Don't ever pretend to be somebody else.

Also, you have to study, study study. You never really know the pieces well enough. Even André Previn said that every time he studies a score, he doesn't know it, but he gets a little closer to it.

And that's how I feel as well – every time I study a piece, I see something new in it. The musicians help me make those discoveries as well. It's like a path that's always unraveling before you.

How important is mentoring the younger generations for you? If a young conductor wants to find a mentor, what would you say would be their first step?

Make contact with someone that you know, even if you may not know them personally. We are all connected through one person or another in this industry, so find someone to make an introduction for you, or just reach out!

Sometimes people just want to have a phone conversation, and I'm happy to talk. Sometimes it's more in-depth, like a female conductor having a problem with her board or a problem with a key player in the orchestra and just needs to talk it through. I often get asked, “How can I deal with this? Have you ever had this experience?” For those of us with experience, I think it's important we share what we've learned.

Also, things like the Dallas Symphony Women in Classical Music Symposium are very important. In Buffalo, we recently had a Conductor's Guild three-day masterclass for exclusively women conductors. There were eight talented women there in a very supportive environment. I would suggest looking for things like that where you can be honest and open.

There are so many mentors, and I'm talking about men too, who are completely open to women on the podium and can offer help. But women, specifically, can sometimes share with you things they did that maybe undermined what they wanted to do. For example, you’ve probably heard someone say that men shouting at the orchestra is perceived in one way, and women shouting at anybody is perceived in another way. Is that fair? Probably not, but that’s the way it is. So we need to work on changing our world while also making the best of the current situation.

What is your best advice to a younger conductor just starting to guest conduct around the country or globe?

Approach the orchestra with respect and joy — and that doesn't mean being silly — but give them the feeling that you're happy to be there. Like all of us, orchestras like to be acknowledged as something special.

Again, just be yourself, because that sincerity is so evident when you're on the podium.

I always tell people don't anticipate a negative experience, because you can manufacture that. During my first guest conducting (you can imagine how important and terrifying this was to me), all I could think about was, “Do they like me?” Specifically, the oboist looked like he didn't want to be there. He was angrily turning the pages of his part and staring at the floor at all times when he wasn't playing. He looked absolutely disgusted. I thought, “Well, I guess there's someone who doesn't agree that a woman should be conducting.” I got so agitated that I really couldn't work.

We had our break and I saw him coming up to talk to me. He said, “Maestro,  I'm so sorry. I was really looking forward to playing for you and I can't get my reed to work. I'm so upset that I can't be what I wanted to be for you.”

After that, I told myself that I was never going to let this happen again, I'm never going to imagine the worst. That was a big turning point in my life.

Just imagine that they're all happy to play for you. Is it going to be true for 100 percent of the orchestra? No. But, if you react in a welcoming, supportive way, that's going to win over 98% of the orchestra.

There was another time I was auditioning for an orchestra, and one of the older male players in the woodwind section said to me, “I wish I had died before women were on the podium.” I was taken aback, because what a ridiculous thing to say.  You have to have a sense of humor too and not take everything like life and death.

When performing canonical repertoire, has a concertmaster ever given a strong resistance to the style you wanted to convey? How did you deal with that?

I have one that sticks in my mind. I was conducting in Germany and doing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. We came to a spot in the cello section that I wanted to take in a more urgent tempo and they played it very slowly. We all looked at each other in surprise and tried it again. And again, they played it very slowly. They looked at me and said, “Well, this is how it goes.”

Then I realized that they had always, probably for 120 years, played it in that tempo. I didn’t like it myself, I like it to be more anguished and urgent, but I realized I could start at that tempo and then gradually move faster. I decided to let the orchestra inform the performance.

Essentially, every orchestra is different. They have their own personality, history, and character. They have different ways of learning and different contexts for each piece. You need to respect that. The performance will become a sort of hybrid of you and them, and it can't be just about you.

It sounds like you have a very collaborative approach to working with an orchestra. Can you elaborate?

Every time we play a piece, it's never quite the same as the last time. And that's the wonderful thing about music. It's fluid. It can be wonderful in so many ways. So, why not be collaborative?

In orchestras, you have so much talent in front of you. When I was younger, I would be terrified of this because there are 90 musicians, and they've all been playing since they were four or five years old. They've had thousands of music lessons and they’ve practiced for hundreds of thousands of hours. These are experts, so what was I doing there?

But now, I try to think of my role as helping them flourish even further. I started to think about myself as creating a landscape where they could be great. I want to help them bloom like flowers in a garden.

We have noticed that most women conductors wear pants nowadays. Did you ever feel pressure to dress a certain way for concerts, especially when you were younger?

Maybe decades ago, this was a very big question: What does a woman conductor wear? When I started first, I would usually wear a black skirt and a black jacket. Then I realized that I was not much of a skirt wearer, and I started to wear what I normally would, which was a black suit.

There were some instances when I went to Europe, where I would get a message from the management asking me to not wear pants. They felt their audiences would feel that you were trying to be a man, but this was a while ago.

