Throwing Down The Gauntlet: Music for English Horn Alone
Jacqueline Leclair, credit: Shoshana Klein | Classical Post
In winter 2018, I was developing a conference proposal when a former oboe student Carly Gordon visited me. Carly is a wonderful musician, entrepreneur, and activist, devoted to equity, diversity, and social justice. As we talked, it dawned on us she and I should do a joint presentation for the conference, focused on diversity in recital programming. She would write a paper explaining the history of white male hegemony in classical music, and the specific obstacles marginalizing music by underrepresented composers. I would gather a collection of works for English horn alone, and interpolate performances of the music with her PowerPoint talk.
On Facebook, I requested recommendations for works for English horn alone by underrepresented composers. Quite a few recommendations flooded my messages. Carly and I spent several months developing our presentation. She wrote the talk and made the PowerPoint. I selected and learned the pieces; and Carly and I met at the conference in Tampa FL and made the presentation as planned in July 2019.
At some point in that process, it occurred to me it would make sense to release the seven works as a CD. I happened to have a one-year sabbatical beginning soon, and recording the seven pieces seemed like an obvious project to undertake.
Beginning The Project
Looking back on the circumstances of how the album was conceived, Carly Gordon was the catalyst who inspired the project, and I am grateful to her for the quiet consciousness raising she elicited from me, which I would have missed if she hadn’t happened to visit me at that time.
The winnowing process I went through to choose the seven pieces for the album was almost entirely intuitive. I was interested in exploring all the different pieces I discovered, and finding compositional voices that resonated with me in different ways across a wide spectrum of musical diversity. In the end, the CD came together, seeming almost like a curated recital. But I did not plan it that way, consciously.
The English horn is traditionally heard almost exclusively in symphony orchestras, playing beautiful slow solos in pieces like Rossini William Tell Overture, Berlioz Roman Carnival Overture, and Dvorak New World Symphony. The instrument has been stereotyped into this role of playing only sad, prayerful, and pastoral music since Hector Berlioz first described it as suitable for only those sentiments in his orchestration treatise of 1844.
With this CD (Music for English Horn Alone), one could say I am throwing down the gauntlet, demonstrating that the English horn is as capable of playing as wide a range of musical roles as any other instrument. It deserves to be respected and to take its place in mainstream music as the gorgeous, powerful, and flexible instrument it truly is. I am calling on you, composers: Forget what you read in orchestration books and what you hear in standard repertoire. This is 2020, and you need to be writing for English horn.
The following are some thoughts from the seven composers represented on this compact disc.
Cecilia Arditto
Cecilia Arditto (b. 1966 Argentina): As I developed Música invisible, I was researching and thinking about the extended techniques in a way that was technical, but at the same time focused on different ways of listening. I developed a repertoire of these sounds and techniques. They became my tools. The instrument started speaking in a different way, and that opened a path, and I followed the path as I composed the piece, searching.
The English horn is a miniature physical space, a resonant space. I was interested in the modulation of the human voice through the instrument. I find this miniature resonant space inside the English horn fascinating. Somehow, the frequencies of the spoken voice resonate with the frequencies of the English horn’s body.
Jacqueline’s recording makes the English horn powerful. It is an English horn piece, but at the same time it is an anti-English-horn piece.
I belong to a new collective of Latin American composers (around 300 women, and growing) from the whole continent, including artists like me who live abroad. We are diverse in style, political views, social realities, and race. But we all face the same issues about the lack of visibility and opportunities as female composers.
Meera Gudipati
Meera Gudipati (b. 1993 Germany): My Yale University classmate Lauren Williams commissioned Ashakiran last year. Many of us had doubts about our careers and the musical audition process. I wanted to write this piece to give her a ray of hope “Ashakiran.” I wrote it for anyone who had doubts about themselves, with the hope that we can all grow stronger together.
Ashakiran grows out of the first “awakening” moment as the music begins, and develops from there, unfolding and expanding. The second movement introduces a lively and playful melody with virtuosic embellishments. I included the improvisation at the end to give the performer the chance to turn from the typical focus on perfection and the rigidness of Western classical music. Sometimes we don’t learn even simple improvisation in music school. I wanted to give Lauren and other [CAPITAL E]english hornists that outlet for their creative voices, building hope through improvisation.
We can all see the numbers regarding diversity and equity. As a community, we still have a long way to go. Now with COVID restrictions, there is more chamber music, solo, and new music being shared with the public. This creates more opportunities for playing and presenting music by composers of diverse backgrounds.
I think every one of us has to do our part, to be less complacent and more active creating solutions: introducing diverse composers to students, presenting music of diversity, and creating projects like this CD.
Hannah Kendall
Hannah Kendall (b. 1984 U.K.): I composed Joe in 2006 for Michael O’Donnell, a colleague at Royal College of Music, as part of a series of new works for solo instruments written in response to various portraits on display at the National Portrait Gallery as part of their fourth annual Photographic Portrait Prize. It was premiered in the National Portrait Gallery.
