Celebrating Women Composers at Women’s Rights National Historical Park

This post was written by Daniel Ketter, Co-Director of Music in the American Wild, an ensemble that began as a way to celebrate the 2016 U.S. National Park Service centennial. 

On March 3, 2018, Music in the American Wild continued its collaboration with National Park Service sites by hosting a concert celebrating Women’s Voices at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY. This project was supported by a grant from the Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, which helped to fund a new chamber commission by Buffalo-based composer Caroline Mallonée. Her composition for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and voice, titled “Solitude of Self,” was inspired by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s famous speech given while resigning as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. In addition to the commission, we performed works by Amy Beach, Joan Tower, and arranged a suffragette march. The performance was held on site at the park in the Wesleyan Chapel, the location of the First Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. Performers included Eastman alumni, faculty of SUNY Buffalo, and leaders of Buffalo String Works: Emlyn Johnson (flute), Daniel Ketter (cello), Hanna Hurwitz (violin), Andy Brown (clarinet), Yuki Numata Resnick (violin), Virginia Barron (viola), and Tiffany DuMouchelle (soprano).

Caroline Mallonée included the following program note for her composition:

“Solitude of Self” is a setting of selections from a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she gave later in her life, years after Seneca Falls got the movement started, as she was still working for women’s suffrage. She presents a cogent, strong, and unique argument: we are all our own selves. “We come into the world alone, we leave the world alone; we each die alone.”

The music portrays the individuality of self at times by juxtaposing different motifs on top of one another. In other sections, the forces come together to illustrate “the long, weary march,” the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, or peaks of ice in the Swiss Alps.

The topic of women’s rights is an important one now. It’s been 100 years since women got the vote in New York State, but we are still working for equality and hashtagging #metoo. I hope this piece feels timely; the process of researching the work done at Seneca Falls and since was enormously satisfying for me this year, and I hope the message of “Solitude of Self” resonates with the audience: let us each embrace our own solitude, even as we stand together and move forward.

As a part of our collaboration with the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, we interviewed two park rangers and plan to produce a short video with Eastman faculty Amy Zhang highlighting the unique cultural value of this historic site. This video serves as a document of our performance activity and is an artistic statement in support of the mission of the park that can be shared with others.

Talking with the park rangers, we were excited by their interest in the spirit of our music. We were also surprised and inspired to learn about the scope of the park’s mission. Rather than focusing on a particular moment or period in history, both of the rangers we interviewed had a much broader outlook on the mission of the park, focusing on civil rights in general. We were struck by their commitment to an inclusive approach to celebrating the development of civil rights in America, from the suffragettes to today.

The program we performed at the WRNHP matched that inclusive approach, representing music from the suffragette era to the present. The premiere of Mallonée’s work was a special moment in the performance, matching the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to a space where she actually spoke, wrote, and worked. The dynamic work was full of text painting, allowing the audience to understand the narrative of Stanton’s piece through words and music and bringing history alive through vivid and varied sounds.

Many audience members had never attended a concert where all of the music was written by women. In particular, one of our audience members, Molly Murdock, is a great advocate for bringing music by women into the music theory classroom with her website, www.musictheoryexamplesbywomen.com. Molly was enthusiastically supportive and shared several “live tweets” of our performance with her social network of like-minded musicians.

This project continues Music in the American Wild’s mission: celebrating American people, places, and their stories with new music. We want to make our music active, embedded in the communities it serves, and connecting composers and performers directly to their inspiration and audience. By connecting composers with landmarks celebrating a century of women’s rights and communities of people dedicated to preserving and sharing this history, the music concretely acts to empower the object of its focus: it highlights the voices of contemporary composers, preserves and celebrates our shared history, strengthens and grows the community of people dedicated to the cause, and allows performers to serve people with deeply contextualized music.

We hope to continue our focus on Women’s Voices alongside our focus on the American wild with more commissions and performances leading up to the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. Music in the American Wild’s next activities include an upcoming album to be released this year on the ArtistShare label and a return residency at the North Cascades National Park Complex in August 2018.