When I conducted my first concert with the Milwaukee Symphony, I wore my black suit. The very next morning, all of the female musicians came into my office and said they wanted to wear black pants now too. Before that, they had to wear skirts, but they said "If our conductor can wear black pants, we should be able to too!”

It was a little controversial back then, but now I just tell women to wear something comfortable that you don't have to think about. If it's a complicated outfit, do not wear it on the podium. Don't wear the hair clip that will constantly fall out.

However, I think if there are some who feel completely comfortable in a gown, why not?

Besides conducting, even outside of the musical realm, what do you enjoy doing that keeps you grounded in your busy schedule?

I travel a lot and always try to visit places where people live in that town, instead of the big tourist things. It makes you realize a beautiful thing: people are wonderful. These days, we get this feeling that people are at each other's throats. But I don’t think so. Everyone has some kind of humanity in them.

I also practice yoga, read, and go for long walks — all things to decompress.

What do you want your legacy to be?

Personally, I would like the orchestras that I've worked with to know how much I value the musicians. It's because of the people that my life has been so happy.

(PC: Cheryl Gorski)

The post Conductor JoAnn Falletta Talks Career, Legacy, and Advice appeared first on World's Leading Classical Music Platform.

The Violin Channel recently sat down with violinist Gwendolyn Masin to learn more about the lesser-known female composer and pianist, Poldowski. Poldowski was the professional pseudonym of Irene Régine Wieniawski, the daughter of the Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski.

On her album, Legends, Masin explores the music of Poldowski in an effort to shed light on the composer's work and style. Poldowski's Tango can be heard below, along with an interview with Masin about the composer:

Who was Poldowski? What is her family background? 

The discovery and recording of Poldowski’s „Tango“ stems from a programme I created for my music festival in Switzerland called „GAIA“. The theme of the festival centres around musical families. A particular programme focuses on one of the violin world’s great all-rounders, namely Henryk Wieniawski. What I did not know before conceptualising the programme was that Henryk wasn’t the only famous musician in his family. The Polish Wienawski family’s musicality stemmed from its matriarch, mother of Henryk and his brother, the pianist and composer Józef: Regina Wolff, a professionally trained pianist and sister of pianist Edouard Wolff.  Irene Wieniawska, aka Poldowski, was Henryk’s daughter. Sadly, Henryk died six weeks before she was born. She was christened Régine after her paternal grandmother and, after moving to London with her mother, Isabella Hampton, married Sir Aubrey Dean Paul.

What was her musical training? 

Aspects of Poldowski’s biography are shrouded in mystery; she claimed to have studied at the Brussels Conservatory, but no record of her time there survives. In the 1920s she led a colourful life in London, entertaining guests including the conductor Eugène Goossens and fellow composers Peter Warlock and George Gershwin.

Sir Henry Wood considered Poldowksi to have “exceptional talent” and conducted the premiere of her orchestral Nocturne at the 1912 Proms. Poldowski said of her compositional style that she was “always restless and dissatisfied under any scholastic influence”, but she was particularly drawn to French composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Fauré, and to the poetry of Verlaine.

What was her composition style like?

For me, Poldowski’s language is instantly recognisable, taking ownership of an authentic signature, a creation of her own making, more contemporary than her father and uncle. Irène’s works carry the sculpted edge of ironic humour, of someone observing and questioning how things unfold, of a critical thinker. Tellingly, she chose a surname’s masculine ending rather than a feminine one, as if to emphasise her point.

Why the pseudonym? 

Irene felt burdened by her father’s legacy and adopted a masculine-sounding pseudonym – one of several versions of her name used at various times – to escape the association.  The fact that she took a male alias lends an indication of how she felt about the reception of women’s oeuvres in contrast to men’s.

How did you discover her? What drew you to her music?

Research for my festival has me searching for treasure all over the world. In the case of Poldowski, I travelled to Brussels to visit libraries, the conservatoire and the Ysaÿe Foundation. I was tracing a narrative that had its origins here. This thread started with one of the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles’ earliest representatives, Henryk Wieniawski and was followed by his student Eugène Ysaÿe, and Ysaÿe’s student, George Enescu. As I followed the trail of violinist after violinist, I suddenly discovered a name in the lineage that was not connected directly to the Conservatoire – that of a certain “Poldowski”. Poldowski was the professional pseudonym of Belgian-born Irène Régine Wieniawski.

When I first leafed through her music, I discovered songs, piano works, and orchestral pieces, and finally stumbled upon works for violin and piano. I believe the Tango is not part of the staple repertoire for the same reasons that classical musicians as a community have only begun performing works by women composers with greater regularity in the past decade or so. As a performer, when discussing my choices of repertoire with other professionals, I felt that within the world of string playing, there was an air of dismissal towards music by female composers – their works were not seen as equally complex, grand, sweeping or athletic as their male counterparts. To understand this fully, it is helpful to remember that female musicians, for a very long time, were not given the tools to dream of writing large orchestral works or opera; employment for female composers, if there was any, was often limited to teaching children, conducting choirs, or assisting their male counterparts.

