Super Duper So So Much

Last week I got to hear the wonderful philosopher Anne Lamott speak. Something she said that keeps rolling around in my head was something like (she surely said it better): “if it were up to me, we’d have all of the good stuff and also all of the hard stuff in our lives, but it would be neatly organized, like a meal with different courses: now is the grief, and now is the joy, and now is the challenging time, and now is the peace. But instead it’s like everything got dumped out on the floor, all mixed up together.”

Last night I played my premiere concert of the Agnes twelve concert etudes, here for my home audience in Gettysburg.

The livestream link will be live for a few days: https://youtube.com/live/tmCfP0-w3Kk?feature=share

That was such a joy. But right up till the concert felt like so much, dumped out in the floor, and that spilled over into the playing.

I had a complicated technical setup with slides and video, that I mostly managed myself, and that was stressful. My clicker died, and the replacement clicker I ordered was missing a part, and the one I borrowed was cranky about connecting to my computer. I wasn’t sure it would work till two minutes before the house opened. The technical setup did work and people loved it, but I put a lot of my pre-concert energy into figuring it out and keeping myself from freaking out about it.

Meanwhile, the news has been particularly harrowing lately, of course. And some people I love are going through some losses right now. I feel all of that. I read on social media, an hour before the concert (the worst possible time to go on social media), that a college classmate just died last week. We weren’t currently close, but I played on her senior recital and I’ve always thought of her as someone who would be wonderful to reconnect with when we get a chance. I even have her on a list of names of conductors who might be interested in playing the Agnes overture. And she’s gone. So I was thinking of her, wanting to honor her. And a dear friend is in town for a vigil at her mother-in-law’s dearhbed, and I’ve been thinking of her and her family. When I saw, right before going onstage, that my friend had managed to come to the concert, I burst into tears. I hope it didn’t scare my dear student stage managers too much. I got it together and went onstage and mostly played well (though I haven’t seen the recording yet), but it took some work to get my focus to the right place. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried right before going onstage before.

But that’s the game, and that’s what Agnes must have felt. Joy and sadness and all of it. It’s everything dumped out on the floor at the same time.

But here’s some of the joy: the audience really loved the music. The etudes are such crowd-pleasers, and they’re so much fun to perform. The technical setup did work, and all the side details I’ve been obsessing about—shoes and trees and dress and nail polish (Anne Lamott said she wears sparkly nail polish as a reminder that there is light in the world, and as a reminder to try and be the light in the world, so I’m doing that now)—worked really well. It was a wonderful feeling to play this music for such welcoming ears, and afterwards different people told me different etudes were their favorites, and I loved that. I tried to bring some comfort and joy to the audience, and I think I succeeded. A moment I loved was at the very end, gesturing towards Agnes’s portrait so the applause could go to her.

And here’s some more comfort. I woke up this morning feeling like I can’t wait to practice Agnes—a couple of Etude spots where I need to solidify the memory, and also a couple of character pieces I’ve started but put on the shelf to focus on the etudes. In the past I’ve sometimes felt like the day after a concert I don’t want to play…but I just keep wanting to practice Agnes.

I got an email that made me cry today from a student:

I was unable to attend your recital, but I watched the livestream today, and WOW! It was so beautiful. Agnes's music is absolutely delightful, and listening to your performance was such a joy. I'm so sad I couldn't be there in person!! It was so lovely. I'm so happy that I (we!) now have the fortune to hear such wonderful music that hasn't (yet) had the fortune of widespread recognition, and until now, performance. 

I don't know exactly why I'm sending this email but as a congratulations on a wonderful performance, and a general expression of endless gratitude that I live in a time and place where I get to experience such incredible music written by such an incredible woman. Thank you for finding her, and for caring about her, and for introducing me (and the rest of us to her).

I love music, and I love Agnes, and I love woman composers, and wow, I am so grateful for all of this, and that despite the world being so scary right now, there is also this; we get to hear music, and love music, and make music, and we get to rediscover music and people through it, and we get to share it with people. And I'm so grateful. 

