Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season March-April 2016 | Page 12

Cracking
the Concert Hall

N ew works by women composers Counter 
inequality in the orchestral world.
By Christianna McCausland

W

hen Kristin Kuster was asked to write
a themed piece of music for the BSO’s
“Centennial Commissions” series, she
chose the theme of Marin Alsop. The
BSO music director, says Kuster, a
42-year-old composer and associate professor of composition at the University of Michigan, “is such an important
figure for female musicians, not only in orchestral music
but in art music.”
Kuster’s Alsop-inspired piece, entitled Moxie, which
the orchestra played at the BSO Centennial Gala on

Kuster describes her work,
Moxie, as a “fun, five-minute
party in honor of Marin.”

“

February 11, is one of 10
new works by contemporary
composers inspired by more
than 100 ideas submitted by
the public in response to the
BSO’s call for ideas from the
Baltimore community.
The composer describes
the work as a “fun, fiveminute party in honor of
Marin.”
“It honors her verve and
her drive to just do it and to
do it at such a high level,”
Kuster adds.
Six of the ten commissions are by female composers, making the Centennial
Commissions an important
milestone not only for the
BSO, but for women in
orchestral music, seemingly one of the last places
Frederick Huber
where females remain
BSO Music Director
underrepresented.
1937
The commissions are
made possible by generous
support from Classical Movements, a music touring
company founded by female entrepreneur Neeta Helms.
In addition to Kuster, the other women composers are
Joan Tower, Libby Larsen, Caroline Shaw, TJ Cole, and
Lori Laitman.
Kuster also premiered a work in 2015 with the
Cincinnati Symphony’s “One City, One Symphony” program, with commissioned pieces set
to poetry by Maya Angelou, and will debut her
original opera, Old Presque Isle, at the Virginia
Arts Festival in 2017.
She says that Alsop, a champion of new music, has
been an important role model for her and her contemporaries, as has Larsen, Jennifer Higdon, Joan Tower,
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Betsy Jolas.
“There are many more women composers featured
now than ever before, but the numbers are still really
bad and do not represent the number of female composers who exist and who are awesome and who are
willing and able to write for orchestra,” says Kuster.
“It seems to me that the people in charge of making
programming decisions are choosing not to program
women, and that’s a problem.”

Limitations
placed
on women
musicians
are largely
a matter of
tradition and
have no more
foundation
in logic than
withholding
the vote
franchise
from them.