Poldowski lays those suppositions to rest with her Tango, which is fiendishly difficult – it demands greater in part even than those of her father’s music – and packs a bunch of ideas into a deliciously crunchy four minutes of music. The piece opens with arresting piano chords and muscular violin writing before the tango proper – Argentine in flavour. The violin seems to be possessed by different voices: that sinewy, gruff opening manner and a higher-pitched, soaring lyricism in answer – an equality of dialogue and status that Poldowski enjoyed to some extent in her lifetime, but which her reputation deserves still.

Why is it important to you to play the music of lesser-known composers?

In the past, I have heard it said that if a piece or composer is unknown, the reason for that is that their music was not good enough to stand the test of time in comparison to their peers. Take for example the music of Ferdinand Ries or Johann Nepomuk Hummel, in juxtaposition to that of Ludwig van Beethoven, or the piano compositions of Nikolai Medtner overshadowed in his lifetime by those of Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin.

I see an unfortunate relationship with this way of thinking and the neglect that works of female composers, composers of colour, composers from minorities, from the LGBQT+ community, and so on, have suffered — works unknown, not worthy of recognition, not worth of discovery. In the words of Nadia Boulanger, “an artist and their music can never be more or less than they are as a human being”. Much of the music I consider neglected is only in that state because of societal norms of the past, and the promotion of some composers over others.

Part of what I love about being a musical artist is that we can draw attention to things that happen, now or in the past. Artists are critical observers of our time. We can offer significant contributions to the public within the framework of their means of expression, full of intention and with the potential of great impact on audiences and public awareness.

What was it like recording the Tango? 

Recording the Tango was a lot of fun. We had the opportunity to be one of the final productions at the Swiss National Broadcasting Association’s Brunnenhof studio in Zurich before its renovation, which gave the whole process an air of nostalgic melancholy. There were so many stories of incredible musicians recording and performing in that hall. The engineers were recounting their memories of working there for decades, and a peek at the schedule of that season alone bore a swoon-inducing amount of musicians whom I greatly admire. At the same time, we were the first to record a work of Poldowski there, and we had very little time to do so. If I remember correctly, we played it through a few times, and that was it. So those four minutes of music, laden with musical ideas, were recorded in a hall layered with historical performances, many of which can’t be known, but can somehow be felt. It seemed fitting.

What is one thing you’d like listeners to take away with them after listening to the recording?

I hope that the brilliance of the piece stops people in their tracks. From the opening call to the attention of the piano’s chords, followed by a jump on the violin into the nth position in the first bars, to the cheekiness, irony, and command to centre the listener’s focus. Here is a composer who understands how to tell a good story without losing integrity, who understands how to be uncompromising, bold and unafraid when integrating unusual harmonies not commonly used in encore-length pieces, and who never loses the conviction of her own voice along the way. That is by no means an easy thing to do and in my eyes, these are qualities to aspire to, not just for women in classical music, but for people everywhere.

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An acclaimed mainstream British composer with commissions from the BBC Proms and The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Eleanor Alberga has penned numerous works ranging from solo instrumental pieces to symphonic works and operas, that have been performed internationally. 

Having composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, vocalists, movies, and plays, one of Alberga’s biggest hits was her 1994 setting of Roald Dahl’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, commissioned by the Roald Dahl Foundation. 

In 2015, she reached millions of people through her commissioned work ARISE, ATHENA! for the opening of the Last Night of the BBC Proms, conducted by Marin Alsop.

Additionally, her early piano music connects deeply to her Jamaican heritage, as do her works for solo voice and for choir; her own experiences as a dancer with an African group to her classical musical training has seen her works stem from various musical influences. 

“I think I’m influenced by everything,” she said in the British Music Collection. “My early life was mostly as a pianist so I did loads of repertoire of old classical stuff, but I really fell in love with Bartók in a big way from very early on, and so 20th-century and now 21st-century music has been my biggest interest. I’m influenced by people like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky or Messiaen - Messiaen can be quite tonal sometimes, and so can Shostakovich! But I also love Harrison Birtwistle.”

“Dance, as with all the music I grew up with, was part of my inheritance,” Alberga told Guarneri Hall in an interview. “The Jamaica I grew up in certainly had a less self-conscious attitude to moving than I found in London when I arrived there in the early 1970s. Having spent a great deal of time in the world of professional dance in the UK, as my calling to compose grew, I should acknowledge that dance was a big part of my early development as a composer.”

A video of VC Artists Nathan Meltzer and Kevin Zhu, violist Joshua Kail, and cellist Sterling Elliot performing Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1, can be viewed below. 

Born in 1949 in Kingston, Jamaica, Alberga decided to be a concert pianist at the age of five; at age ten, she was composing her own piano pieces. After it coincidentally opened near her childhood home, she studied at the Jamaica School of Music. 