I couldn’t ask for a better review. And here’s some more joy: my beloved, but honestly not generally interested in my piano music, 15yo son came to my concert, and I came home to this:

Tickling the ivories podcast

I had a great time as the interview subject on the podcast The Ivory Attic, and of course I talked lots about Agnes (and also my piano training and teaching). You can listen to the Tickling the Ivories episode here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1neaU7lse6pGr7PH2VIfJr?si=eUeeAqCiTpqs34mDZFhFJA

Eureka: Production Questions

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing a lot of creative puttering and dreaming, thinking about my Agnes etudes premiere concert (September 13! Save the date!). This is production stuff that isn’t practicing the music. It’s asking questions like:

What kind of experience do I want the audience to have? What messages and feelings do I want them to leave with? What do I want to say? What do I want to write in the program notes? Do I even want program notes? On paper or digital? Can I make some kind of audience interaction that’s organic and fun, not onerous or cheesy? What am I going to put on the poster? What kind of lighting do I want? Do I want to project images on the screen while I play, and will that even work? What images will make sense? And what the heck am I going to wear?

I’m going to take those in order, not that I have complete answers for everything (but I did solve a couple of things today, thus the title). As you’ll see, I’m just a tiny bit ambitious, here…

1. What kind of experience do I want my audience to have? I want endorphins. I want them to feel excited that they’re some of the first people in the world to hear this music, and I want them to feel special for that (because they are!). I want them to leave the outside world outside and enter the world of the concert and the music and be engaged and fully present as they listen. I want them to feel like the roomful of people is a community all experiencing something together. I want them to have lots of little moments of delight at Agnes’s turns of phrase. I want them to feel like they own the music.  I want them to feel gobsmacked and inspired and thrilled. I want them to feel like “I can’t believe I get to hear this.”

2. What messages and feelings do I want them to leave with? Definitely “hey I heard this amazing composer Agnes Tyrrell and now I am part of the movement to make her famous.” Also “the world contains more possibilities than I ever imagined—now let me go find more possibilities in my own life” And also “the world may be on fire but it is not *only* on fire.”

3. What do I want to say? I’m going back and forth about this. Honestly very little: speaking takes performing energy that I’d rather put towards the playing, and I want this to be a concert, not a lecture recital. I want my speaking to make the audience feel welcome and like they know me—it’s always way more fun to go to concerts when you know the performers (even if you only know them as a fan). But I don’t want my speaking to take the audience (or me) out of the world of the show.

4. What do I want to write in the program notes? I may crib from this blog quite a bit. I want people to understand that Agnes got the training her talent deserved, unlike almost every other woman composer of her time, and that the existence of her music proves that what’s possible has always been more than we can imagine. I also want to point out what an incredible act of courage it was for Agnes to dedicate her etudes to Liszt. I’ll probably quote the Liszt letter, and I’ll probably say I’ve held it in my hands. I haven’t figured out how much of my story with this journey I want to tell; I don’t want to write a novella for the program notes, and I also want to make sure the main takeaway is more “Agnes is amazing” than “Jocelyn is amazing.” But it’s true that part of what’s special about this concert is that it’s me playing, the one who’s publishing and recording this music. I need to figure out how to tell my story and Agnes’s story together, briefly and compellingly. I’m still working on that.

5. Do I even want program notes? Well, yes. I have too much to say to make people listen to me yammer all night.

6. On paper or digital? Maybe both? I think it makes sense to make a digital version that can include some colored pictures. I’m not sure we need a program, but it can be a nice souvenir. I’m thinking about maybe messing with the form of the paper program; there was a cute DIY ‘zine project (link: https://www.mirkwork.com/buy-my-stuff/how-to-make-a-zine-pdf   at the Musselman Library this summer, and I’ve been thinking about the idea of making a tiny little cool folded thing for the program. That may be silly. But it’s an example of the kind of thing I’m woolgathering about.

