Una Bourne as Pianist

In September, Una Bourne featured on this website as Composer of the Month. Todays, we highlight her as a pianist.

Una Bourne was active as a pianist from c1900 to just before WWII, both live and on record. She started in Australia, where she accrued many a glowing review from a very young age, when she swept the board at local competitions, carrying off every single prize. The accolades continued on her arrival in Europe, both of her live concerts and later, of the many recordings she made:

“The distinction of Miss Una Bourne’s playing seems to lie in the fact that the imagination and thought by which she has formed her musical conceptions is perfectly expressed in her technique.”

“As a pianist Una Bourne plays with her mind and her brain and her heart, as well as her fingers and is the most perfect concert artist to ever grace a concert platform.”

Despite this, she gets rather dismissed in modern reviews. The overview on Naxos labels her “competent, but no virtuoso”, and takes exception to her choice of “popular encores and lighter classics: many works by Chaminade, with whom she studied, as well as pieces by Paderewski, Scharwenka, Smetana, Cyril Scott, Sinding and Sydney Smith” suggesting that “Because of this her reputation today is not high.” The writer goes on to admit that she also recorded pieces “by Granados, Albeniz and Grieg”, thereby inadvertently disclosing his aesthetic priorities. She plays for effect, he says, though does not give details of this.

This hierarchy of repertoire is one that sticks, despite many attempts to demonstrate that “light” music does not mean “trivial”, and that economic success, i.e. writing what your audience likes and will buy, does not necessarily mean a corresponding lack of musical insight. Elaine Borroff writes of this in her defence of parlor music:

“This article is a culmination of unease. For years I had been reading about parlor music, accepting the subtle (and not so subtle) put-downs of that national institution without a murmur. But in some cavern of my mind, a dissonance was resonating, and one day I heard it. Most writers on this subject have used the word limited, applied both to the music and, of all things, to the audience.1 Charles Hamm speaks of “music designed to be performed by and listened to by persons of limited musical training and ability.”2 The clear implication is that parlor music was a style or genre created especially for second- rate performers who deliberately aimed second-rate musical salvos at second-rate listeners. I don’t believe it for a moment. I have no idea how to rank listeners. What persons compose a first- rate audience? Those with an IQ of 132 to the metronome? Those who survived Theory 101 with a B-flat or better? I know of no performer so toploftical as to demand more than persons who come, who listen, and who are willing to respond. Does a doorman check the incoming audience and refuse admission to those below some “cultural” standard? Does the box office at an elite university check the grades of students who want to buy tickets? I knew such statements about and negative characterizations of parlor music were all wrong because I had been there, and it was nothing like that.”

And yet Bourne was a pianist of choice of many highly-regarded musicians, such as Nellie Melba, with whom she toured for many years, and Leopold Godowsky, pianist and teacher. She once was chosen to replace Ferruccio Busoni at short notice in a concert, and on a piano roll of Brahms, shared space with Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer and Mita Nikisch. Are we to believe that people then had a lower standard than we do today? What was it about her playing (and personality) that kept her in such demand for decades?

Bourne was a pioneering recording artist, starting a thirteen year relationship with HMV in 1914, when she recorded two of her own pieces, Petite Valse Caprice and Nocturne. She would go on to record around 80 works, from composers as diverse as Chaminade, Paderewski, Beethoven and Cervantes. Most of these recordings were solo, but she also had a successful partnership with violinist Marjorie Hayward. She seems to have had a particular penchant for Scandinavian music, from Grieg to less-programmed composers such as Olsen and Palmgren. Her final set of recordings was made in 1926 and consists of a series mainly of short pieces by herself and Cecile Chaminade, who had featured prominently in her recorded repertoire over the past twelve years. 

I have picked four recordings here, that demonstrate the breadth of her offerings, and range in chronology from theValse Caprice of 1914, to Chaminade’s Berceuse Arabe of 1926. There is a very clear, underlying performance aesthetic to all of them: Bourne’s priorities lie with precision, clarity of voicing, and a sense of overall structure rather than detail. There is enough variety to prove that her fondness for tempi on the fast side are not simply an outcome of the necessity of fitting a work onto a four-minute side. 