“There never was a contradiction in my loving classical music as I grew up,” Alberga added in Guarneri Hall. “It was a natural subset of the cultural inheritance I had. I went to classical concerts, which was relatively easy to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t really hold with the idea of Western classical music being somehow geographically or culturally tied to anywhere. Like all true art it belongs to us all as a manifestation of our humanity, whatever its more specific cultural attachments.”

Gifted as she was, Alberga soon drew the attention of London’s Royal Academy of Music (RAM), and she was granted the school’s biennial West Indian Associated Board Scholarship to pursue further piano studies and singing at RAM.

Arriving in England as a student in 1970, Alberga has remained there permanently. In 1974, she was one of three finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, UK. 

Her foray into composition began with her arrival in 1978 at The London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT) — then led by its artistic director Robert Cohan. There, she became one of the very few pianists with a deep understanding of modern dance, and her company class improvisations left a lasting legacy.  

Alberga’s time with LCDT soon led to works commissioned and conceived for dance by the company; she later became LCDT’s musical director — conducting, composing, and playing on many of its tours. 

Below is a clip of Alberga from 2021 discussing and conducting her piece Nightscape, which was recorded as part of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’s (ASMF) “The Beacon Project,” showcasing female contemporary composers. 

At different times, she was also a member of the famed Jamaican Folk Singers, both singing and playing guitar, plus held a three-year membership with Fontomfrom, an African Dance Company. 

Since pursuing her composition career full-time in 2001, Alberga’s interests in orchestral, chamber, vocal, and music for the stage and screen, has seen the continued expansion of her compositional output. Her works are often distinguished for the use of striking overtones and undertones, and embodying the effervescence of the dramatic arts.

Alongside her husband the violinist Thomas Bowes, Alberga was part of the duo Double Exposure, plus recently founded Arcadia, an original festival in the English countryside where they reside.

Alberga’s many awards include the 2000 NESTA fellowship and the 2019 Paul Hamlyn Award. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and was awarded an OBE in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honors for services to British Music.

Alberga’s British Music Collection records can be found here.

A recent performance by VC Artist Stella Chen of Alberga’s No-Man’s-Land Lullaby for Violin and Piano (1996) can be viewed below. 

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Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was also known by her Sioux name, Zitkála-Šá, meaning “red bird” in the Lakota language of the Sioux tribes.

In 1913, she worked on the opera, The Sun Dance, which included traditional Yankton rituals, dance, and melodies. It is the first and one of few grand operas written by an American Indian, and featuring American Indian performers. It first premiered in Utah, and was later presented by the New York Light Opera Guild in 1938. 

As well as being a violinist and composer, Zitkála-Šá’s work as a writer and activist helped spearhead citizenship and voting rights for women and all Indigenous people in the early 20th century.

She was a member of the Yankton Sioux/Dakota Nation, and spent her childhood on the reservation with her mother Ellen Simmons, who was of Sioux Dakota heritage. Her father was of French descent, and had left the family early on.

When she was eight years old, missionaries from the White’s Manual Labor Institute visited the reservation to recruit children for their boarding school, and Zitkála-Šá was placed at the Quaker-run boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. 

According to her autobiographical essays, she, alongside many Indigenous children, became victims of boarding schools attempting to assimilate them and erase Native traditions and culture. She was punished and beaten whenever she spoke her tribal language or practiced her Sioux culture. 

After completing her studies, she enrolled in a teacher training program at Earlham College. She later transferred to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied violin from 1897 to 1899. 

In 1900, at the age of 24, she performed solo violin with the Carlisle Indian Band at the Paris Exposition, and performed at the White House for then President William McKinley.

Zitkála-Šá in 1898 (Photo credit: Gertrude Käsebier)

She also taught music and speech at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, but left within two years, believing its administration to be patronizing Native students by giving them limited vocational work rather than academic subjects. 

Following her return to the reservation, Zitkála-Šá began working as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In 1902, she married Captain Raymond Talephause Bonnin, who was also of Yankton Sioux ancestry. They had a son named Raymond Ohiya Bonin.

In 1911, she joined the Society of American Indians (SAI), where she became the secretary in 1917. A year later, she spoke at the National Women’s Party headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Using Zitkála-Šá as a pen name, her essays and short stories were published in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Weekly. Her first book, Old Indian Legends, translated many Sioux myths into English — preserving them for future generations.

When Zitkála-Šá met and started collaborating with William Hanson, a music professor at Brigham Young University, she combined her love of words and music to compose and create the libretto for her first opera. 

The Sun Dance was inspired by a ceremony of spiritual healing, which was then outlawed by the U.S. Government. The titular dance is common among the tribes on the Plains, and depicts personal devotion and sacrifice. 

The opera was staged across Utah 15 times by a mixed Native and non-native cast. At the time, some critics thought it presented American Indians stereotypically.

“She is resisting the denial of religious ritual, and trying to elevate these tribal sacred dances and songs to what she knows is respected in Western society, which is grand opera,” explained LaDonna Brave Bull Allard on PBS. 