7. Can I make some kind of audience interaction that’s organic and fun, not onerous or cheesy? I’ve been thinking about this so much…I went to see Weird Al Yankovic at Wolf Trap last weekend (actually that experience has been informing a lot of my thinking). I loved the singalongs; it was unironically moving to sing “Yoda,Yo-yo-yo-yo-Yoda.” There won’t be a singalong in this concert! But there was also a moment where he had everyone wave their phones back and forth, and that was really moving too. There might (or might not, I know I know) be a way I can make something like that happen, but I’ll have to figure it out. Years ago I did an interactive concert at a music educators conference (so the most game audience ever) where I had them throw red balls of yarn around the room and then negotiate the resulting web while I played Chopin’s Opus 10 etudes, and that was one of the best performance experiences I’ve ever had. It was partly about effort, which that project was in a way that this one isn’t, I don’t think, so I don’t quite think I could do exactly that again. And most audiences might not go for it. But I’m definitely going to have some way that audiences can give nicknames to the etudes that need them, and I might have a vote for the favorite etude. I keep thinking about, and haven’t completely given up on (even though this is ridiculous) having everyone wear birthday party hats (because Agnes’s birthday is a few days later—oh gods, I could make everyone sing Happy Birthday). Then, in a reference to Robert Schumann’s famous “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” quote about Chopin, everyone could take off their hats and throw them in the air. But what an audience “could” and “would” do may be very different…

8. What am I going to put on the poster? I want it to look colorful and fabulous but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

9. What kind of lighting do I want? House black, curtains closed, and beyond that I need to go into the hall and play with the lighting.

10. Do I want to project images on the screen while I play, and will that even work? I definitely want to, and it will work in my home recital hall. There’s been some googling of portable projectors and stands for when I go on the road.

11. What images will make sense? Definitely some of the manuscript pages—they’re so beautiful. And YOU GUYS. I found out today that it’s now really easy to insert live video into a PowerPoint (after many many years of frustrating tech meetings where people told me “nope, can’t really do that). So I’m going to show parts of the manuscript pages with a live feed of my hands on the keyboard, and that will be fantastic. There are still a few wrinkles to iron out and long cables to buy and such things, but this will work. I need to ask a friend to be my tech person so I don’t stress about it, but I can do that.

12. And what the heck am I going to wear? I have spent waaaaaaay more time than I’m proud of googling about this. I like the idea of wearing a pantsuit or jumpsuit, because feminism, but I have not found my perfect outfit amid all the terrifyingly boring mother-of-the-bride chiffon things. I also really like the idea of being colorful, because Agnes’s music is so colorful. I bought a really fun colorful jumpsuit (that was a very fun local shopping experience at https://freshboutiquei.com  ) but it’s very modern, and isn’t quite right; I’m just going to wear it to teach in instead. And I ordered a promising jumpsuit online, but when I put it on I looked like a tablecloth, or like one of the Von Trapp children wearing curtains. So back it went. I also like the idea of a dress with flowers, since Agnes was Moravian in the Victorian era, so fabrics included lots of floral patterns. I went so far as to buy a bunch of silk flowers to sew on a navy blue dress I have, but that was going to be a lot of work when I should be practicing, and maybe wasn’t going to look very good. What I’ve really wanted is something beautiful, maybe a little shiny, visually interesting for the audience, with a comfortable fabric that I can throw in a suitcase and never iron. And I found it! At the Goodwill store for ten bucks. It’s handmade, but very well-made: the seamstress matched the patterns at the seams beautifully. It’s definitely a Moravian-looking pattern with lots of flowers on it, and it’s colorful and interesting and comfy and not too serious and just perfect.

So I didn’t practice piano today, but I figured out the dress and how I can project video of my hands. I’m calling that a win.

Unrelated but very cool: I dreamt I was talking with Agnes, which hasn’t happened before. She was a modern very cool Berlin chick, maybe in her twenties, with bobbed hair and black leather and lots of eyeliner, and she said “seriously, you’ve got to check out the opera.” I will, Agnes, I will!

