JAVS Spring 2023

Featured Article

A Compendium of Women Viola Composers by Carolyn Waters Broe

In recent years, there has been a tremendous interest in learning more about music by women composers. Aaron Cohen lists 2,961 women composers in his International Encyclopedia of Women Composers written in 1981. Since then, new research has revealed a treasure trove of previously unknown women composers and updated research on already established composers. An original manuscript of the Sonata for Viola and Harpsichord of Beatrice Mattei of Florence, Italy (1741) was discovered in an Eastern European library in 1996 by ARS Femina. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the library was tasked with repatriating them to their original owners. Since the manuscript for the Mattei Viola Sonata was owned by the Knights Templar, the library was about to ship it off when the research group ARS Femina of Kentucky asked if they could make a copy. 1 There was also another recent discovery of a Sinfonia by Maria Antonia Walpurgis (1724-1780) found in the Bach Archive discovered in Kiev, Ukraine in 1999 by Christoph Wolff of Harvard and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted. This archive contains approximately 5,000 scores by 17th and 18th century European composers (C.P.E. Bach, Telemann, Graun, and the Benda brothers, etc. from the Singakademie of Berlin). 2 There are a few women composers whose music was collected in this Singakademie archive of music. Most people are unaware that there were Baroque and Classical women composers such as Élisabeth Jacquet, Marianne von Martinez, Wilhelmina and Anna Amalia Princesses of Prussia, Henriette de Beaumesnil, and Maria Theresia von Paradis. Many more women composers during the 19th and 20th centuries became more readily available knowledge, including Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade, Louise Farrenc, Emilie Mayer, Rebecca Clarke, Nadia Boulanger, and Lillian Fuchs to name a few. When we truly look at the numbers, we are now aware of more than 6,000 women composers—both historically and still living—

and growing from 70 countries. 3 In honor of the one hundred-year anniversary of women getting the right to vote in the US in 2020, I am sharing my list of music by women viola composers with the American Viola Society members. Several works that were misattributed to male composers are now believed to have been composed by women. Some works by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel were published under her brother Felix Mendelssohn’s name. Recent editions are making corrections in these publications. 4 Modern forensic handwriting analysis on music manuscripts is also revealing who these works really belong to. Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart’s handwriting has been identified in a teaching sketch book of her younger brother Wolfgang Mozart. 5 We know that Nannerl composed for thirteen years between the end of her touring years and the beginning of her married life. What became of all her music? Perhaps one day soon we may get the answer to that question. The American composer, Louise Lincoln Kerr (1892 1977), left a manuscript archive of over 100 compositions to Arizona State University. L. L. Kerr’s Five Character Pieces for Viola and Piano have been edited, as part of my Doctoral dissertation on her string literature and published by Classics Unlimited Music. Her “Etude for Violin and Viola” has been edited by David Bynog and generously made available on the American Viola Society website. Kerr was an expert in composing chamber music pieces, many of which included viola parts. She also composed chamber orchestra works as well as several symphonic works and five ballets. Kerr was both a violinist and violist, who studied theory and composition in 1910 with two Columbia University professors while she was a student at Barnard College for Women in New York. She was one of the first women to perform in the early pre-Cleveland Symphony Orchestra of 1913 as a violinist. She was the piano roll proofreader for Aeolian

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2023

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