Rhyme, women and song: Collaborative Works Festival puts a focus on female composers

The works of Stacy Garrop and three other composers will be featured in Thursday’s opening concert of the Collaborative Works Festival. | Darrell Hoemann Photography

The classical music world long has given women composers short shrift, but the imbalance will be at least partially righted in Chicago this week.

Female musical creators from past and present will be showcased in varied concerts across the city Thursday, Saturday and Sunday with “The Living,” the 2019 edition of the Collaborative Works Festival. The annual event celebrates the oft-neglected art song — a form in which famous and not-so-famous poems are set to classical music.

Featured in the opening concert in Roosevelt University’s Ganz Hall will be songs by four veteran Chicago composers whose fame extends well beyond the city’s borders: Stacy Garrop, Lita Grier, Shulamit Ran and Augusta Read Thomas.

“In thinking about a festival of living composers,” said tenor Nicholas Phan, artistic director of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, “I thought there are so many who live in Chicago and so many of them are women. Then on top of that, particularly in the cases of Lita and Stacy, they’ve done so much work in the realm of art song.”

Phan, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and soprano Lauren Snouffer will perform Thursday and during the two later programs along with pianists John Arida and Lisa Kaplan and a rotating mix of other instrumentalists.

Art song is typically associated with luminaries from the past like Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Fauré and Franz Schubert, but numerous modern and contemporary composers have contributed to the form as well.

After the Collaborative Works Festival’s successful presentation of the Midwestern premiere of “Songs From the Operas,” by Missy Mazzoli during the 2018 installment, Phan decided to devote an entire festival lineup to living composers, putting an emphasis on women. “Let’s draw attention to the fact that there is so much happening now,” he said.

Garrop has written some 20 art songs during her career. The three examples to be showcased Thursday with those of her three Chicago colleagues include “Smile, O voluptuous cool-breathed earth!” based on a poem by Walt Whitman. “We have a collection here of four women who are writing very wonderful art music,” she said, “and I’m very happy to be programmed on this and to be representing Chicago this way.”

Works by other five other women composers, including Caroline Shaw, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and Finnish master Kaija Saariaho, will be well represented Saturday and Sunday during the festival’s remaining concerts in other locations. “I’ve been very fascinated by the music of Caroline Shaw for a long time now,” Phan said. “I know she writes a lot for the voice, so I was immediately gravitating toward her.”

“And So” by Caroline Shaw is on the program of Saturday’s Collaborative Works Festival concert.

Although the artistic director said the festival did not plan it this way, he is not surprised that its emphasis on women composers corresponds to similar such offerings this fall in Chicago and elsewhere as more and more classical organizations respond to ingrained discrimination.

“There has been a great imbalance for centuries,” he said, “and there have been a lot of calls — rightly so — that it needs to be rectified. In general, classical music is being pushed to broaden its diversity and be more reflective of the world in which we live.”

Other area concerts featuring women composers include the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble presenting Sally Beamish’s new Partita for string octet on Oct. 11 at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Philharmonic performing Anna Clyne’s “Masquerade” (2013) during an Oct. 6 concert in Evanston.

Garrop is of two minds about any special spotlights on women composers. She realizes that such events can be important to assuring that they finally get fair representation, but at the same time she wishes the classical world could get to a point where only quality and not gender matters.

“We don’t necessarily like being identified as women composers,” she said. “We just like feeling that we’re being judged by what we can do with our pencils and computer notation programs rather than the fact that we are female.”