Valse Caprice: recorded 1914

This is an acoustical recording of one of Bourne’s own works. Already there is the trademark clarity, the finger work in the tumbling triplets executed with silvery precision, and attention lavished on the left hand duet in the B section. Sometimes the triplets are given dominance, at other times, the counter-melody. While the waltz rhythm of the left hand is obscured by the combination of Bourne’s voicing and the recording level, one can hear some tantalizingly interesting detail – a highlighting of the tops of chords, or a directive change in rhythmic positioning. With each repetition the phrase endings are subtly different in both rubato and articulation. In contrast to the considerable cuts of later-recorded, longer works, here there is a repeat of the final section that is not in the score. 

Kreutzer Sonata: recorded 1918

The recording of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata was the first of several that Bourne would make with violinist Marjorie Hayward, to critical acclaim. There is not really room here fully to explore the fascinating and dynamic performance practice on offer, but I will touch on a few of the more obvious points , saving the finer details of the partnership for a later date.

The first obvious issue is, of course, the cuts needed in order to fit the sonata onto four sides. These are telling for many reasons, including being a treatise on a certain approach to form, and the accuracy of hitting the four-minute target is impressive. Our modern sensibilities, so obedient to the nineteenth-centuy’s exhortation that we should listen to complete works and in silence, shrink at the swathes cut from this Kreutzer. But you know what? If I want the full experience, in itself an aesthetic choice highlighted by current listening habits shaped by streaming sites, I can go elsewhere. This is history-making, the first recording of this work, judiciously pruned to the four sides of 78s that it inhabited. The second movement is permitted to take two sides, meaning that there are only two small cuts, with lost time made up by ignoring repeats. The first movement is sliced to the required four minutes through one huge cut, while the last movement, also one side and thus four minutes, has several, smaller but nonetheless substantial cuts. (The first full-length recording would not be for another eight years, after the advent of electrical recording, when Isolde Menges and Arthur de Greef recorded it for HMV. Their performance comes in at around 34 minutes.) It’s worth noting, too, that the performance offers more proof that Bourne’s tempi are a musical choice, as much as a practical one. The Presto of the slow movement is slow by her standards, at minim=72, while the slow movement is crotchet=48. There are interesting choices here in ensemble – Hayward and Bourne clearly don’t see precision of playing a note exactly together as always the goal of good ensemble – dynamics, and articulation, both of which can stray quite a long way from the literal markings of (most) scores. It’s a fabulous performance, well worth shelving modern biases for.

Rondo alla Turca: 1925

Bourne takes it a good deal faster than almost anyone else at the time, at crotchet=164. In contrast, both Emil Sauer in 1923 and Rachmaninov in 1925 take it at 144, while 1933, Edwin Fischer adopts a stately 120. As a result, Bourne only omits two repeats in the 2’30” she takes to play the piece - and still has time for a ritardando at the end. Possibly as an outcome of this speed, Bourne does have a tendency to “land” on final notes of phrases, although this gives such a clear picture of the structure she is creating that it feels very much deliberate (and is not noticeable in recordings of other Classical era pieces). The clarity is still superb, and one can hear the colour change between major and minor, and particularly into the f# minor section. The way in which she emphasizes a LH crotchet melodic line is a particular highlight.

Berceuse Arabe: recorded 1926

This performance was recorded in the C Studio, Small Queen's Hall, on 18 October 1926, probably making it the last piece Bourne recorded. It was an up-to-the-minute repertoire choice, as the work had only been published the previous year. As already mentioned, Chaminade’s music played a large role in Bourne’s recorded output. It’s worth remembering that at this point, Chaminade herself was still recording and with some success, although her reputation was fading fast in the turn towards neoclassicism and newer modes. Bourne is perhaps a fellow victim of this change in aesthetic, being seen as a relic of a past age that music was surprisingly eager to dissociate itself from. Certainly it’s easy to hear a commonality in performance practice between the two pianists, not just in repertoire but in approach to the keyboard. Bourne clearly enjoys experimenting with the articulation, using very little pedal throughout.

