On September 24 at the Library of Congress, I’ll give a talk on
American composer Louise Talma (c. 1906–1996), her youth, and her first
composition. At the same time, I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my book
about Talma and her works (Ashgate, forthcoming 2014). My interest in Louise Talma stems
from my first book, an institutional biography of the Conservatoire Américain
in Fontainebleau, France. She was, along with Aaron Copland, one of the
Conservatoire’s most successful pupils, and although her music is not performed
today as frequently as it was during her lifetime, she was at one time a
significant figure in the contemporary music world.
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Nadia Boulanger and her class, including Lousie Talma. (Library of Congress) |
“Epistolary trail” only begins to describe the boxes and
boxes of letters, telegrams, drafts of letters, cards, and transcripts of
conversations she left behind at her death. While it’s obvious that some
materials have been lost, in general she retained letters ranging from the
1930s to her death. Even with letters that were destroyed, Talma nonetheless
usually saved the envelopes so as to record dates of receipt, often making
notes or comments as to what had been inside. Of the letters she did save,
Talma often annotated them, identifying casual “Saturdays” and “Tuesdays” with
the exact date, and identifying individuals referred to by nicknames. She was a
re-reader, once telling Wilder that he could donate their opera-related
correspondence to Yale only after she’d made copies of all of their letters,
“as I can't bear not to have them in immediate reach so that at any moment I
can live over again the joy I had on receiving them.”
Her scores, musical sketches, and notes for works are also
often annotated. In selecting texts to set as songs, she identified poems “about
death—mostly of a young girl,” and marked others as humorous, nature-related,
or personal. She copied out texts she considered setting; made fair copies of
her scores; identified portions of rows in her more serially-influenced pieces;
took dictation from birds, the sounds of silverware falling on the floor, and
the sounds of the cities in which she lived;
made copies of the letters she sent, so that she would remember exactly
what she had written; and kept track of how much composing she had done each
day by writing the date and time she stopped at the end of each day into the
manuscript at hand.
With such an abundance of material, especially combined with
the fact that so many of Talma’s pieces were overtly autobiographical in
nature—such as her religious works, which serve as conversion narratives, her
musical responses to the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassinations, and
others—it seemed only logical to explore the issue of musical autobiography in
her work. While there were plenty of other approaches to take with Talma’s
work, including traditional musical analysis, queer theory, feminist theory and
analysis—all of which I use in my work—reading both deeply and broadly in
women’s autobiographical theory led me to decide that using it autobiography as
a frame for Talma’s work was altogether appropriate. It also offered a relatively
new way of examining the conjunctions of a composer’s life and work. Although
the autobiographical reading of works of music is not new and has been done
before, particularly with Berg, Berlioz, Mahler, and other male composers, the
direct application of women’s autobiographical theory and the concept and
theory of écriture féminine
to works of music is less common. Hélène Cixous has
famously written that “women must write themselves,” and this need not be
limited in any way to prose writing.
This approach has proved illuminating. Once I began to
understand Talma’s writing—both prose and musical—as a form of self-writing
engaged with the sociopolitical and creative
atmospheres in which she worked, the connections between her self and her music
became even more striking. And while there are competing theories of women’s
self-writing, no scholars can deny the complexity of the issue of women writing
their own lives in a culture in which women are viewed as—and frequently view
themselves as—the Other. Talma’s works serve as rich, multi-layered examples
for this point and many others put forth by theorists of women’s self-writing.
Between Talma’s letters and her compositions,
reading with the theories of women’s autobiography in mind has enabled me to
chart the course of her life and development as a composer and artist with far
more information than a more traditional approach or even mix of approaches to
her works might have supplied. This study, along with old-fashioned digging,
interviews, and time spent with microfilm, has revealed her fears, hopes,
compromises, and decisions in ways that can only benefit both the scholarly
understanding and performative interpretation of her music.
Note: Kendra Preston Leonard's lecture is now available as a webcast.
From her home base in Loveland, Ohio, Kendra Preston Leonard serves as Managing Editor of the online Journal of Music History Pedagogy and director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive.
Note: Kendra Preston Leonard's lecture is now available as a webcast.
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