"Revealing Carrie Jacobs-Bond-- and Myself: A Contemporary Composer Responds to Women Musicians," Lecture by Visiting Composer Joan Epstein, on Monday, April 3, 4:30 p.m. in Wilder 112 Story by Linda Shockley
	RELATED Women's Studies and Conservatory Host Guest Composer/Musicologist Joan Osborn Epstein on Monday, April 3 and Tuesday, April 4		Carrie Jacobs-Bond On Monday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m. in Wilder 112, composer Joan Epstein, guest of the Women's Studies Program and the Conservatory of Music, will offer a talk, "Revealing Carrie Jacobs-Bond-- and Myself: A Contemporary Composer Responds to Women Musicians." The talk is a final event in the Women's Studies Program celebration of Women's History Month. Using slides and music, Epstein, who is head of the music department at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, will discuss earlier musicians and their role in her own music, some of which will be performed in concert on Tuesday, April 4, 8 p.m., in Kulas Recital Hall by teacher of classical guitar Steven Aron with his frequent collaborator soprano JoNell Aron, Epstein, and the Femme en Noire String Quartet (Celeste Cleveland, Erica Dicker, violins; Amy Cimini, viola and Robin Reynolds, cello). Professor Epstein has balanced her teaching and composition endeavors with scholarly work regarding American women in the arts at the turn of the 20th century. Her research on this topic, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been presented at conferences sponsored by the College Music Society in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, San Diego and Bloomington, by the American Music Research Center in Boulder, Colorado, and by Ohio University, Athens, as well as at Amherst and Smith Colleges as part of residencies at those schools. Epstein earned her degrees at Smith College and the Yale University School of Music.   Q&A with Composer Joan Osborn Epstein By Linda Shockley Q. How and when were you introduced to the music of Carrie Jacobs-Bond? Why does her music hold such fascination for you? A.Perhaps it will surprise many people to learn that my relationship to Bond's music is a little ambivalent. Her style is far too conventional and sentimental for my own taste. What I recognize, however, is that she had tremendous gifts as a melodist; she knew how to craft a song that sounded great in most anyone's voice; and she was exceptionally attuned to the concerns of her audience, primarily, but not exclusively, a female middle class audience. She understood just what her talents were and exercised unparalleled entrepreneurial skills to bring them to fruition (and get rich doing so). Eight years and seven months ago, my life changed forever, not as it might have changed had I won the lottery, or lost a child, or suffered a stroke at my life's prime, but more as it might have been if I had come into the presence of a great teacher or encountered a particularly great work of art. A single, chance occurrence redirected how I teach, how I write music, and most importantly, how I understand myself and the world I live in. That chance occurrence took place in August of 1991 in the sauna-like heat of a Florida summer. I arrived one morning to teach our new crop of students at Eckerd College and found two moldy suitcases, vintage 1930, on the Music Center doormat. I opened them with some difficulty. The first was full of sheet music, mostly 1950s pop tunes arranged for chord organ, ripe for redelivery to the Goodwill. The second held volumes of accessible piano classics as well as a single dark blue volume whose cover banner jumped out at me: America's Foremost Woman Composer. Who was making this claim? Carrie Jacobs-Bond? Never heard of her. The first copyright to catch my eye on a quick flip through the pages was 1901, long ago, of course, but as something of a scholar of American music, I was surprised not to know who this woman was. Taking the claim on the cover somewhat seriously, a thought entered my head. I had just been asked to compose a string quartet: why not take this earlier American woman composer's music and make it mine, somehow? I buckled the suitcases and hastened to my office where I began to read through the songs at my piano. "Just a Wearyin‚ for You," "The Hand of You,‰" "Little Pink Rose," my enthusiasm wilted. The lyrics were sugary sweet; the melodies and harmonies sappy to match. And then I stumbled onto the one song I did know: "I Love You Truly." Now, I'm a trumpet player, and as such, I play a lot of weddings. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some dear friend of the family, in warbly soprano voice, croak out this tune at the heart of an otherwise dignified ceremony. My experience with two famous desecrations of the song - its slaughter by a tone deaf sidekick to a Justice of the Peace on Dick Van Dyke and its presentation in tear jerking sentimentality in It's a Wonderful Life - further soured my view of it. How could I, a lover of jazzy rhythm, dissonant harmony, and adventurous form, connect with this music? How could I, an educated, so-called modern woman with the luxury to create art for art's sake, work with this conventional, market-sensitive music from another era-- without mocking it, that is? I set the volume aside for a couple of weeks. When I opened it again, something new caught my eye. It was the preface, "A Life Written Into Song,"Here, we learn how poor, brave Mrs. Bond, as a young widow with a child, ventured from small-town Wisconsin to take on the nasty world of commerce in turn-of-the-century Chicago and triumphed as a writer of heart songs, "the keys to every heart," which drew on her own experience with life's pain and with