Every Friday in 2020 we will post the composers from the last 7 days. In these posts, you can also find the link to the composers we presented in 2019.
Check here the composers from this week (February 8th to 14th) and learn more about these amazing women who made/are making history in music!
Maria Rosa Coccia was born in 1759 in Rome, Italy, and she was a composer at a very young age. At the age of twelve, she wrote a set of six sontate per cembalo, or sonatas for harpsichord. At thirteen years old she wrote an oratorio entitled Daniello nel lago dei leoni, which she dedicated to Duchess Marianna Caetani Sforza-Cesarini (“Maria Rosa Coccia”).
This was an incredible feat for any woman at the time, much less a child, since women were not allowed to attend oratorio performances at the time.
In 1774, she wrote a canon in the presence of four examiners of the Roman Accademia di Santa Cecilia, one of the oldest music academies in the world. The examiners were impressed with her work and published it. However, its publication was met with controversy, as critics claimed her work contained many errors, and that she was only published because she was a woman (“Maria Rosa Coccia”). In response to these critics, Michelle Mallio published a biography on Coccia, including letters of praise from distinguished musicians, such as Pietro Metastasio, Padre Martini, and Farinelli, a castrato singer who was also known as Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi. Upon her passing entrance into the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Coccia became Maestra di Capella, the master of chapel music in Rome. She was the first woman to receive this title but was not allowed to carry out her duties because of her gender.
In 1779, she was granted admission into the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna, the most prestigious musical school in Rome, which was then an association for musicians of Bologna.
She continued composing and teaching composition, but she was unable to keep a steady patron to support her. When looking for a patron, she often looked to wealthy women, hoping they would be sympathetic to her.
It is unsure whether Coccia stopped composing or if her music was lost, but there is not much evidence about her life beyond 1832. “The last evidence we have of her whereabouts is a plea for a monthly stipend written in 1832, one year before her death, to the Accademia di S Cecilia” (“Maria Rosa Coccia”). In this letter, she stated that she had been composing and teaching her entire life, but she was financially unable to care for ill parents and sister. She died in November of 1833 after receiving a small pension.
In her heroide, Coccia has written to Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi , the castrato singer who wrote a letter of support of her upon hearing about the controversy surrounding her entrance composition that was published. There is no evidence that they knew each other in life, but for the sake of the poem, I imagined that she caught word of his letter of support and wrote him a letter of thanks. I imagined that after that, they became good friends through their letter correspondence. In this letter she is commiserating with him about her struggle to make enough money as a musician to buy the medicine her ill sister needs. It is true that late in life, Coccia took care of parents and sister, who were both ill. She too, eventually fell ill, and “she did not have even a small savings for her old age” (“Maria Rosa Coccia”). To deal with this struggle, she often looked to wealthy women to be patrons for her, hoping they would be sympathetic to her situation.
In the poem, she is also dealing with the inner struggle whether she should give up writing music for another job that would support her family. She fights against the suggestion to go into medicine, insisting that her musical compositions are a part of her, and she is not willing to give that up. She feels as if God is writing musical messages to the world through her hand, and she can not stop writing music even if she wanted to. She believes that her calling is to write music for the church. She feels the need to convince the world that music is still an important part of life and is necessary for one’s wellbeing. In this poem, Coccia wants to find someone to support her music in order to make enough money to take care of her sister.
This poem strays from Ovid’s heriode structure because the woman in the poem is not writing to her lover, as many of Ovid’s heroines were. In Coccia’s case, she is writing to a distant friend who is also colleague in the music field. Also, in many of Ovid’s poems, the woman has been mistreated by the lover in some way, whether she be abandoned, neglected, or beaten. This is definitely not the case in this heroide by Maria Rosa Coccia. She is struggling with being the sole supporter of her ill sister while continuing her trade as a composer and teacher.
