Good afternoon all,

As it is Proms season, and also I am reading The Rest is Noise, I've been thinking a lot about classical music lately. Please enjoy a Fem Fri about two women composers and one grumpy woman patron.

Helen Grime is not only a woman composer but also Scottish woman. I enjoyed this interview with her in which she talks about her works based on two Joan Eardley paintings:

Catterline in Winter is much darker, an almost leaden grey. Musically, Grime knew she needed to find something to unify the two works. That prompted her to dig further into the musical history of the area’s landscape. Grime eventually unearthed an old folk song from the area, sometimes referred to as a bothy ballad. The ballads originated with farm laborers in the northeast of Scotland. They would gather in their shacks (called bothies) at night to sing and entertain each other.

https://seattlesymphony.org/watch-listen/beyondthestage/helen-grime

You can listen to the piece here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3jtEas1veY

And here's the Eardley painting, Catterline in Winter, for you to look at while you listen:

I knew that Fanny Mendelssohn was incredibly talented, but until today I didn't have a sense of just how prodigious her output was. She composed over 500 pieces apparently and only lived to be 42. Here's an article about her and Angela Mace Christian who is the leading academic of her work:

For decades, scholars believed that the original manuscript was lost. But in 2010, Christian was able to trace it to a private archive in France. When she had the opportunity to examine the manuscript in person, her suspicions about its authorship were confirmed. “I was able to see that it was in [Fanny’s] handwriting,” Christian says. The manuscript also contained page numbers that were missing from a different manuscript known to have been authored by Fanny. Taken together, Christian says, these were “major factors pointing to the identification that [the Easter Sonata] was hers.” The discovery of the Easter Sonata further cements Fanny as a masterful composer in her own right.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sonata-fanny-mendelssohn-mistakenly-attributed-her-brother-premieres-under-her-name-180962429/

Lots to listen to here as well in this reasonably brief overview piece:

https://www.cmuse.org/fanny-mendelssohn-hensel-was-born-today-in-1805/

Finally, I promised you a grumpy patron and here's a really good one – it's Winnaretta Singer! This is also a classic and beautiful story of an early C20th American industrialist and a penniless European aristocrat getting what they need out of marriage. Here's an excerpt from The Rest is Noise about her stern listening habits. Please note that I've been doing the reading and it's possible that Alex Ross and I have substantially different definitions of the word "secretly":

Winnaretta and Edmond lived happily together until his death in 1901, united by the common passion of music and by the desire to be surrounded by the emerging composers and performers of the time.

https://parisianmusicsalon.wordpress.com/winnaretta-singer/

Have a great weekend, team!

A xx.