By Alissa Freeman
Invited annually, graduate schools of music present the Presser Graduate Music Award to an outstanding graduate music student whom they select. The program is designed to encourage and support in a special way the advanced education and career of truly exceptional graduate music students who have the potential to make a distinguished contribution to the field of music. The Award is a cash stipend of up to $10,000, which is made available to a graduate student designated by the institution.
Alissa Freeman received the Award in 2019-2020 from the University of Michigan. Her project ||:HerClassical:|| is an online resource for teaching classical music by female composers.
The development of the website came as a result of the gender imbalances that remain persistent across the field of classical music. According to a recent study by the Donne Women in Music, among 1,446 concerts across the world in 2018-19, only 76 included at least one piece written by a woman. Within a survey of 47 college music history textbooks, 25% failed to mention a single woman composer, and only .02% of the musical excerpts were written by women.
Why are teachers not choosing to include women in their curricula? Many of the reasons have to do with accessibility. Some pieces still only exist in their manuscript form or in poor editions from the 18th and 19th centuries. A few publishing companies, such as Hildegard Publishing and A-R, have created editions of works by women, but these versions can be expensive, are not available online and are often best suited for professional pianists with significant background in classical-era performance practice. Hardly any existing editions include designations of pedagogical levels, and since many teachers do not have the time, resources, or expertise to incorporate unleveled music into their curriculums, this is a huge barrier for inclusion. There are countless pieces written in leveled compilations by male composers, and those will always be favored until there is an equivalent for females.
You may also wonder why music composed by women has faded into obscurity throughout time. Certainly, the music has as much merit as the works of well-known male classical era composers. Since it was uncommon for women to have access to music education unless they were from wealthy, elite families, or families of musicians, this likely contributed to the gradual erasure of those who did still compose. Still, both then and now, biases against women as composers led to a devaluation of their compositions–enough so that they were virtually ignored for hundreds of years. Additionally, many works by women composers remain lost–a disproportionate amount in comparison to the lost works of male composers, since hundreds of years of music research were devoted only to discovering and promoting compositions written by men. Due to this, thousands of works by women are yet to be unearthed, let alone published and distributed.
The development of ||:HerClassical:|| responds to the vastly unequal numbers of scores available from male composers and highlights works by 18th-century women composers by compiling and producing recordings, editions, and teaching resources. Very few pieces by women composers from this era are included in modern pedagogical compilations, though these pieces are wonderful additions to the student repertoire. By highlighting these pieces and creating new, more accessible editions, the ||:HerClassical:|| project opens the doors for pianists and teachers to explore this music.
The website features women composers such as Maria Hester Park, Jane Savage, Marianne von Martinez, Sophia Maria Westenholz, Elisabetta de Gambarini, and Marianne Auenbrugger, with explanations about the women’s lives, video recordings of pieces they composed, and links to their scores that can be bought and/or downloaded for free.
When selecting the pieces, I utilized the help of major anthologies in female composers to identify areas of need. I favored pieces with practical pedagogical value in a variety of levels that do not currently exist online, with additional preference given to pieces that only exist in facsimile or manuscript forms. I also narrowed my libraries to those located within Germany, Austria, and England due to my own language capabilities, and I have contacted and received permission to use manuscripts and scores on site that are not available through interlibrary loan.
Eventually, the ultimate goal is for the website to include any classical-genre music written by women that is in the public domain, regardless of nationality, background, and era. I am currently in the process of creating the editions for publication on ||:HerClassical:||. These editions will include performance instructions such as suggested dynamics, articulations, and fingerings to help guide students less familiar with classical-era performance practice.
The impact of the Presser Graduate Music Award on this project has been very significant. The funding has helped me gain significant experiences that I would likely never have had without this award. Because of this project, I have gained experience in audio recording and editing, video editing, and music editing. Additionally, I gained the unique experiences of working with a publisher and developing a website to house new resources. These skills in particular will be critical for my future career goals as a professor, as they will set me apart from other pianists who typically do not have these skill sets. Thank you so much to The Presser Foundation for this incredible opportunity.
With a unique profile in education, performance, and entrepreneurship, Alissa Freeman is a passionate musician who is always working on a new project. Her accomplishments in performance, pedagogy, and research have been vast and varied as the recipient of both the undergraduate and graduate Presser awards, numerous full-tuition academic and music scholarships, winner of two university concerto competitions, and performances and presentations both nationally and internationally. Both in her personal and professional life, one of Alissa’s greatest goals is to build more inclusive environments by understanding barriers to inclusivity and finding creative ways to remove them. This led to her development of the ||:HerClassical:|| project. Alissa works as a Program Assistant for the University of Michigan School of Music’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) department. During the past year, she also co-founded and has served as the Executive Director of The 5pm Series, a charitable nonprofit organization that has aimed to provide financial support to musicians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alissa is currently a DMA candidate studying Piano Performance and Pedagogy at the University of Michigan with Logan Skelton and John Ellis as her primary instructors.