This One’s About Practicing

There’s one spot in the second etude that I just haven’t quite unlocked, and it’s given me some cuticlebiting moments (how I wish that were a metaphor) this week. Here comes some nitty-gritty about that, with the acknowledgment that in these crazy days it’s a luxury to be frustrated about a musical moment. I know I’m lucky that I can go deep into practicing and try to shut the world out.

I’ve been thinking so much about this Yehudi Menuhin quote—in fact stop me if you’ve heard this before--where the famous violinist said:

“There is no such thing as a difficult piece of music. A piece is either impossible or easy. The process where it migrates from one category to the other is known as practicing.”

Right now there’s a section of Agnes’s second etude that is, for me, by that definition, impossible.

There’s a lot going on*:

1. There’s a big rolled chord, where the left hand has to jump hand positions to fit all the notes

2. The top of the rolled chord is the melody, that will continue in the next rolled chord

3. After the rolled chord both hands jump to the middle of the keyboard and then

4. The sustain pedal goes down

5. Both hands play fast repeated notes with neighbors and then

6. The sustain pedal comes off and then

7. Both hands jump out again and then

8. Both hands play another big uncomfortable rolled chord

9. And do the pattern again on different notes. Also

10. It’s all supposed to be quiet.

11. And then when the whole section repeats, the pedaling is different so that you catch the top note of the melody sometimes, and sometimes you catch the bottom note of the bass.

The rolled chords have been bugging me. A rolled chord—the marking is that wavy vertical line—means you play the notes of the chord one at a time, fast, first the bottom, then the next to the bottom, then the next one, all the way to the top. Do you play both hands at once like that, or play all the left hand notes first and all the right hand notes after that? It depends. Often composers will write one big ribbon (that’s how I think of that wavy vertical line) from the bottom note to the top note, and then you know it’s all the left hand notes then all the right hand notes. But sometimes they write two separate wavy lines, and it still makes sense to do it that way. It’s often really beautiful to roll a chord all the way from the bottom to the top. But it takes extra time to play all the notes one at a time in a rolled chord, and it often makes more sense to roll the left hand and the right hand at once. That’s what I’ve been doing, and I think it’s right: there’s not time to do the slow roll the other way. And the left hand chords are really awkward: I just can’t reach all the notes in one hand position, so I have to do a big fast motion to get all the notes in. That wouldn’t be so bad if it just went rolled chord, rolled chord, rolled chord (which in fact is one helpful way of simplifying it). But somehow, doing the awkward big roll and then immediately jumping in to do the fast repeated notes and then jumping out makes it all feel really uncomfortable. I think I’m not opening and closing my hand fast enough.

Yesterday I thought I had found a breakthrough, and I thought I was going to write triumphantly about it. I changed where I split the left hand positions and it felt like it was going to be much easier to play it that way, even adding in the calculation about the time it will take to relearn it. I’ve been mostly playing the bottom two far apart notes before changing positions, but yesterday I tried jumping after just the low note, and it felt like it was going to be easier and make sense. I was really excited to come back this morning and practice the new way in, make it a new habit (I love knowing what specific thing I’m going to be working on before I start practicing—it’s the best feeling). But then today it fell flat. Yesterday’s discovery just didn’t work. It sounded clunky and bumpy and it didn’t feel good and the old way, where I play two far apart notes and then change positions, is clearly what’s going to actually work. But it doesn’t feel good yet, just less terrible than the other way.  I’m figuring that out, but I don’t have it yet. It’s not easy.

The next thing that I haven’t quite grasped is the sound of the fast repeated notes with the neighbors, in between the rolled chords. According to Agnes’s very specific pedal marks, all the notes ring during the little dissonances of the repeated notes. It’s hard to know what effect she was going for. On the modern Steinway, pedaling over those notes makes them sound loud and muddy. This morning I felt sort of desperate about it, so I went to try it on our fortepiano (a copy of a Mozart-era Walter made by Thomas and Barbara Wolf), and that made much more sense in a way: the pedal made the left hand notes sustain enough to sound melodic, but the dissonances all died out before they completely took over and got obnoxious. I need to figure out what sound Agnes was going for so I can try to replicate that, and I’m thinking I may have to find a piano like the one she played on to find that out.

