Marga Richter

3. Fragments: 1960s

3 Fragments 1960s Lament might be my favorite. I absolutely love that work. I think I love all of her music. She’s always made the point that music is an emotional and spiritual thing. During that whole twelve-tone scene, she always said music is emotionally driven. It has to say something to you. It can’t just be an intellectual exercise. I think that’s why her music speaks to people. Because it comes out of a place of inspiration. I think first she always gets the inspiration and then she writes the piece. Maureen Skelly Raj, interview by Sharon Mirchandani, 2008 u.s. composers in the 1960s (e.g., Carter,Varèse, Babbitt, and Cage) gravitated toward total serialism, electronic music, or chance music. Richter never found these styles appealing and did not adopt them. She did reluctantly respond to the trend of composing sparse, economical, and atonal works. She began to compose shorter, more fragmented works that had little or no development and were not as expansive as her earlier (and later) works. The added responsibilities of motherhood may have also encouraged shorter works,although Richter said she did not consider this a factor in her compositional decisions and never viewed motherhood as an impediment to her creative work. She hired sitters for several hours each day when the children were very young in order to work without interruption. She brought work with her on vacation at a time when most women did not. Quite helpful was the support she received from her husband and children. In 1960 Richter’s String Quartet No. 2 (1958, see chapter 2) was premiered by the Max Pollicoff Quartet at the Bennington Composers Conference in Vermont.1 Richter’s remarks reveal her ambivalence about her experiences at Bennington: It was a summer thing and composers would go. You had to be accepted, and you had to pay something, and you’d go and you’d get a work rehearsed and recorded. A friend of 47 mine said, “you should really go there,” and I thought I’ve never applied to MacDowell, or Yaddo or any of these places, because I don’t need another place to work, although it’d be good because you meet other people, but I just never did it. I could still do it now and meet some people, I suppose, but I have places to work, and I’m happy the way I am, so . . . I probably missed out on that. But you’d only do what you [already] do, right? . . . I brought my Second String Quartet, and they actually played that. They also played the beginning of what I was going to call a symphony, but it was like two-part counterpoint [laughs] . . . it was so simple, there wasn’t any point in having them play it [but] they did.2 Richter generally preferred her independence and isolation to a large extent, not feeling a strong need to network with other composers. However, one encounter at the Bennington Composers Conference, with composer William Sydeman (b. 1928), was influential in steering her toward the prevailing attitudes of the day. Richter describes this: Up there I met this composer named WilliamSydeman. And I remember bringing a recording ofmyfirstpiano concerto and playing itfor him, thinking he would be reallyknocked out. But, he didn’tlike it, because itwastoo . . .Iwon’tuse the word‘ordinary,’butitdidn’tdo anything 9. Marga Richter with daughter Maureen and son Michael, 1968. 48 spectacularly different in form or anything like that, it was just a nice emotional piece. He was nice about it, but I could see that he thought it was boring. [He said] ‘You should really think in terms of conciseness. Don’t develop it so much, don’t be so obvious . . . ’—that kind of thing. He didn’t use those terms, but I think he probably knew I knew what he thought. Thispiece wastoo mainstream.Since I liked him a lot, I thoughtmaybe I should trythat. I was influencedbyhimforaboutfiveyears.Iwrotepieceslike Fragments,EightPiecesforOrchestra and the piano version, Soundings, and my Suite for Violin and Piano. Plus a chamber piece which was premiered at Yale but which is really terrible and has been withdrawn from my catalog. So I went off on that kick for awhile. And then I got sick of it, because it just wasn’t me. I mean, those pieces are still me, but they’re not really...