Ninon Vallin in Dimitri Kirsanoff's film of Les Berceaux

In the move to include women composers in the historical landscape, we sometimes tend to obscure the many extraordinary women performers that have helped make music the experience that it is and has been. In part, this is an issue to do with ‘capturing’ – recording is so young, still, that it is easy to forget those performers who came before the clarity of modern technology. But it is also a sign of the hierarchy we often assign within the composer-performer-audience triad, with the performer, albeit at times unconsciously, seen as creatively less authoritative then the composer. I intend to celebrate some of these bygone women performers in the blog, starting today with some fairly unknown film footage from pre-WWII. 

Between 1932 and 1940, film director Dimitri Kirsanoff made three short films with collaborator and cinematographer Boris Kaufman, all taking a piece of music as the inspiration and soundtrack. They were part of a wider project by director Émile Vuillermoz to encapsulate music in visual form and all show a different relationship between music and the visual. They range from the extraordinarily moving to the seriously unacceptable, with Kristanoff’s offerings occupying much of that spectrum. 

All of Kristanoff’s short films centre around water as a theme. It tumbles through the landscape, around it, over it, sometimes hurling itself at the eye of the spectator. We won’t spend time here on the psychological weight of meaning behind such a choice of theme, be it conscious or unconscious, but will let it provide the backdrop to our focus, i.e. the women who perform in them, through music and drama. It’s striking just how the films demonstrate pretty much the entire gamut of women’s roles in the space of about 15 minutes. I have always found Delys Bird’s summation of these roles, in her 1992 exploration of the relationship between artisthood and motherhood, to be the most succinct and descriptive:

“Major constructions of the feminine in Western patriarchal societies are situated within the discourses of creativity and maternity, but women are positioned in a different gendered relation in each of these discourses. The fa¬miliar, secondary roles assigned to the creative feminine — as muse, nurse, handmaiden, wife or mother — are understood as necessary prerequisites to the environment that will enable masculine creativity to flourish.”

I am most interested in the first film, featuring French singer Ninon Vallin (1886-1961), which seems to me to offer the most complex reading, but the other two must be touched upon. The gradual erosion of female agency from number one to number three is stark and shocking. The final film, La Fontaine d’Aréthuse from 1940, is based on Symanowski’s violin and piano piece of the same name. The interesting part of it is how Kristanoff combines footage of the performers - Jacques Thibaud plays violin, Tasso Janopoulo is on piano - with the storyline. It feels like a very early forerunner of the Oxford Lieder Festival’s shadow puppetry take of performers and protagonists in their film of Erlkönig, though the concert dress of the two musicians in the 1940 film exudes a cultural authority the later film caricatures to an extent. My interest gives way here to extreme discomfort, as the nude female figure of dancer Sabine Earl appears (I had to promise YouTube that I am over 18 in order to view this). According to IMDB, this figure is ‘a vision of divinity’, being chased by The Hunter, who is fully (who’d have thought it?) if scantily dressed. It's not the nudity itself that disturbs me, but the fact that the woman is the only one undressed. Thus we have the single woman in the looked-at position - and her terrified flight leaves us under no illusion as to how powerless she feels - while the men wear the trappings of hegemony. It’s not acceptable to modern, post-Laura Mulvey eyes.

The 1936 film of Mompou’s Jeune Fille au Jardin is at least clothed, as Magda Tagliaferro plays the backcloth to dancer Clotilde Sakharoff. Again, we see both pianist and dancer, Tagliaferro bookending the whole with her visual presence, and Sakharoff occupying the middle section. This has a definite feel of a choreographed rendition of the piano music. Sakharoff takes many cues from the piano, occasionally to faintly and probably unintended comic effect, and making the whole feel the least experimental of the three films (although Tagliaferro lives up to her reputation as an innovating interpreter by making some notable choices in her own choreography, for example the exaggerated leaps of the opening line).