I was drawn to Richard Boll’s Joe due to its mysteriousness and enigmatic makeup; and I thought the cor anglais would perfectly capture my interpretation of the work. Joe presents a multitude of possible explanations which is what the music’s changing character is exploring, providing no firm answers.
Faye-Ellen Silverman
Faye-Ellen Silverman (b. 1947 U.S.): I love the viola, the English horn, and the alto flute. They have different timbres than higher instruments (although I love those instruments, too, when I write for them), and to me they are very beautiful. I enjoy the timbres as the instruments go into their lower ranges.
I worked on Layered Lament while I was Visiting Composer at the University of Utah, having been brought there by my former teacher Vladimir Ussachevsky. He gave me some of his taped sounds to work with, and that is where the piece originated. The tapes were string sounds, and as I began to play with them I could hear what sounded like the human voice almost. That’s where I got the idea of a lament that would be layered between the English horn, which has its own kind of lamenting quality (as one of its many possible qualities), and the taped sounds. I thought the English horn matched well with the electronics. I created the piece for James Ostryniec to play at the Bourges International Electronic Music Festival.
With regard to equity, I find that, in general, there is significant prejudice against older composers as well as other underrepresented composers. In my case, when I was younger than 35, there were actually few opportunities for emerging composers. Then things changed, and the opportunities shifted to be aimed predominantly at emerging composers. Today, when a call for scores and other opportunities open up, they often exclude older composers.
Jenni Brandon
Jenni Brandon (b. 1977 U.S.): Writing for the English horn is unique because it is not usually an instrument in the forefront or considered an experimental instrument. We think of the clarinet all the time, we think of the violin; and the English horn gets pushed to the side. It shouldn’t be. On this CD, there is an amazing range of repertoire written by people from different places in their lives, with different stories they want to tell, and with different experiences they are bringing to their music. The huge variety of musical sounds and styles on this CD destroys the old stereotype of the English horn playing only mournful or pastoral music. It can portray anything one imagines for it.
I find it really refreshing to be in this CD with a collection of other composers who each has their own story. Each of the voices is unique and important, and needed. Being part of that feels like exactly where we should be right now, having conversations about inclusivity and the need to keep opening our minds to new possibilities. We are all storytellers telling stories of what the music can do and what instruments can do.
Also, we are at an important point in history, looking at how we treat each other. In the music world, we haven’t always treated each other well. There can, for example, be unreasonable expectations about perpetuating the status quo. We have to keep chipping away at that and saying no. I like how this CD presents the music, obviously compositions by women composers. But the CD is primarily presenting a wide variety of music, irrespective of gender. That’s the most important thing here. This CD gives people permission to explore the English horn and its tremendous musical possibilities.
Lisa Bielawa
Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968 U.S.): I am fascinated by the precision of the double-reed sound and also its tessitura that makes all kinds of ornaments possible, colored within the half step. Those kind of gestures are tastier with the English horn than any other double reed. Saxophones can play similarly, but they have a fatter tone and different qualities. The English horn has its amazingly precise sound but also a great warmth to it.
I have to say, especially now that I’m older, I think my own voice has a kind of an English-horn-like aspect to it. That may be one of the reasons I keep gravitating toward the instrument, because of the commonalities between it and my own singing voice.
I think about instruments and their gender associations. To me the English horn is sort of pan, sort of neuter and androgynous because it’s in the middle. It’s a “they” if you will because it’s right there in the middle of registers. The English horn could be thought of as a pants-role alto or a low countertenor.
Karola Obermüller
Karola Obermüller (b. 1977 Germany): One of my earliest pieces, my first commission, …incalzando…, was for English horn and organ. The timbre burned into my ears, in a good way. different forms of phosphorus is my second solo piece for the English horn, so many years later. The English horn timbre possesses something especially powerful, magical. I think it is a combination of its fresh quality and its antique quality: fresh because it is used so seldom as a foreground, solo voice, and antique because it has such old predecessors, from Stone Age musicians playing double reeds made from grasses, to shawms, to age-old instruments played by snake charmers. The oboe, in my ear, was “tamed” during Baroque times, and a quality of courtliness was attached to its sound. The English horn, on the other hand, has never really been tamed. It still has an archaic and mysterious quality to it.
Altogether, the seven pieces on this album unfold almost like a ritual. There are times that are soothing, calming, meditative, and then there are more active periods, like a good ritual. And then, with the Arditto, we leave the English horn pitch world almost completely, and turn a corner to discover a new place.
Jacqueline Leclair
Jacqueline Leclair is Associate Professor of Oboe at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She is a member of Ensemble Signal, and can frequently be heard performing solo and chamber music concerts internationally. Leclair was formerly on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College (NYC), and was Assistant Professor of Oboe at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) 2007-2012. During her last two years at BGSU she also served as the Director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music. Leclair is the author of, Oboe Secrets: 75 Performance Strategies for the Advanced Oboist and English Horn Player (Scarecrow Press 2014); and she worked directly with Luciano Berio in the preparation of the 1969/2000 edition of Berio's Sequenza VIIa of which she is the editor.