Allard is known by her Sioux name Ta Maka Waste Win, meaning “Her Good Earth Woman,” and is a historian and genealogist for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “The opera gave a space to perform sacred dances and songs in a public setting,” she added. “It preserved those songs.”

As a writer, Zitkála-Šá’s articles in the 1920s focused on Dakota history and culture, government corruption and injustices toward Native people, corruption of reservation systems, harrowing experiences of Indigenous children who were placed in boarding schools, and countered the conversion of Native people into Christianity.

When white women in the U.S. achieved suffrage rights in 1920, Zitkála-Šá encouraged them to use their influence to enfranchise Native peoples. From her efforts, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, which granted full citizenship rights to all native-born people in the country.

To bridge the political activism of Natives across the country, Zitkála-Šá and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which saw them discuss policy and legislation with the public, and register voters. She served as president of the Council for 12 years. 

Zitkála-Šá kept advocating for Native rights, suffrage, and self-governance until her death in 1938 at age 61. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to her husband.

A mini documentary about her by PBS’s American Masters, can be viewed below.

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In June 1918, the Chicago Defender – an early Black periodical– noted that Nora Holt (1884/5-1974) had become the first African-American to graduate with a Master’s degree in music. Mrs. Holt, the paper noted, “won her degree and highest honors by presenting a symphonic rhapsody of forty-two pages for an hundred-piece symphony orchestra, and incidentally has the honor of being the only artist of the Race holding the degree of M.M.”

While Holt was a prolific composer in her early years, this was but one of the contributions that Holt made to the musical world. She spent many years working as a music critic, and in this capacity, she became one of the first Black women whose writing on music broke into the public sphere of print. In addition, she founded the National Association of Negro Musicians, which continues to carry out crucial work in advancing the cause of Black classical musicians. Holt also had a parallel career as a singer, gained notoriety as a socialite, and was a key figure in both the Chicago Black Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance. Why is it, then, that she is not yet a household name?

The Chicago Defender

As a composer, Holt wrote over 200 works, but the vast majority were lost forever after the scores were stolen from storage while she was away on a singing tour of Europe and Asia. Following this tragic theft, Holt refused to return to composing, and only two of her works survive.

One of Holt’s most significant roles was her work as a music critic for the Chicago Defender, a prominent Black periodical. Founded in 1905, the Defender played a pivotal role in the Great Migration, drawing many African-Americans to northern urban centers and giving them a print platform once they had arrived. By the 1920s, the paper had established itself as the nation’s leading Black periodical: it had a readership exceeding 150,000, and many of its readers resided outside of Chicago.

It was not merely Holt’s presence at the paper that was revolutionary, however. Harvard historian Dr. Lucy Caplan contends that Holt’s criticism was directly informed by her lived experiences as a Black woman and that her work, therefore, expanded both the scope and the methods of music criticism. Holt’s work was deeply focused on collaboration and prioritized modes of knowledge production that favored multiple perspectives over the individualism that dominated Western thinking.

Having carved out a space for Black women to publish work on classical music, Holt was also able to pass on the torch at the conclusion of her tenure by handing down her role as the Defender’s music critic to Maude Roberts George.

Holt was to return to music criticism in 1953 when she became the host of a new radio show on New York’s WLIB network entitled “Nora Holt’s Concert Showcase.” The program was broadcast weekly from Harlem, and featured mostly Black performers and composers.

Holt and the Black community

Dr. Samantha Ege, a musicologist at Oxford University, notes that Holt did a great deal of work in laying the foundations for other prominent Black women in classical music such as Florence Price, Estella Conway Bonds, and Maude Roberts George. The public and historiographical nature of the published word was crucial to Holt’s work: in her role at the Defender, she was able to document the work of many Black musicians whose work would otherwise have had no historical record.

Caplan notes that in Holt’s time, many Black musicians were operating via what Naomi André calls a “shadow culture”: Black musical activity ran parallel to mainstream musical culture, but remained largely unacknowledged and unsupported. By bringing Black musical culture to the print domain, Holt was able to cast a spotlight on cultural activity that had previously been happening in the shadows.

A further contribution to the wider community of Black musical culture came when Holt founded the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM) in 1919, alongside colleague Henry Lee Grant. The organization’s main mission was to promote, preserve, and support music created and performed by African Americans, and its work continues into the present day. Over the course of its history, NAMN has provided scholarships to many prominent Black composers, such as Florence Price. The association has also established a library, which ensures that there is one centralized location where African-American music can be stored or put forward for publication.

Holt as a scandalous socialite

By the time of her graduation from the Chicago Musical College, Holt had been married three (or possibly four) times. Her third husband, the businessman George Holt, died in 1921, leaving his widow a generous inheritance.

The messy conclusion of Holt’s next marriage (to Joseph Ray, who worked for a prominent steel magnate) was also a rather lucrative affair, but the details of it were so gossip-inducing that Holt was forced to abandon Chicago for New York. Here she became associated with some of the most prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, such as the writer Langston Hughes, and positioned herself at the center of its culture.