The first film, Les Berceaux of 1932, on Fauré’s song, is to my mind the most interesting and certainly the most moving. It’s interesting if unsurprising that the pianist remains anonymous here, in the accompanying role. Ninon Vallin takes centre stage as both musician and actor, her trademark clarity of language emanating from every second that she sings. She is first to be featured in the opening credits, in the largest font, before cinematography, and even the song writers. I choose this term carefully, as Sully Prudhomme, the poet, is listed above the composer, in the same size font, in a move that may feel surprising in comparison to common etiquette of classical music programme listings. 

The film opens with an unaccompanied choral vocalise across a series of serene visuals. These segue from seaside to boat to house, as though the boat is the bridge between nature and humanity. Gradually, as the piano starts with the rocking figure of Fauré’s introduction, the camera pulls back into a dark room, the natural world now seen through a window. We see Vallin, the only musician to act in these films, appearing in costume, as she rocks the cradle.

The room creates a dark foreground, with Vallin’s equally dark figure turned from the camera towards the window in a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting of the woman at the window. Unlike that iteration, however, it’s clear that this woman sees not what is outside, but what is in her mind’s eye, something beyond physical vision.

The window opens at the second verse - Mais viendra le jour des adieux, as though that first word, the ‘but’ that signals something more, has unlatched it. We see the men for the first time, and Vallin and her surroundings vanish for a few bars into the wave that crashes through the window. It brings the last verse with it, before the water calms at the end, on an incoming tide. The sea returns, without bearing its cargo of ship and men, and the piano stills to nothing. 

Et ce jour-là les grands vaisseaux,

Fuyant le port qui diminue,

Sentent leur masse retenue

Par l’âme des lointains berceaux.

There are many ways of reading Prudhomme’s words, and what Fauré finds in them, but here I find both Vallin’s observational, slightly reserved tone, and Kristanoff’s visual world, offer a truly empathetic interpretation. There is no complete experience here; both the women in their homes, gazing longingly out into the external world, and the men, remembering that home they leave behind them, yearn for what is missing. While the darkness feels both stifling and protective, there is a real sense of regret for the men out on the seas, missing the child and its growing. Music and film feel like an observation on the parent-child relationship that excludes, at the same times as it yearns for the third person, and on the longing for new horizons that always realizes implicitly what it leaves behind.

"And loved you better than you knew": finding the whole story

Over on Twitter and Facebook, each day we are commemorating birthdays of women composers. Although for many women we do not know the specific birth date, we have a full almanac (including Leap Day) of composers from the last 500 years.

One such composer is Mary Dickenson-Auner, whose birthday was yesterday. Dickenson-Auner was an Irish violinist-composer, who wrote works ranging from symphonies to violin sonatas, and also happened to have collaborations with both Bela Bartok and with Arnold Schoenberg, giving the first public performance of Bartok’s violin and piano sonata No. 1 in 1922.

In reading the biographies of Dickenson-Auner, it struck me yet again, as it has with so many other biographies of women, how overshadowed she is in her own story by the men with whom she is associated. Despite being a phenomenal player, composer and teacher, despite a career that took her all over the world, she is often relegated to a supporting role; a secondary presence that is only looked at, and must not speak. And thus, much of her story is lost to us (as certainly most of her own words are); it is the story of Bartok and his compositions that we are offered.

There is a whole plethora of reasons for this, from the composer-performer hierarchy that informs most of Western classical music history, to the idea that ‘woman’ cannot be creative in her own right, but must rely on the creativity of men for her expression. George Upton spent a large proportion of his 1890 book Women in Music explaining why this was the case; women are too emotional, they become discouraged too easily, they prefer supporting roles anyway. He concludes:

“For these and many other reasons growing out of the peculiar organization of woman, the sphere in which she moves, the training which she receives, and the duties she has to fulfil, it does not seem that woman will ever originate music in its fullest and grandest harmonic forms. She will always be the recipient and interpreter but there is little hope she will be the creator.
However this may be, there is a field in which she has accomplished great results, namely, her influence upon the production of music. She has done so much for music that it is no exaggeration to claim that without her influence many of the masterpieces which we now so much admire might not have been accomplished at all; that the great composers have often written through her inspiration; and that she has, in numerus notable instances, been their impulse, support, and consolation.”

