Marga Richter

PREFACE

xi preface i first became aware of Marga Richter’s music in 2003 when I was preparing to teach a course on women in music and listened to the audio cassette for Diane Jezic’s Women Composers:The LostTradition Found. I found Richter’s Landscapes of the Mind II for violin and piano to be quite engaging and wanted to know more about the composer. I soon discovered that she was a highly skilled composer of a large body of instrumental and vocal works that are attractive to the listener, challenging to the performer, and exhibit superior craftsmanship. I found her particularly impressive as there have been few women composers of large-scale orchestral music until quite recently. Much of Richter’s music has been performed and frequently commissioned by prominent artists (including soprano Jessye Norman; pianists Menahem Pressler and William Masselos; conductors Carlos Surinach, Izler Solomon, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Gerard Schwarz, Marin Alsop, and JoAnn Falletta; violist Walter Trampler; and violinist Daniel Heifetz), while reviews of the performances have been consistently filled with much praise for her compositions. Her orchestral works have been performed by more than fifty orchestras including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra , and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. She has received awards and grants from the American Society of Composers and Publishers, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller fund, and the National Federation of Music Clubs. Most of her music has been published—much of it recorded and virtually all of it performed. In 1975 she received a contract from a major publisher, Carl Fischer. Marga Richter and I have spoken on the phone hundreds of times since 2003. We have also met in person numerous times beginning in February 2005 when I stayed with her for several days at her Long Island home. Since then I have visited and spoken with her periodically discussing music, composition, women’s roles, raising children, life, relationships, and religion. But mostly music. Music is her main identity. At the age of eighty-five she is still an active composer, and she continues to have premieres of new works. The documentation and consideration of Marga Richter’s music is the most important aspect of this book. Her music, composed over much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, is expressive and interesting, frequently inspired by high-quality U.S., Irish/English, and Asian images or texts. Especially notable are her large-scale works for orchestra: BlackberryVines andWinter Fruit,Landscapes of the Mind I, Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills, Out of Shadows and Solitude and her triple concerto: Variations and Interludes on Themes from Monteverdi and Bach; her chamber opera Riders to the Sea; her Sonata and her Requiem for piano; and her song cycles Testament and Dew-drops on a Lotus Leaf. The nature, origins, and first performances for most of her works are detailed, and many of the numerous reviews are included.The reference section of the book also contains complete lists of her works and recordings. Richter’s musical aesthetics and style are described, particularly her early dissonant style, her rejection of the twelve-tone method, her layered textures and ostinatos, and her more tonal later works. I intend for this explication of her music to offer a more complete view of the musical styles used by U.S. twentieth-century composers. This book is also the first complete biography of Marga Richter and portrays in detail Richter’s upbringing, early training, and musical career over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. A theme in the book is Richter’s relationship to feminism. While Richter does not like the phrase “woman composer ” and never called herself a feminist, I do believe it is important to have a place, like this University of Illinois Press series on women composers, in which to focus specifically on women composers in order to add to and challenge our understanding of gender roles.The effects on Richter’s career of social differences, marriage, children, widowhood, and her own understanding of her gender role are explored throughout this book. Her life is one example of how a woman’s life tends to develop on a different schedule in a different way than a man’s life, often making it harder for a woman to receive recognition for her work. The seven chapters progress chronologically and depict the different phases in her life: “The EarlyYears: 1926–1951,”“Modern Dance and...