Holt’s reputation was such that the writer Carl van Vechten fictionalized her in a controversial 1926 novel, taking some of Holt’s more extravagant personality traits and transforming them into the character of Lasca Sartoris. Sartoris, who New Yorker critic Kelefa Sanneh describes as a “debauched socialite”, is portrayed as a wealthy, glamourous femme fatale.

Not everyone was impressed with Holt’s colorful personal life, however, and her critics often used her lifestyle as an excuse to dismiss her as indecorous. As it turns out, it was precisely this aspect of Holt’s personality that pushed the boundaries of the way that Black musicians were able to present themselves. As Caplan argues, the “scantily clad Parisian nightclub chanteuse could also be the writer exhorting readers to listen to symphonies.” Holt, therefore, resisted the usual pressure for Black classical musicians to have to present as respectable, so that they would be seen as “rising above” the perceived natural inferiority of their race.

Music

One of Holt’s only surviving works is this short piano piece, Negro Dance, which dates from 1921. According to Ege, the piece draws inspiration from African-American antebellum rural dance music, most notably the Pattin’ Juba. This musical pattern derives from a plantation dance that was originally brought to Charleston by slaves and uses only the body – slapping and patting of the arms, legs, chest, and cheeks, alongside stomping with the feet – to create rhythm.

The Pattin’ Juba uses only the body out of necessity. In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, which took place in South Carolina in 1739, plantation owners forbade their slaves from playing any rhythmic instruments for fear that they were hiding coded messages in their drumming patterns, and so the body became the primary carrier of rhythm. Florence Price later used the Pattin’ Juba in the third movement of her Symphony No. 1.

You can hear Dr. Samantha Ege performing Holt’s Negro Dance (1929) below:

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Tania León, 79, has garnered international acclaim as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. She has composed close to 120 works including those for theater, voice, solo instruments, chamber ensembles, mixed genre, ballet, opera, and orchestra.

In 2022, she was a Kennedy Center Honoree for her contribution to American culture, and in 2021, received the Pulitzer Prize for her composition Stride — commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. The London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) will give the UK premiere of Stride on March 31, 2023.

León was also recently announced as the next LPO Composer-in-Residence, and Composer Mentor for the LPO Young Composers program, which supports emerging orchestral composers.

Born in 1943 in Havana, Cuba, León developed a fascination with music from as young as four years old, when she would often dance to songs on the radio and sing along with perfect pitch to pieces played on the classical station. 

Tania León, aged 8 (Image courtesy: NPR)

From a young age, she was receiving rigorous, European-style conservatory training from her piano teacher in Cuba. When she was nine, she received a postcard from her teacher in France with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Inspired by the card, León set her sights on living in France as a piano virtuoso and helping her family financially. 

She went on to win three major competitions and earned degrees from Havana’s Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade Conservatory in piano and music theory. She began trying to travel to France in earnest when she turned 17. 

“After struggling so many years, and finally getting the support of a family in Miami through the Catholic Church…I got a telegram telling me that I was to fly on the 29th of May,” León said in a recent interview with NPR. “And one of the things that happened boarding the plane — I didn't know that all of a sudden I was a citizen of the world, not a citizen of my country anymore.”

In 1967, at age 24, León left for Miami on a free flight to the U.S. through a resettlement program in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, expecting to continue her travels on to Europe. Her initial plans changed drastically when she found out that upon entering the U.S. she was required to stay at least five years before she could apply for citizenship. Furthermore, she was not permitted to return home to Cuba during this period. 

From left to right: Tania León, Karel Shook, and Arthur Mitchell - founders of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, looking at the score of León's first ballet, "Tones" (1969-1970), dedicated to her grandmother (Image courtesy: NPR)

The following year, in 1968, after stepping in for a pianist friend for a ballet class, León was appointed as resident composer and music director of Dance Theatre of Harlem — a new studio formed by dancer and choreographer Arthur Mitchell, the first soloist of color with the New York City Ballet, who was giving the class. Soon, famed ballet choreographers Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine were teaching León their repertoire. 

During her time in the U.S., she also received scholarships from and studied at New York University, The Juilliard School, and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

As a conductor, she appeared with the Beethovenhalle Orchestra, Johannesburg’s National Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Chicago Sinfonietta, New York Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfonica de El Salvador, Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra, and many more.

In the 1970s, she began composing large-scale, percussive dance works. Simultaneously, the Dance Theater of Harlem — also America’s first black classical ballet company — drew international acclaim, and its tours finally saw her arrive in Paris. In 1979, she was allowed to visit home through a Cuban government family reunification program.

TANIA LEÓN | BATÁ (1985) | FOUNDATION PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA | DAVID SNELL 

Additionally, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series in 1978 and co-founded the American Composers Orchestra Sonidos de las Americas Festivals as the Latin American music advisor in 1994.

From 1993 to 1997, she was New Music Advisor to Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, and from 1994 to 2001, was the Latin American music advisor for the American Composers Orchestra. In 2010, she became the founder and artistic director of Composers Now, an organization empowering living composers and celebrating their diverse voices. 