the sustaining power of love. We learn as well that now, in 1932, she's comfortably settled into her California retirement, resting satisfied that hard work and patience have had their rewards. Who was the editor who had written this savvy frontispiece? I wanted to know. Who had snapped those shots of Mrs. Bond rocking on her rose porch in Hollywood and designed the heartwarming photo montage opposite the preface, sure to sucker in anyone truly in need of a heart song? I checked the cover for a publisher and got a surprise: Carrie Jacobs-Bond & Son. She had done it all: written the songs and most of the lyrics, written the promos, posed for the photographs, and promoted the music with great success. The only two paragraphs I could find on Bond in the Eckerd library confirmed what I guessed must be the case: Bond, who lived from 1862-1946 and composed over 200 songs, was America's first woman music publisher. If only for my interest in Bond as entrepreneur, I was hooked. I went through the songs again and began to find some with promise; with lovely turns of melody, surprising chords, distinctive motives. My string quartet was launched. I couldn't resist, of course. The first song to go on the chopping block - and the imagery is right here - was "I Love You Truly." I pulled out a couple of fragments of the tune and took them for a ride: a bit of woolly and angular Bartok here, a soothing stroke of Ravel there, a bluegrass hammer on a passage at the center, a touch of Jimi Hendrix style slap and slide towards the end. 'Truly," my title for this movement, became a scherzo in the truest sense. It is a joke, an irreverent romp. As I worked the motives and played them in my head over the course of a week or two, I began to hear something new, however: an elegance, a memorability and naturalness of line, in Bond's original which bad singing had always masked for me. My quartet took on its title at that point, Bond Revelations, for it seemed that the more I worked to impose myself on Bond's music, and the more I worked to reveal its limitations and expose the strengths of my own approach, the more the positive qualities in her music stood out, the more Bond's voice asserted itself. Then a friend who knew about my project brought me a gift: a precious CD, Jan DeGaetani's farewell to life album. The great singer, famed interpreter of George Crumb and other adventurous composers, recorded the album before starting a devastating and ultimately fruitless round of chemotherapy. Here on this recording were her all time favorite songs, mostly Modernist gems-- Copland, Berio, Bolcom, Ives-- but also three songs of Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Jan DeGaetani? I gasped. I gasped again when I heard Bond's music in the throat of a great singer, a great musician.   Q. Why it is important that we know her work and perhaps the work of fellow women composers? A. I think that it is important to reckon with all sorts of "voices," many points of view. Narrow mindedness breeds arrogance, even immorality, in my opinion, so it is essential to know what women have had to say, in any era, as it is essential to know what others outside the visible power structure have had to say. Carrie Jacobs-Bond was definitely not alone in composing music during her era as I have discovered from a ton of archival research. Lots and lots of women (along with lots and lots of men) composed both popular and concert music at the turn of the century and a greater percentage saw their music go into print than is the case today. But it didn't stay in circulation and was overlooked by prominent performers. What is unique with Bond was that she published her own music and controlled its distribution; saw that it got performed by millions of people, including very famous performers, both popular and classical performers. Most other women's music got lost in the market and certainly was ignored by the historians-- and by the academy /arts establishment generally. Also, it was extremely interesting and revelatory to define my musical self in relation to this other woman's music. I came out of the experience a better, and certainly more self conscious composer, and I don't think Bond suffered too much in the process. But what was even more life changing was what I did after completing the piece and preparing it for a first performance. Needing to deliver some pre-concert comments for the quartet's premiere, I search for more information on Bond. With the help of a wonderful reference book compiled by Adrienne Bloch, I found a few interviews in old magazines and, to my great surprise, an autobiography, The Roads of Melody. In that book, Bond hides plenty in her presentation of her life' story up through the mid-1920s, but there is enough revealed there both for me to know that I had been on the right track in plumbing the songs and to know that Bond's significance far outshines anything the biographical entries in Groves and other sources indicate. This woman was connected to everything important at the turn of the 20th century: the turn from a rural to an urban existence, the history of the railroads, the history of women's clubs and women's art-making, the history of World War I, the history of popular and classical music in the States, the Arts and Crafts movement, the history of race relations, national politics-- you name it. I drew up a summer research proposal to the NEH and received a grant for the summer of 1993. Traveling to Janesville, WI, Iron River, MI, Chicago, LA and San Diego, I traced Bond's life and artistic development. I learned so much in a few weeks, that I can't begin to share my findings, and if you add in the research I've done since then on Carrie Jacobs-Bond's