Women themselves have quite a different view on this role, as well as their own contributions to the creative outpourings across the centuries. Margaret Steele Anderson’s poignant poem sums up the inner turmoil involved:

“Song
The bride, she wears a white, white rose — the plucking it was mine;
The poet wears a laurel wreath — and I the laurel twine;
And oh, the child, your little child, that’s clinging close to you,
It laughs to wear my violets — they are so sweet and blue!

And I, I have a wreath to wear — ah, never rue nor thorn!
I sometimes think that bitter wreath could be more sweetly worn!
For mine is made of ghostly bloom, of what I can’t forget —
The fallen leaves of other crowns — rose, laurel, violet!”

Elizabeth Akers Allen’s longer poem points to the cost of the silence imposed on these women:

“Left Behind
It was the autumn of the year;
The strawberry-leaves were red and sere;
October’s airs were fresh and chill,
When, pausing on the windy hill,
The hill that overlooks the sea,
You talked confidingly to me, -
Me whom your keen, artistic sight
Has not yet learned to read aright,
Since I have veiled my heart from you,
And loved you better than you knew.

You told me of your toilsome past;
The tardy honors won at last,
The trials borne, the conquests gained,
The longed-for boon of Fame attained;
I knew that every victory
But lifted you away from me,
That every step of high emprise
But left me lowlier in your eyes;
I watched the distance as it grew,
And loved you better than you knew.

You did not see the bitter trace
Of anguish sweep across my face;
You did not hear my proud heart beat,
Heavy and slow, beneath your feet;
You thought of triumphs still unwon,
Of glorious deeds as yet undone;
And I, the while you talked to me,
I watched the gulls float lonesomely,
Till lost amid the hungry blue,
And loved you better than you knew.

You walk the sunny side of fate;
The wise world smiles, and calls you great;
The golden fruitage of success
Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
And you have blessings manifold: -
Renown and power and friends and gold, -
They build a wall between us twain,
Which may not be thrown down again,
Alas! for I, the long years through,
Have loved you better than you knew.

Your life’s proud aim, your art’s high truth,
Have kept the promise of your youth;
And while you won the crown, which now
Breaks into bloom upon your brow,
My soul cried strongly out to you
Across the ocean’s yearning blue,
While, unremembered and afar,
I watched you, as I watch a star
Through darkness struggling into view,
And loved you better than you knew.

I used to dream in all these years
Of patient faith and silent tears,
That Love’s strong hand would put aside
The barriers of place and pride,
Would reach the pathless darkness through,
And draw me softly up to you;
But that is past. If you should stray
Beside my grave, some future day,
Perchance the violets o’er my dust
Will half betray their buried trust,
And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
”She loved you better than you knew.””

Fanny Hensel, who knew quite literally what it meant to be left behind, when her brother Felix was taken to meet Goethe and she was required to stay at home, was known as the Cantor in her family – the musical support and critic of Felix (his corresponding critique of her works did not earn him the same title). How fascinating, then, that in her piano trio, she chose to quote from the first work to see public light of day without any input from her, Felix’s oratorio Elijah.

It is an ongoing story, and will be revisited again and again. Today, let the last word belong to Mary Dickenson-Auner herself. Here is the third movement of her Irish Symphony, the Caoine (Lament). You can find the whole symphony on YouTube, played by the Mährische Philharmonie.

The return of live music

Normally, these blog posts are going to be on material that I’m researching, or teaching, or just thinking about. But I feel that I must first at least acknowledge the current situation that remains ongoing around the globe. 

There are a lot of adjectives flying around at present, to describe the times in which we live. Words like unprecedented (unprecedented times), and overwhelmed (The NHS will be overwhelmed), and plunged (plunged into another lockdown), through to words that are rather more unrepeatable, so I won’t. Though I may have yelled them at a wall fairly often over the last eighteen months.

And of course, it’s a particularly tough time for the arts. The disjunct between the complete closure of all live performance, and the enormous role of online performance in keeping morale high during lockdowns of varying degrees, in different countries, is clear wherever one turns. On one hand, arts courses face financial cuts from the current UK government that are often unsustainable; on the other hand, the leader of that government is at ease with quoting song lyrics in a party conference speech. Hmm, could it possibly be that an art form offered a way of saying something that nothing else comes close to doing? 

