Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508140122
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By KATHRYN CRAWFORD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SEATTLE LENGTH: Medium
When music professor Susan Pickett began reading the music, hearing the long-silent notes in her mind, she found it brilliant.
That quintet is among hundreds of forgotten and ignored compositions - all written by women - that Pickett has recovered from the world's libraries.
Many, she says, are masterpieces.
``It's as though I have literally stumbled upon a gold mine,'' said Pickett, a violinist and music professor at Whitman College in the eastern Washington city of Walla Walla.
``There aren't enough lifetimes to even begin to discover how much gold there is. There's so much great music, so much forgotten art.''
They are thrilling, upsetting discoveries, said pianist Jon Robertson, chairman of the music department at the University of California at Los Angeles and conductor and music director of the Redlands Symphony.
Robertson heard Pickett and her group, Donna e Doni - women and gifts - perform some of the lost works during a recent visit to Walla Walla.
``It was overwhelming to hear her play. I was listening to music I'd never heard, the quality of which was so very impressive,'' he said.
The Western world's 6,000 known female composers have published tens of thousands of pieces over the past four centuries, but not a single composition by a woman is in the repertoire of a major ensemble, Pickett said.
``It is a clear question of prejudice,'' Robertson said in a telephone interview. ``It's not like the creative element of taking a pen to paper is reserved for men only, that inspiration moves only through male genes.''
Pickett, concertmaster for the Walla Walla Symphony, is among a growing number of scholars working to recover lost music by women composers.
The neglect of women composers reflects attitudes in the music world that allow the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the finest in the world, to prohibit female musicians from even auditioning.
And only within the last decade have women been allowed the opportunity to conduct orchestras.
``It's not like a baton is so heavy,'' Robertson said.
Pickett found the quintet, written by the 19th-century French composer Louise Farrenc, listed in the card catalog at the U.S. Library of Congress. It was published in Europe in 1842.
According to the library's records, no one had pulled the score from the shelves since it was acquired in 1888.
``I began to read the first violin part and then began to scramble around and put the parts together,'' Pickett said during a visit to Seattle. ``I realized instantly, this is great, this is a masterpiece and the world does not know that this piece exists.''
Franz Schubert composed a quintet in 1820 called ``The Trout'' with the same unusual instrumentation - piano, violin, viola, cello and string bass - which virtually every string bass player in the world has played, Pickett said.
Farrenc's Quintet No.1 has since been recorded by the Linos Ensemble in Berlin and is available on CD.
Pickett began her search by accident five years ago when she tried to find the music of Marion Bauer, an acclaimed composer from Walla Walla.
Bauer's work was performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1947. She taught at New York University, the Juilliard School and Columbia University, and The New York Times published a lengthy obituary when she died in 1955.
But 40 years later, almost no music lover has ever heard of her, most of her manuscripts are missing and only a single work, a sonata for viola and piano, is available as a recording.
The legacies of some women artists have been preserved under men's names. In the 19th century, Clara Schumann used the name of her husband, Robert, to get her works performed. Most of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's 400 compositions remain unpublished, and the few that made it into print appeared under the name of her famous brother, Felix Mendelssohn.
The neglect of a composer's work is not a problem reserved solely for women: Felix Mendelssohn is credited with single-handedly resurrecting the work of J.S. Bach in 1829.
``But the repertoire of music by a whole gender wants resurrection,'' Pickett said.
Pickett has cataloged more than 1,000 compositions by about 200 women, works ranging from the baroque to the contemporary.
``I've gone into libraries ... and found music that is so old and decrepit that when you put it on the Xerox machine, it literally crumbles around the edges,'' she said. ``You have to blow the dust off the Xerox to do the next page. You begin to think, `I should feel guilty because this copy is decayed, it belongs in a museum.'
``But if I don't copy it, I may never ever see this music again, and I know that I should be playing it.''
by CNB