There is no mention of relationship trouble, or really a relationship with a lover at all. There was no mention of a lover in Coccia’s biographical information, which makes me believe she was very career driven and perhaps did not have time for romantic relationships, or that they did not last long. Apparently, a collection of Coccia’s minuets were found, dated 1793, in a convent, (“Maria Rosa Coccia”) and this makes me wonder if she had taken her vows as a nun, which would explain why there was no talk of a lover or husband. Needless to say, this heriode has nothing to do with a lover, which is quite different from Ovid’s heriodes. It does follow the structure of Ovid’s heriodes in one way; this poem is written in first person narrative, but it has been written by someone other than the heroine. In Ovid’s time, usually men wrote these narratives, but of course, my heriode has been written by a woman. This also strays from the structure of an Ovid Heriode.
Maria Rosa Coccia lived from 1759 to 1833 as a composer and music teacher. She composed an oratorio at age thirteen and became the first woman to achieve Maestra di Capella in Rome. In this heriode, she writes to a fellow musician about her struggles to continue composing while supporting her sick sister.
ELSA BARRAINE - FRANCE - AUSTRALIA BORN 13 FEBRUARY
Elsa Jacqueline Barraine was a composer of French music in the time after the neoclassicist movement of Les Six, Ravel, and Stravinsky. Despite being considered “one of the outstanding French composers of the mid-20th century,” Barraine’s music is seldom performed today. She won the Prix de Rome in 1929 for La vierge guerrière, a sacred trilogy named for Joan of Arc, and was the fourth woman ever to receive that prestigious award (after Lili Boulanger in 1913, Marguerite Canal in 1920, and Jeanne Leleu in 1923). Born in Paris to Alfred Barraine, the principal cellist of the Orchestre de l’Opéra, and Mme. Barraine, Elsa Barraine began studying piano at a young age. She attended the Conservatoire de Paris and studied composition with Paul Dukas, whose impressive list of students includes Yvonne Desportes, Maurice Duruflé, Claude Arrieu, and Olivier Messiaen. Barraine and Messiaen were good friends throughout their lives and kept in frequent contact. Barraine worked at the French National Radio from 1936 to 1940 as a pianist, sound recordist, and the head of singing, then after World War II as a sound mixer. During the war, Barraine was heavily involved in the French Resistance and was a member of the Front National des Musiciens. Between 1944 and 1947 she held the position of Recording Director at the well-established record label Le Chant du Monde. In 1953 Barraine was appointed to the faculty at the Paris Conservatoire, where she taught analysis and sight-reading until 1972.It was then that the Ministry of Culture named her Director of Music, giving her charge of all French national lyric theaters. ♫ LISTEN
Jeanne Marie-Madeleine Demessieux was a French organist, pianist, composer, and pedagogue. From 1936-39, Demessieux studied organ privately with Marcel Dupré, whose organ class at the Conservatoire she joined in 1939. After receiving a first prize in organ performance and improvisation in 1941,
Demessieux studied privately with Dupré in Meudon for five more years, before she played her début concert at Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1946. This was the beginning of her career as an international concert organist. Demessieux gave more than 700 concerts in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. She had memorized more than 2,500 works, including the complete organ works of Bach, Franck, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, and all of Dupré's organ works up to Opus 41. A prolific recording artist, she was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque Award in 1960 for her complete recording of Franck's organ works (1958).
In 1962, Demessieux was appointed as titular organist at La Madeleine in Paris. She combined this with demanding academic duties, serving as professor of organ both at the Nancy Conservatoire (1950–52) and later at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège (1952–68). In 1967, she signed a contract with Decca for a recording of the complete organ works by Olivier Messiaen, which she did not live to finish.
Demessieux wrote more than 30 compositions. Many of these were written for the organ, but she also produced pieces for piano, fairly numerous songs, a handful of choral works (including an oratorio, "Chanson de Roland"), and orchestral works. About half of her output has been published to date. The Dutch label Festivo has re-released on CD several of her LP recordings, including the above-mentioned 1958 recording of Franck's complete organ works.
