In April 2018, Damkapellet got the opportunity to create a performance in cooperation with Københavns Musikteater and Dansk Komponistforening. Tutored by Signe Høirup alias Jomi Massage, and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, they now present you the performance concert “A Room of One´s Own”.
“A Room of One´s Own is a performance concert that portrays five female composers personal creative spaces and the inner life of their times. A space that is essential for any artist, but often not given or permitted to women. With music as the medium and female classical composers as examples, we take the audience on a journey from medieval times until today, recreating a room of their own in the contemporary world.
Coming from a selectively emphasised history, we shed light on a more diverse view and increase our knowledge of women in the arts. We invite our audience into an experience of an inner life, to be a part of a room, to make our own history.”
List of compositions
Damkapellet – A musical Selfie (audio)
Isabella Leonarda (1620 – 1704) – Sonate a piu¹ Strumenti
Kaija Saariaho (*1952) – Six Japanese Gardens, mov. IV and V
Elfrida Andrée (1841 – 1929) – Piano Quartet in a minor, mov. III
Laurie Spiegel (*1945) – Drums (audio)
Julija Morgan (*1993) – Glaskropp
Hildegaard von Bingen (1098 – 1179) – Ave Maria
Duration: ca 55 min
Performers
Mika Persdotter, viola
Pauline Hogstrand, viola
Nicole Hogtstrand, cello and viola da gamba
Nadia Okrusko, piano
Paulina Storbacka, violin
Irene Bianco, percussion and electronics
Scores on Walls:
Julija Morgan
Read more about the composers
ISABELLA LEONARDA (1620 – 1704) – SONATE A PIÙ STRUMENTI
Anna Isabella Leonarda was an Italian composer from Novara. At the age of 16, she entered an Ursuline convent to become a nun. Leonarda is a remarkable figure in the history of Western music; it was not at all unheard of for women to compose music in times gone by, but in those instances the music written is vocal, since most female composers in earlier times were nuns. It is indeed unusual to find a 17-century Italian woman like Leonarda putting together textless instrumental music in the new Italian Baroque fashion. She is now known as one of only two Italian women known to have written instrumental music.
Kaija Saariaho percussion (*1952) – Six Japanese Gardens
Her father worked in the metal industry, her mother looked after the three children, and yet this unpromising ground would be catalysed by the spark of music. “I was very sensitive,” she says. “There was some music that frightened me, and some that I liked. We had an old-fashioned radio at home, so I listened to music on that. But I also heard music when I was a girl that didn’t come from a radio.” Saariaho then reveals something that shows how her sensitivity to music was already tied up with the idea of a heightened reality, and with her own invention. This music that “didn’t come from a radio” was music “that was in my mind. I imagined that it came from my pillow. My mother remembered me asking her to turn the pillow off at night when I couldn’t sleep; to turn off the music that I imagined inside my head.”
All composers are dreamers. But very few have dared to dream sonic images of such magnetic power as those that Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has conjured in her music for ensembles, orchestra, opera houses, electronics and soloists.
Elfrida Andrée (1841 – 1929) – Piano Quartet in a minor, III Finale: Allegro
“It would be easier to pull a piece out of the rock than to take my ideal idea away from me: the raising of the female genus.” – Elfrida Andrée (1870-71)
Discussions on women´s right to seek and hold organist services in churches were in progress, and in the priesthood it was expressed, among other things, that “Paulus has said, “Women be silent in the assembly.” In 1861, the change was made and Elfrida became an organist in the Finnish Church in Stockholm.
Elfrida Andrée was a Swedish composer, conductor, Sweden’s first cathedral organist and first female telegraphist. She was a pioneer for Swedish women at the time, contributing to two law changes – the right for women to work as organist in churches and as telegraphists.
Julija Morgan (*1993) – Glaskropp
Julija is interested in investigating what the impact of different formats has on the musical expression and the interaction between the musicians. This has led to the creation of different kinds of graphic scores. The format of comic book series, came out as an attempt to make pieces focusing on interaction, all the time on the border between composition and improvisation. The boxes structure the music by zooming in or out in different expressions and influences tempo, rhythm and format. The series format makes it possible to present different characters and let them develop and interact with each other.
Julija is interested in investigating what the impact of different formats has on the musical expression and the interaction between the musicians. This has led to the creation of different kinds of graphic scores. The format of comic book series, came out as an attempt to make pieces focusing on interaction, all the time on the border between composition and improvisation. The boxes structure the music by zooming in or out in different expressions and influences tempo, rhythm and format. The series format makes it possible to present different characters and let them develop and interact with each other.
Energy occurs in the lines of transformation into sound and silence, changes between tight density and stagnant space. The work is created on the premise that the musicians communicate and the moment in itself, changing the box together, creates a nerve.
Hildegaard von Bingen (1098 – 1179) – Ave Maria
Hildegaard was born in Germany around the year 1098. She was in early age offered to the monastery to become an abyss, and came to be a writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
Hildegard said that she first saw “The Shade of the Living Light” at the age of three, and a few years after she began to understand that she was experiencing visions. She used the term ‘visio’ to this feature of her experience, and recognized that it was a gift that she could not explain to others. Hildegard explained that she saw all things in the light of God through the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.