There was an enormous amount of online musical activity, of varying types and levels, but all driven by the same need to communicate. I watched some of the live feeds from opera houses around the world, from Wigmore Hall, from living rooms and kitchens. My whole family watched the Epica Omega concert, and I saw the same need in that band as I did in classical musicians – a longing to be back with a live audience, that feeds the performers, but also being lost in the enjoyment of being back in a studio with one’s musical collaborators. 

Let’s skip over the fact that the arts bring in billions to the UK economy for now; I’m talking about what gives our lives meaning. What’s the point of economic gain, if it doesn’t make our lives more fulfilled?  Even the word entertainment isn’t the fluffy luxury that many in power assume. It comes from the Old French word entretenir, meaning “to hold together, to support,” in other words, the communication that happens between artists and their audiences, between artists and each other, is fundamental to our relationships, to our livelihoods, and even to our existence. 

Nowhere was this clearer than watching students at the Royal Academy of Music come back together after so many months of sitting at home, unable to meet another musician. Piano accompanists who had been making backing tracks for singers, singers who had to sing down a Zoom camera and try to make eye contact with a blinking light, orchestral players who watched a split screen and tried to time their entry to allow for a technological delay, they all got to walk back into a room together and make live music. The delight and excitement was almost tangible, the smiles being cast at each other as sound filled the rooms once more were constant. Of course, it’s not all a straight line back into the thick of things. There are anxieties, and uncertainties, and moments of friction. But that’s life too, and after all, music encompasses everything, not just the glorious. As the words of Laura Farnell’s choral work In Praise of Music says, “awake my voice, awake my soul and sing!”

It's great to be back. I hope we get to stay. 

Welcome to the new Salon website!

Welcome to the new Salon Without Boundaries website! There are several new sections for you to explore, with more coming soon. 

It is a common misconception, that women composers of earlier times were as unheard and unprogrammed as they are now. This isn’t true. While they have never had the same recognition and authority of their male counterparts, many were heard on stage and platform, with works often being favourably reviewed and – crucially, as any contemporary composer will tell you – heard multiple times. What does tend to happen, however, is that this recognition and success dies with the woman herself. This is also the case for performers, especially those who graced the stage before the advent of recording. How do we accord creative authority to someone whose output doesn’t seem to exist any more, when we tend to see authority as residing in a permanent artifact (i.e. a published score)? 

With the current recognition of the essential nature of diversification in programming, there is a real need to make both information and scores readily available. One purpose of the Salon is to shine a spotlight on what’s out there, to help make it accessible. And we are well past the time of performing a work without understanding where it’s come from, who it has mattered to, how it speaks to us now. We aim to offer context, both musical and non-musical, as well as the musical objects themselves. With this in mind, we will be exploring not just new compositions, writings and performances, but also old ones, some very easily found online, if you know how to search past the dominant algorithms. We have a long way to go to make historical women’s outputs as accessible as their male counterparts’, but it’s worth highlighting the unceasing efforts of so many people to start addressing the imbalance.

We’ll be starting with these sections:

Composer of the Month: An introduction to historical women composers who are lesser-known, and often never programmed. We will be first concentrating on women active in the UK, Ireland and Germany (my areas of research), particularly women from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Poem of the Day: Poetry was once seen as indistinguishable from music. Here you can get a daily dose of Lieder ohne Musik.

In My Headphones: Not so much reviews, as reflections on recordings old and new – not just CDs, but recordings you can find online, e.g. on YouTube, of composers and of past performers. Sometimes this will be related to the Composer of the Month.

From My Bookshelf: Explorations of books by women and about women. We will be ranging from eighteenth-century publications to new releases.

The Salon Blog: Thoughts, reflections, ideas, discussions on anything and everything  around creativity, including the links between the arts and the every day, and what it’s like to be women living that. We’ll also be exploring those previously-mentioned ideas around creative authority.

You will also be able to find scores, recording links, poems, pictures and more, all being uploaded regularly. More exciting sections will be following soon.