It’s the kind of situation where it would be incredibly helpful to go listen to twenty different recordings and hear what people do in that spot and decide what I like. That’s what I told two different students this week who are working on pieces by Beethoven and Chopin, and I know they’ll come back with clear intentions about how the music should sound. But there aren’t twenty recordings of this music: there aren’t any recordings of this music.

I *will* figure something out, even if it’s a compromise where I play what I think sounds good instead of what the composer wrote. But since I’m the first one playing this music in this century, I feel a responsibility to be true to the composer’s intentions so other people can know what they are. If there were already twenty recordings I could just do what I want (okay, after agonizing and researching lots) and make lots of changes with a clear conscience. But I don’t quite feel like I can do that. Maybe in twenty years there will be twenty recordings, and then I can change my mind and do another recording, like Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the Well Tempered Clavier. I like that idea.

*My beloved, nutty, much-missed aunt Meg once looked me up and down and said “you’ve got a lot going on in that outfit” when I was wearing a multicolored striped dress and pink textured tights and a blue cardigan with purple buttons. So whenever I think or say that something has “a lot going on,” I think of her voice and that outfit (which, for the record, was fabulous and I stand by it).

Frauen Orchester Projekt

I just spent a wonderful three-day weekend in Berlin at a music festival, the Frauen Orchester Projekt, where an all-women orchestra rehearses intensely for three days and then puts on a concert (officially an informal reading—but it was definitely a concert) of music by women. They played Agnes’s Overture in E flat, the first time that music has been performed since 1874, when it was played in Agnes’s hometown of Brno. It’s tempting to say that Agnes couldn’t have imagined an event like that: an orchestra of women in a world capitol, playing her music about 150 years after she wrote it. But I also think she probably could have imagined it easily. I feel so clearly that she was writing for the future, leaving such clear copies of her manuscripts, even when her pieces weren’t published. I think she absolutely did imagine that her music would be played in a world capitol, and I like to think she could easily imagine a concert by women of music by women.

It was so moving to hear the piece played by an orchestra, not the midi sounds on my computer; I cried just like I knew I would, especially when the audience whooped and applauded afterwards. It was also really helpful to hear the orchestra rehearsing the piece. There are some spots that just don’t work—the poor horn players said some of their parts are unplayable, so we’re going to have to rewrite those, and the clarinets also had some strange moments in their parts. They’re going to share a spreadsheet so the players can let us know about errors—whether ours or Agnes’s—that we’ll need to fix before publication, and that may be a big project. In the midi version, the timpani part struck me as just dumb, but in the hands of the skilled timpani player (the first woman orchestral percussionist in Germany, if I understood her right), the timpani ended up being the heartbeat of the whole orchestra, giving everything shape and nuance. The incredible conductor, Mary Ellen Kitchens, is an absolute powerhouse. I think Riley, my fantastic student/assistant/collaborator, got video of her jumping into the air as she conducted the finale; if she did, I’ll make sure to share it here. Riley did come, with her partner and parents, and it was thrilling to see her get the applause she deserves for all her hard work typesetting the score and parts (I edited them, but she did the actual typing of notes into the computer).

It was fun to hear the form so clearly in the performance, as you can in works by great composers. The overture is in a modified Sonata Allegro Form. In Sonata form, there’s a part in the middle, after lots of wandering around, where everything gets set up very clearly for the triumphant return of the opening music. It’s called the dominant preparation, and it’s all about making you want to hear the return of the original key and the original theme. The overture sets up a very clear feeling of dominant preparation, but instead of leading to the original theme like you expect, it pulls the rug out from under you and goes instead to a slow, lyrical, quiet theme. Then there’s another build, and we do get the original theme as expected. But there’s a very clear breaking the rules happening there. For lots of the nineteenth century, music critics talked about music as being “masculine”—loud, bombastic, forceful— or “feminine”—quiet, slow, lyrical. Did Agnes have those characterizations in mind? It feels like she must have. If she did, is she saying something about having a big lead-up not to the main theme but to a definitely “feminine” theme? I wonder.