As an educator, León has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Michigan, University of Kansas, Purchase College, Hamburg’s Musikschule, and the Jazz Composer Orchestra Institute. In 2000, she was appointed professor of Music at Brooklyn College and has been a Distinguished Professor of the City University of New York since 2006.

TANIA LEÓN | INURA (2009) | SON SONORA VOICES AND ENSEMBLE | TANIA LEÓN 

Throughout her career, León continued to compose and in 2020, completed Stride as part of NY Phil’s “Project 19,” featuring commissions by female composers honoring the centenary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. The work was dedicated in honor of suffragist Susan B. Anthony and “to the visionaries Deborah Borda and Jaap van Zweden.”

“It’s the 100th anniversary (of the 19th Amendment),” León said at the time. “A lot of things have changed, a lot of things need to change, and that is my very personal comment,” she added about what her work represents. “That we’re celebrating something that was handicapped, and something that is still handicapped.”

PROJECT 19: THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC IN REHEARSAL FOR LEÓN’S “STRIDE” (2020)

León’s success blossomed from the encouragement she received from her family, in particular her grandmother. “I come from a very poor family, a family integrated by people of different cultures,” León told NPR. “But what we had in common was the fact that we were poor and dreaming of something that was virtually impossible.

Her many honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. Additionally, she holds honorary doctorate degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2018, she received the United States Artists Fellowship, and in 2022, Chamber Music America’s National Service Award.

Currently, she serves as an honorary chair for the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing and is a Member of the Boards of Directors of the New York Philharmonic and The ASCAP Foundation.

“[León has] conducted the world renowned New York Philharmonic and worked with the Brooklyn Philharmonic to bring classical music beyond concert halls into city neighborhoods,” said President Joe Biden during the 2022 Kennedy Honors address. “She led symphonies in South Africa, from South Africa to Germany. A mentor and a professor, she champions new composers earning dozens of honors, her versatility, her vision, her defying labels, her deepening Latin American influence in classical music.”

A composer portrait of León can be viewed below.

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Born in 1961 in Seoul, South Korea, Unsuk Chin studied with composers Sukhi Kang and György Ligeti, and has lived in Germany since 1985. The creator of rich and vibrant sound-worlds, she is considered a significant figure in the contemporary art music scene.

With an output of both electronic and acoustic scores, Chin’s works have been performed by orchestras including the Bavarian State Opera, Berlin Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Radio France Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, among others.

Contemporary music ensembles that have programmed her works include Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Arditti Quartet, and Kronos Quartet. 

Conductors Kent Nagano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Rattle, Markus Stenz, Peter Eötvös, David Robertson, Myung-Whun Chung, George Benjamin, Hannu Lintu, plus violinists Christian Tetzlaff, Viviane Hagner, and Renaud Capuçon, have all championed Chin’s compositions.

Chin, 61, grew up in Seoul as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and began learning music from an early age. While her father taught her the basics of piano, formal tuition for instrumental music was beyond their means financially. 

Despite this, Chin continued to hone her passion for music, setting pencil to paper to write music instead. “South Korea [in the 1960s] was one of the poorest countries in the world and there was a military dictatorship in power,” she told The Age in 2018. “It was also a highly patriarchal society; women were allowed to enter education but not in order to become independent…But I was always a stubborn person, determined to follow my own dreams.”

Twice refused entry to Seoul National University — which at the time, was seen as an “existential disaster” — Chin was accepted on her third try. Later on, she applied to study abroad as her home country lacked opportunities for composers like herself. 

In 1985, she received the Gaudeamus Foundation grant to study in Germany with Hungarian composer Ligeti — a key figure in 20th-century music. However, while studying there, Chin felt cultural barriers.

“For a female Asian composer, there were some very strong glass ceilings back then — at least in Germany,” Chin continued. “I overcame those obstacles by trying to ignore them, concentrating on my work and constantly trying to improve its quality.”

In a recent interview with San Francisco Symphony editorial director, Chin revealed a breakthrough that occurred in her mid-20s. “When I was younger, I devoured all of the Western avant-garde music, as if with a time lapse, and wrote prize-winning works that were indebted to different modernist idols. 

“[When I studied with Ligeti], he demanded that I find my own voice; it was a time when he had himself renounced the avant-garde to look…beyond traditionalism, modernism, and post-modernism,” she added. “As a result, I couldn’t compose for three years.”

In 2004, she received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for her first Violin Concerto, written in 2001, which brought her to public attention. 

UNSUK CHIN | VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1 | VIVIANE HAGNER | NEIL THOMSON | SÃO PAULO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | 2017 

Chin has written over 50 works for vocals, tape, chamber, quartet, and orchestra, as well as operas and concertos. They have been released on record labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, Kairos, and Analekta, and are published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. A full list of her works can be found here.

Possessing a unique musical style, her first opera, “Alice in Wonderland,” written between 2004 and 2007, showcases Chin’s use of references within each other to create rich layers for ironic effect, emulating Baroque styles to those of Bizet and Schoenberg. 

