Piano Queens: Women Who Shaped Piano History

Description

This book was created to be used in conjunction with the 2024 Female Composers Challenge in March 2024 in celebration of Women’s History Month. It features 31 composers, with the intention being that you learn about and listen to a piece by one composer each day during the month of March.

Throughout the last 300 years, men and women have been playing the piano and composing sonatas, preludes, fugues, concertos, etudes, nocturnes, and more. Our traditional music history that most musicians learn includes so many of the men – men like Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin – and their iconic works that make up our standard piano repertoire. However, the truth is that there were hundreds of women composing right alongside of the men all throughout history. The aim of this book is to introduce you and your students to many of the “Piano Queens” – the women who made significant contributions to piano literature – that deserve recognition alongside their male contemporaries.

In this book you will learn about Clara Schumann, who almost singlehandedly shaped the standard piano literature that we know today and introduced audiences to Bach and Beethoven through her concerts. You will learn about Hélène de Montgeroult, who was one of the first people to teach that the piano could sing – that you could create beautiful singing phrases by playing legato and lifting your wrist at the end of a phrase. You will learn about Norwegian pianist Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, who music critic George Bernard Shaw called one of the greatest pianists in all of Europe. You will learn about Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño, who was called a queen, a goddess, and a lioness of the piano.

You will also listen to a piano work of each of these 31 women. Many of these women were extremely prolific and quite famous in their day; others are lesser known but still wrote wonderful piano music that deserves to be taught and performed today.

My hope is that you will gain an appreciation for these women and for their music – and maybe want to learn some of it! – and I hope that you will pass on the information to the next generation of music students.