world, we'd be here till doomsday picking through my discoveries. Allow me to focus on a few things which I believe are pertinent to all of us, men and women, who strive to make meaningful lives for ourselves in our complex and conflicted society. The first thing to strike me on delving into Bond's life was first: how attuned she was to own gifts and to their appropriate application in her time and place; the second: how driven she was; and third: how her ambitions and activities affected her personal relations. Later on, I was able to put together how, working with prominent female classical performers, she had profoundly shaped the so-called high art culture in the U.S., and in ways that affect us to the present. As for Bond's gifts: she was a prodigy who could pick out a tune at the piano on one hearing by the age of four, and as such, was encouraged to entertain her grandparents‚ lodgers at their Janesville hotel. A few years of piano lessons helped her to master the parlor repertory so popular in her day-- that is, flowery little keyboard numbers and sanitized songs about family, mother, flowers, and birds, traditionally performed in that sanctuary in 19th century middle class homes, the parlor-- and also to master accessible classics and the conventions of notation. This was the extent of her formal music education, but a few glimpses of a musical life beyond the parlor caused her to aspire to a public music career. But it wasn't a classical concert career to which Carrie Jacobs aspired, rather, she saw her future in the creation of parlor songs, a new variety of beautifully crafted parlor songs which connected the domestic realm with the world beyond. Bond's marketing savvy went beyond keeping a fine tuned list of contacts and beating the pavement. She exemplified in her presentation of the songs, as well as in their content, the social dynamic of her time. She bowed to parlor conventions in writing children's ditties and songs about flowers, birds, and Mother, but tipped a hat to themes beyond the protected home sphere in songs about romantic love. There were songs as well about work and sacrifice with rewards at the end of the road, including her anthem for the American business women, "The Golden Key." In sum, hers was music for mothers who got out of the house, served on committees and did social work, who carried the tasks of motherhood into the public realm.   Q. What can the audience expect from your talk? A. An introduction to Carrie Jacobs-Bond's music and cultural significance as well as a look into the creative process that resulted in my string quartet Bond Revelations which will be presented Tuesday night at 8 p.m. as part of Steve Aron's program.   Q. Are the three pieces for the composition seminar - Cumberland, Arborvitae, Prairies - your pieces? A. Yes. I'll also be alluding to other pieces of mine including my trombone quartet Monuments and my piano duo Savannah. All of these works are substantial: big ideas; 20-25 minutes in length. They are very different from each other but all address in some way or another the human relationship to the natural world.   Q. In a conservatory - which has as its mission "to conserve" - people sometimes sniff at contemporary works, as if they have less value than works not performed by or composed by the great masters like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. What are the challenges and rewards for young composers and how do you their future? A. My expertise is in the music of the past century, but as one of two full-time music professors in a small liberal arts college, it is my job to introduce students and audiences at our public concert series, to all sorts of music, including that of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. There is an awful lot of music from the past worth conserving: essential, life changing music. But it is a travesty that the art music of our time is so undernourished. Great music in any era needs lots of time and resources devoted to it if listeners and performers are to benefit from it. Particularly in the past 40-50 years, we have done almost nothing as a culture to address this need. Dozens of wonderful works have languished; sit in drawers collecting dust along with the one archival recording of the one dismally underrehearsed performance. Nothing gets played enough times to show its worth. That's why I have poured myself into the development of a regional composers forum, but even we can't afford to present multiple performances of our best works. It's tough. But I think Carrie Jacobs-Bond had the right idea: if your really must express yourself and believe you have something powerful to say, then get out there and promote your message; develop an audience; create a market; grab those patrons and keep them interested. Performers who value new music have to take on this same missionary or entrepreneurial stance. This takes more energy than most people can muster, but if you look at who has succeeded in recent times-- Phillip Glass, John Adams, and to a lesser extent, Libby Larsen, Ellen Taafe Sweilich, and a handful of others-- you will see that they have given composition and the production of their own music their full attention and have sucked in dozens of powerful supporters to bolster their aims. In my own case, I'm doing my best: to write significant pieces which are really interesting to listen to and perform, and to get them performed by excellent players around the country. With a very full-time job - I'm department chair too - scholarly interests, community involvements, and a family (spouse and three daughters), I know that I probably won't end up a household name.
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