Brooke Grasso
Staff Writer
Students of the Claremont Chamber Choir honored brilliant, yet unrecognized women composers from the 19th century Thursday night in Scripps College’s Balch Auditorium.
The concert, “Women Composers in Post-Civil War America: 1865-1900,” featured many songs that had never been played for an audience because women composed them at a time where men dominated the music industry.
“It is important to bring to light that women were composers too,” Ellen Pelos, junior music major at Scripps College said.
Pelos was the student director of the show and also sang in the concert.
After noticing very few women composers mentioned in her music textbooks, she continued her research on the topic throughout the summer at UC Davis. There, Pelos discovered thousands of songs composed by women in the 19th century.
“Women were playing an active role in the music world even though they weren’t well credited,” she said.
The show was composed of singers, pianists and a violinist that played music Pelos discovered through her research.
Soloists were accompanied by a piano centered on the stage in Balch Auditorium, which held over 100 audience members.
“Balch is a lovely place,” Megan Edwards, media studies major at Scripps College said.
“It has great acoustics too.”
Edwards enjoyed the fact that singers were able perform without microphones; because of the architecture of the auditorium, sound was easily transmitted to the audience.
Before each performance, music students presented information on the composer and the history behind the lyrics and composition.
“I liked the context that they gave before,” Edwards said.
Fifteen students from the Chamber Choir projected their voices into the audience for their opening performance of “Freedom’s Battle.”
“Freedoms Battle” was written by an abolitionist who wrote the piece to get her all-inclusive message across.
The composer, Frances Watkins Harper, was the most well-known composer of the night, however she remains unrecognized by many.
Women like Harper are who inspire Pelos to do her research.
Stephanie Kim, senior English major at Scripps, performed with the choir and said women are not given the same opportunities as men.
“Most of the musical canon is composed of male artists because females did not have the resources,” she said.
Women often wrote music under a fake name or transcribed through their husband because they were not permitted to produce music.
Kim has been involved in choir since elementary school and has been performing for the Chamber Choir for four years. She loves the feeling of singing with her classmates compared to singing alone.
“Music is a shared experience,” she said. “It feels like you’re a part of a bigger picture.”
Twenty-seven songs were performed, lasting two and a half hours. Edwards thought the show could have been shortened but was pleased with the performances.
“I wasn’t going to stay the whole time at first,” she said. “But I was so interested and it was so beautiful that I stayed.”
Brooke Grasso can be reached at brooke.grasso@laverne.edu.