I also played an all-Agnes concert, mostly solo but with a couple of songs with the lovely mezzo Frances Falling, as a post-festival “matinee.”  The audience laughed out loud at some of the moments where Agnes ends a piece with a smile and a shrug, and they definitely wanted to clap after every etude (I played six of the twelve), even when I announced them as a set. It’s so fun to play crowd-pleasing music. I think people enjoyed it, and I definitely had some moments where I heard the piano writing differently now that I had heard the orchestral writing. This happens in, say, Beethoven all the time: you can really get a clear sense of how the composer is imagining the piano music because you know how the orchestral music sounds. But this was my first time hearing Agnes’s orchestral music live, and that was really fun to discover some added dimensions in some moments. Some of the playing went very well and some of it wasn’t my best, which I expected: early afternoon is my lowest-energy part of the day, and I knew I would be already tired from the emotional orchestral concert that morning. And then the piano had some trouble—there was a definite “clunk” happening on one of the low notes, and I couldn’t get it to play as quietly as I wanted it to. But the thing that really pulled my focus was trying to speak to the audience in both English and German. My German is just couple of notches past rudimentary, and I had meant to write out my concert patter and translate it with AI and have everything ready to read. But I just didn’t get to writing out my concert patter—I kept feeling tired and jet-lagged and not up to writing (turns out writing takes really similar energy to practicing, just my luck). So I thought I’d try speaking in English into DeepL, the AI translator on my phone, and then reading the translation into German. That could probably have been an okay plan if it had worked, but of course technology is a miracle until it fails, and it didn’t quite work. I got flustered and tried to sort of translate on the fly. I think it was okay—I do think the audience enjoyed themselves—but it took so much of my focus, and really made my playing not as strong as it could have been. One very funny moment was when I was playing the fifth etude, which is loud and fast and busy, and it made the whole piano move, and my phone—there for translation—fell off the music desk and into the piano, where it rattled on the strings and made them buzz. The audience laughed, and I stopped playing. Someone yelled out “prepared piano!” And I said “Sorry Agnes!” And everyone clapped. It was a funny and joyful moment…but I really, really hope it’s not the main thing people remember from the concert, and I’m afraid it may be.

But it’s exciting that Agnes had her Berlin debut and I did too, and it was exciting to premiere pieces there. I’ll include the program of the “matinee” concert below.

One striking moment for me was after that concert, when we were all packing up our things, and I heard Mary Ellen, the conductor, whistling the main theme from the Agnes overture. For the past three years I’ve been hearing Agnes’s music in my head—in fact, I often don’t listen to external music, because I’m enjoying listening to the Agnes music in my head—and I’ve been aware that I’m the only one around me with this music in my head. But here was someone else walking around with Agnes Tyrell’s music running through her head. And then yesterday, when I was walking around Berlin, I thought that there’s a whole orchestra of women who might have Agnes Tyrrell’s music running through their heads now. I love that.

Klavierwerke und Lieder von Agnes Tyrrell

Jocelyn Swigger, Klavier

mit Frances Falling, mezzosopran

Frauen Orchester Project

9 Marz 2025

14:30

Konzertsaal 2, FEZ Berlin

Alle deutschen Erstaufführungen

von Idyllen und Scherzi, A884

  1. Pastorale

  2. Scherzo in a-moll

  4. Scherzo in D-due

von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837

   No. 1 in b-moll „Dritten“

   No. 2 in H-dur

An den Mond A840

   Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Idyll in G-dur A860 no. 1

Albumblatt in d-moll Op.18/3 

Albumblatt in G-dur Op. 18/2

von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837

   No. 3 in A-dur „Octaven“

   No. 4 in A-dur

Die Muhle, A873

Nocturne in F-dur Op. 16, A829

Beim Wandern Op. 55, A843

  Gedichte von Max Haushofer

von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837

   No. 8 g-moll 

   No. 11 F#-dur 

Vielen Dank an:

FOP

Riley Dunbar

Kolbe Foundation

Gettysburg College

 und das Archiv von Agnes Tyrrell in der Abteilung für Musikgeschichte des Mährischen Museums (MZM) in Brünn, Tschechische Republik

Translations

I know Agnes so well and I also don’t know her at all.