UNSUK CHIN | ALICE IN WONDERLAND | "THE MAD TEA PARTY" | MYUNG WHUN CHUNG | SEOUL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA | 2016

Her Clarinet Concerto written for Finnish clarinetist Kari Kriikku and Violin Concerto No. 2 for Leonidas Kavakos are among her solo works with an orchestra that have been performed to great acclaim. 

“I’m attracted by virtuosity,” Chin told the New York Times on writing for solo instruments. “This enthusiasm and virtuosity of a player trying to go beyond [their] boundaries: I like that,” she explained. “It’s a situation that I experience all the time as a composer: pushing the limits of your possibilities, not knowing whether you can do it — and then somehow succeeding. I ask every bit as much from a soloist.”

UNSUK CHIN | VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 2 "SHARDS OF SILENCE" | LEONIDAS KAVAKOS | SIR SIMON RATTLE | LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | 2021

Among Chin’s numerous accolades include the Arnold Schoenberg Prize, Prince Pierre Foundation Music Award, Ho-Am Prize, Wihuri Sibelius Prize, Hamburg Bach Prize, Kravis Prize, Leonie Sonning Music Prize, and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.

Additionally, she is the Artistic Director of South Korea’s Tongyeong International Festival and has served in the same role with Taiwan’s Weiwuying International Music Festival since this year.

A mini-documentary on Chin can be watched below.

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Born in 1931 in the Tatar region of Russia under the Soviet Socialist Republic, Sofia Gubaidulina began learning music at the age of five and wrote her first composition eight years later. 

She commenced piano and composition studies in Kazan, Russia, before continuing at the Moscow Conservatory in her early 20s studying with Vissarion Shebalin. Her skill was recognized by Dimitri Shostakovich, whose support in the late 1950s was a significant moment in her life.

According to Deutsche Grammophon, when the head of Moscow Conservatory’s examination panel stated that Gubaidulina’s writing of a symphony was “on the wrong path,” Shostakovich stepped in to advise differently. “My wish for you is that you should continue on your own incorrect path,” he told her.

“I am grateful the whole of my life for those wonderful words,” she told the Guardian. “They fortified me and were exactly what a young composer needed to hear from an older one. It gave me the courage to follow my own path.”

(Photo credit: Priska Ketterer / Boosey & Hawkes)

She later settled in Moscow’s musical scene but was not fully embraced by the Soviet Union’s conservative music organization. She had developed a personal and unique quality in her concert works which expressed her Christian faith. This was often confronted by the artistic mandates of the Soviet Union.

Making a living during this time composing film scores, she was also exploring non-Western percussion instruments. “I give a lot of importance to percussion instruments,” she told the NY times. “They contain the essence of existence.”

She faced many issues with the Soviet authorities due to her meeting with dissidents and attending unauthorized western music festivals. 

In 1979, she was blacklisted at the Sixth Congress of the Composers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and denounced with six other composers for producing “noisy mud instead of real musical innovation,” according to the Guardian. The condemned group became known as Khrennikov’s Seven.

While most of them went into exile, Gubaidulina stayed. “Being blacklisted and so unperformed gave me artistic freedom, even if I couldn't earn much money,” she said. “I could write what I wanted without compromise.”

In the 1980s, she turned heads in the West with “Offertorium,” her first violin concerto written for Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer. With its influence from Webern and Bach, the work rooted Gubaidulina’s global regard as a spiritualist writer.

“Offertorium” was premiered by Kremer in 1981 in Vienna. Gubaidulina could not attend as she was denied an exit permit by the Soviet government at the time.

In 1996, she composed her viola concerto, dedicated to violist Yuri Bashmat, and in 2007, wrote her second violin concerto “In Tempus Praesens,” for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.

At age 87 and inspired by the philosopher Martin Buber’s 1923 book I and Thou, Gubaidulina wrote her third violin concerto in 2018, titled “Dialogue: I and You,” dedicating it to violinist Vadim Repin. This piece performed by Baiba Skride in 2021 can be watched below.

“The dialogue can be understood in many ways,” Repin told music journalist Bodil Maroni Jensen. “It is a dialogue between the musicians on stage, and it is a prayer, a dialogue with God. It can also be a dialogue with our inner self. In my opinion, it is a rich presentation of thoughts and feelings.”

Among her many pieces include her orchestral works, Fairytale Poem, Figures of Time, Pro et Contra, and more recently, The Light of the End and The Wrath of God. 

In addition to writing a tome of concertos, solo, and vocal works, she penned four string quartets, with the fourth dedicated to the Kronos Quartet in 1993. A performance of it by the Azuri Quartet in 2018 can be watched below. 

Since the Soviet Union dissolved, Gubaidulina has resided in a small village outside Hamburg, Germany, where she finds it peaceful to compose music. Her pieces are published and represented by the UK’s Boosey & Hawkes, the British Commonwealth, and the Republic of Ireland. 

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