I seem to have spent a lot of time of late talking about how to programme women composers, particularly as the uneasy adjunct to the performing canon they currently seem to be seen to offer. There are, of course, many models. I am grateful to one particular student who reminded me recently of the “add and stir” label mentioned by Karin Pendle and Marcia Citron. Another student, a guitarist, highlighted the all-too-frequent habit of festivals and general conferences to corral women composers into their own concert, shuffling the female performers off after them before shutting the gate. There are the models which select composers because of a personal characteristic, whether that be nationality, gender, or some other social attribute, and then there are models that try to ignore the fact that the composer is being programmed is lesser-known - not the composer most likely to be programmed by mainstream venues, or even indeed to be taught to burgeoning professionals.
This is before we even get to the idea of how such concerts should be publicized. Do we highlight that the majority of the pieces are by women, thus demonstrating that women are and have indeed been composers, but perhaps making more of their personal characteristics than we would wish, rather than allowing their music to speak for its own worth, or do we “ignore” the fact that they are women and expect people to take the gamble of attending a concert of unknown repertoire? I am reminded of my time on the Galápagos Islands where we had an intense discussion on the pros and cons of people interfering in animals habitats and reproduction; one woman asserted that people should not interfere at all, as we have no right to, whereas another was of the view that given we have been interfering for centuries, hence creating the problem in the first place, we have to continue to interfere at least for a while in order to redress the imbalance.
Because it is of course the centuries of imbalance and exclusion that makes our programming choices almost impossible. In some ways, however, the idea of a single composer whether it be concert or CD can overcome this – certainly Arthur Froggatt writing in 1919 suggested that the single composer program is the best. He was certainly in a minority thinking this way, but it’s interesting that it was mooted quite so early:
“The ideal programme is undoubtedly drawn from the works of a single composer; and although such a course is not always possible, it should be adopted much more frequently than is at present the case.”
All of this is in my mind as I listen to Dedication in Time, the CD of chamber and solo music by Margaret Hubicki released by Chandos for her ninetieth birthday in 2005.
I cannot help but hear parallels between Hubicki and her almost exact contemporary Geraldine Mucha, who was born two years later and began her studies at the Royal Academy of Music the year after Hubicki‘s graduation in 1934. This is probably at least in part because of their shared composition teacher Benjamin Dale, as well as their shared milieu, but there is also something I hear that springs from pain, especially in their relationships (very different though that pain was for both), and the way it inflects their compositional voice. This parallel reaches its pinnacle in Svolgimento, the first movement of an intended violin sonata written for Hubicki’s husband, Bohdan Hubicki, just months before his tragically early death in a WWII air raid.
According to one obituary she believed that “music and written words needed ‘space to unfold’”, an aesthetic that can be heard in this album. Spirituality was also apparently important to her, mainly evident through her devout Christianity, but also evident through this music. The opening track of the album, From the Isles to the Sea for flute and piano, celebrates the Scottish islands of Iona and Lindisfarne that she loved so much; we move from there into the piano sonata she wrote for her own graduation recital. The open and gentle textures of the flute and piano work give way to a large and rich sound world, with the occasional delicious spikiness. The one song on the CD, Full Fathom Five, demonstrates Hubicki’s love of landscape, and the way in which it influences her music so deeply, not just in the programmatically titled movements such as this and Lonely Mere and Rigaudon, but throughout all the works. From London vistas in the Goladon Suite, to an imagined Irish Landscape in the first movement of the Irish Fantasy, a vivid visualization underpins both the writing and the way in which Hubicki wants her audience drawn in.
“[W]hile acknowledging the darker aspects of human existence, she recognises in music an unrivalled source of energy, healing and resurrection.”
Here you can hear From the Isles to the Sea for flute and piano.