Agnes Tyrrell (1846-1883) was a genius composer, and this blog is where I chronicle my adventures playing and researching her extraordinary music. I sometimes post snippets over here.

I feel like I know her intimately from playing her music for the past couple of years.  I know she’s better at playing thirds than I am, and I know she likes to end a piece with a shrug and a smile instead of a giant big finish (though she likes those too). I know she’s frugal with her manuscript paper: she’ll write half a measure at the end of a line, like writing half a word at the end of a line with a hy-phen. But I don’t know her from her words, except for the occasional tantalizing moment in English (her dad was British and earned his living as an English teacher, so she was fluent). She translated Goethe’s Egmont into English and signed it with a humorous inscription: “Translated by Agnes Tyrrell, a very dear little thing, with an ugly face but as industrious as any living creature.” I can’t stop thinking about that, to the point where I should probably say “stop me if you’ve heard this before.” I  love that Agnes could gently mock herself, and that she was so proud of being industrious. Me, I haven’t been so industrious lately—I was felled by the terrible cold that’s been going around, and I’m just not at my most productive when all I can do is sleep and cough and blow my nose. How did Agnes actually compose incredible music when she was so sick she couldn’t tour?

I wonder about that all the time. But I don’t actually know from her own words, because most of her documents are written in old German handwriting, and I can’t read them. Yet! Last year when I was at the archive I took pictures of all the documents I could find there, and I’m hopeful that this summer I’ll get to read Agnes’s letters and writings. I’ve got a student excited about deciphering and translating them: we’ll use one AI to read the handwriting, and then run the German through two different AIs to come up with readable English.  I tried out the process last year in the archive on a page that was maybe a memoir, maybe a short story, and I was able to turn an incomprehensible page into a few paragraphs about a childhood memory of enjoying Aunt Hilda, so I think it will work. We really do live in the future.  We turned in a grant application a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m crossing all my fingers and toes we’ll get the funding for that project this summer.

So a few weeks ago, before The Cold That Wouldn’t End, I was looking through my photos of the letters, feeling kind of like a kid shaking presents under a Christmas tree, and I found some correspondence that struck me: a note, in English, from the magazine The Family Herald, granting Agnes Tyrrell permission to translate the story “The Gloved Hand” into German. I had seen it before, but this time it struck me that it would be interesting to read the story, since Agnes liked it enough to translate it, or at least the magazine, to find out what kind of stories Agnes liked to read in English.

I emailed my superhero librarian friend Betsy—a major theme of this whole journey is “librarians are superheroes”—and asked if she could help me find any copies of the magazine so I could get a sense of what Agnes liked to read. About half an hour later she emailed me a link to the actual story:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/snVPAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22gloved%20hand%22

It’s a dark Victorian thriller, about a woman who is tortured with her hand held over a candle flame, and ever after wears a glove on that hand. At the beginning she has two suitors, a rich one and a poor one. She chooses the poor one, but stays friends with the rich one, who hires her husband to manage some of his estates. She keeps the accounts of the estates, and notices the rich man is behind on his debts and close to ruin: he’s three thousand pounds short on his mortgage of his manor house, and the bank is going to call it in. She and her husband arrange to sell some property to cover the debt. The husband is about to travel with the cash when an evil servant (whom she never liked) and his brigand friends come up with a scheme to lure the husband away and steal the money from the woman. But she has had the foresight to hide it, and she won’t tell them where it is, even when they hold her hand over the candle flame. The commotion wakes up her son, who toddles in and says “what are you doing to my mamma?” Just then the husband returns with help, so the kid is fine.  The thieves are sentenced to fifteen years. Everyone praises the woman for her heroism, including the rich suitor whose mortgage she saved (now happily married to someone else). It’s interesting that the woman has so much agency and so much recognition. It’s also interesting that the woman can’t play the piano anymore. And here’s another interesting thing: the woman is the narrator’s Aunt Hilda, and the opening is about how much the children enjoyed her visits to the nursery.

