ORDINARY WOMEN AND ONE BAD GIRL
posted by James Reel
Since 1971, Aug. 26 has been designated Women's Equality Day. There are so many "special" days that people tend to ignore most of them, so in case you haven't heard of it, this is the day that marks the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States. It's also intended to call attention to women's continuing efforts toward full equality. It's going to be a very long time before there's a 50-50 mix of music by male and female composers on KUAT-FM, mainly because of the problem of history: We draw our music programming from the past 600 years or so, and until the current generation very few women had careers as composers. Still, there are scattered talented figures from the past, and a great many women active today, and we're sampling their work through the day. We'll have miniatures and major works alike from Amy Beach, Jacquelyn Sellers, Valerie Coleman, Marion Bauer, Elinor Remick Warren, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Pamela Decker, Jennifer Higdon, Ursula Mamlok, Joan Tower, Victoria Bond, Jocelyn Swigger, Libby Larsen, Roshanne Etezady and Katherine Hoover ... along with the usual material by dead white males.
Aug. 27 is the 125th anniversary of the birth of violist and composer Rebecca Clarke, so on that day we'll play a few of her works to celebrate the occasion, alongside those of her fellow birthday celebrant, Eric Coates.
And I happened to notice that Monday, Aug. 29 is the feast day of the beheading of John the Baptist; note that his "regular" feast day is June 24. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to ... well, not exactly celebrate, but mark the occasion with as much music as I could find about that instrument of his demise, Salome. Between about 10:20 a.m. and noon on Monday, you'll hear some of Richard Strauss's music for that anti-heroine (including a piano-roll recording of Strauss himself playing the "Dance of the Seven Veils"), plus items by Archibald Joyce, Alexander Glazunov, Paul Bowles and Henry Hadley. And, just so it doesn't all seem too disrespectful, we'll begin with Healey Willan's Missa Brevis No. 11, "Missa Sancti Johannis Baptistae."
