The Art of Female Composers

This Concert is sponsored by Ariel Premium Supply, Inc.

March 8
​​3:00 PM

Free Admission 

Trinity Church Kirkwood
1110 S Glenwood Ln, St. Louis, MO 63122

Free parking in the church parking lot
PROGRAM

Jessie Montgomery: Strum
Caroline Shaw: Entr'acte
Florence Price: Five Folksongs in Counterpoint
Germaine Tailleferre: String Quartet
FEATURED ARTISTS

Janet Carpenter, Violin
Asako Kuboki, Violin
Chris Tantillo, Viola
Yin Xiong, Cello
Program notes by Ann Fink
Caroline Shaw: Entr'acte
Caroline Shaw was born in August of 1982, in Greenville, North Carolina. Shaw began taking Suzuki violin lessons from her mother at the age of two! When she was ten, she started writing her own compositions inspired by the style of Mozart and Brahms. Shaw received her Bachelor of Music in violin performance from Rice University in 2004 and her Master’s of Music from Yale University in 2007. She also has an honorary doctorate from Yale. In 2013, at the age of 30, Shaw was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition, Partita for 8 Voices. The work was recorded in 2012 by Roomful of Teeth, an a cappella group formed in 2009 by Shaw and other members.

In 2022, Shaw won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her piece, Narrow Sea, and in 2025 she won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for her composition, Rectangles and Circumstance. Shaw has also worked on t.v and film scores that include Ken Burns’ Leonardo Da Vinci on PBS and Fleishman is in Trouble on FX. Artists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Renee Fleming have performed her works. At the age of 43, Shaw is currently among the most successful living composers of her time. 

Shaw wrote Entr’acte in 2011 for string quartet and adapted the score for string orchestra in 2014. The work was first performed by the Brentano Quartet at Princeton University. Shaw was inspired to compose the piece after hearing Brentano perform Haydn’s Quartet Op. 77 No. 2. She says” It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.” *

*This note as well as other information about Carolione Shaw and her music can be found on her website:carolineshaw.com and Caroline-Shaw-editions.myshopify.com.

Florence Price: Five Folksongs in Counterpoint
Florence Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Although racial tensions existed, her mixed race family was well respected in their community. Her father was the only African American dentist in Little Rock, and her mother was a successful music teacher. It was with her mother that Price began her early childhood musical studies. Not only did Price show immense talent as a young pianist, but she was a successful academic student as well. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school class.

Price entered the New England Conservatory of Music in 1902, at the age of 15! She majored in organ performance and piano pedagogy. She also began to compose during her years at the conservatory and wrote her first symphony and string trio before graduating. Sadly, while living in Boston, she felt the effects of racism against African Americans. For a period she passed as Mexican and claimed she was from Pueblo, Mexico in order to avoid discrimination. During her young adult years, Price temporarily put aside her own career and raised three children with her husband, Thomas Price. In 1927, Price and her family moved to Chicago. Once again Price began to compose and study composition at the Chicago Musical College. She also joined the Chicago Black Renaissance, a group of African American writers and artists that lead their community in promoting racial
pride, community spirit, and a collective black consciousness.

By 1931, Price’s personal life was deteriorating. She was suffering from her abusive husband and had financial troubles. However, after her divorce, Price carried on with her musical career to support herself and her children. She worked as an organist for silent films and continued to compose. In 1932, Price won the top award from the Wanamaker Foundation competition for her Symphony in E minor. Then in 1933, Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her symphony, establishing Price as the first African American female to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. Price continued to have great success as a composer throughout her life and amassed a large library of works including symphonies, piano concertos, violin concertos, orchestral suites and tone poems, choral works, songs, string quartets, piano quartets and quintets, solo piano pieces, arrangements of spirituals, organ solos, and violin and piano duos. Price was a leader for her gender and race, and holds an important role in the history of composition and musical performance.

Five Folksongs in Counterpoint was most likely composed between 1949-1951 when Price was 63-64 years old. The folksongs include Clementine, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, Shortnin’ Bread, and Swing Low Sweet Chariot. The fourth movement includes several unnamed folk tunes. 

Germaine Tailleferre: String Quartet
Germaine Tailleferre was a prominent French composer, born in 1892. She started piano lessons with her mother at age four and showed immense talent, but her father was never supportive of her musical studies. When she was old enough, Tailleferre changed her last name from Taillefesse to Tailleferre to spite him. Her early music lessons paid off, and she eventually entered Paris Conservatory to further her studies in a more formal setting. At the conservatory she met several other talented young
musicians including Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger. They formed the famous group of young composers, Les Six, and collectively rejected the old French composition style of Impressionism and the overly emotional pathos of Wagnerism. Tailleferre was the only female member and was invited to join the group in 1919, after the premiere of her String Quartet. It took her two years to complete the quartet and she dedicated the piece to Arthur Rubinstein.

Tailleferre wrote a large amount of music in the 1920’s and 1930’s, but at the outbreak of World War II, she left everything behind and escaped to Portugal. Eventually, she made her way to Philadelphia. By 1946 she had returned to France and became busy with composing and teaching once again. Tailleferre continued to compose until only a few weeks before her death at the age of 91!

Jessie Montgomery: Strum
Jessie Montgomery was born in December of 1981, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her mother, Robbie McCauley was a playwright and her father, Ed Montgomery a composer. Montgomery’s musical training began with violin lessons and eventually led to a bachelor’s degree in violin performance from the Juilliard School. She earned a master’s degree in Composition for Film
and Multimedia from New York University in 2012.

She is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton University. Although Montgomery is only 44 years old, her works have been performed all over the world by ensembles including Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw, Atlanta Symphony, Dallas Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Montgomery was a founding member of PUBLIQuartet and performed with Catalyst Quartet until January of 2021. In 2023, she was named Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today. In 2024, Montgomery won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her piece, Rounds.

Currently, Montgomery maintains a position as Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University. Below are Jessie Montgomery’s own words about her piece Strum. This information, including her extended bio can be found on her website:jessiemontgomery.com.

“Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition. Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
— Jessie Montgomery