Aunt Hilda? Wait a minute. Wait a minute! It’s definitely the one page that I ran through the AI to see if I could read it. I’m so happy I know it’s a translation of a thriller; I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since, that I was looking forward to reading the rest of that narrative. I’m so, so glad I know it’s a translation now, rather than reading the whole thing in the translated AI version and thinking it’s a memoir. I do think I would have figured out that it’s a story, not Agnes’s memory: it talks about names of houses, and she lived in an apartment. But I can also imagine that, at least for a while, I could have thought “my god! Agnes had this heroic aunt with this chilling tale!”

So thank you, heroic librarian friend Betsy, for keeping me from being incredibly wrong about Agnes in this one particular way. And I do feel like I know Agnes a little better, from enjoying reading a story that she enjoyed reading. I can’t wait to read more of what she actually wrote.

November 2024

It’s never felt more important to play music by a genius woman.

The US is in a dark time and getting darker. But I have to believe that there are some things we can do now that can make things better in the long run. And I feel so lucky—while also feeling all the other feelings—that I have this focus, this project, this long view of history. It’s a luxury to slip away to imagining the nineteenth century and think about music.

And I’m thinking a lot about Agnes, of course. I’ve been playing snippets of her music on instagram, and yesterday I wanted to find the exact right music for the day. The beginning of the sonata was a contender—it’s a cry of anguish—but I didn’t quite want that. I ended up using a bit of the etude in D minor, because it has some sadness and some anger without, to me, feeling hopeless. I don’t want to feel hopeless or make anyone else feel hopeless.

But it was interesting to play so many different Agnes Tyrrell pieces yesterday and have to keep rejecting them because they were too joyful. I can’t stop thinking about that. She was so sick, and she didn’t get the attention she deserved from the wider world, and the Habsburg empire was no democracy, and she certainly didn’t have rights as a woman. And yet, and yet, and yet. There’s so much joy and fun and laughter in her music. I can’t help thinking that she had all sorts of problems and miseries and just got on with it.

I’ve been talking about playing Agnes as a form of radical optimism, because her music proves that what’s possible has always been more than we can imagine, but maybe her music can also give us radical joy: we can be heartbroken and hurting and still choose to find bubbling moments of happiness. So the next playing I post will be her nocturne. There are moments of dissonance and longing in it that I never quite felt till I played through them yesterday, but there’s also a sense of calm and love and a feeling of being grounded. I want to give that to people.

I think we’re going to need fun and laughter and music. The road ahead will be dark and heavy and we will need art and music to give us light and lightness.

It’s never felt more important to play music by a genius woman.

Why I Love Teaching At A Liberal Arts College

Last week Riley, my wonderful research assistant, did a poster presentation along with the other Kolbe fellows who spent the summer doing research here at Gettysburg College. It was so fun running into people who had visited Riley’s poster and were excited about Agnes and the overture performance in March. I kept hearing “So you’re going to Berlin? Can I come?”

I also had a nice conversation with one of my chamber music students, Micah. He’s a double major and a beautiful violist; I’m coaching him on the Brahms E flat sonata. I love seeing our students thrive in different areas. His project was going on a Maya archeology dig, using LIDAR technology to find structures under the ground. LIDAR stands for Light Detection And Ranging, and it makes it possible to look from way overhead at even a jungle canopy, and see through it to the structures underneath the ground. So Micah and his cohort found spots and dug them up to reveal a canal and a terrace, proof of civilization that the surface of the ground doesn’t reveal. I learned my new favorite word: ground-truthing. The technology makes it possible to find the truth under the ground. And that’s so similar to what’s happening with Agnes. The manuscripts were lovingly catalogued and cared for through the 20th century, but it just didn’t make sense for anyone to painstakingly copy out every note before being able to find out if out if the music was worth the trouble. But now I can waltz in with my phone, and take hundreds of photographs in a day. The music was always there, but it was hidden beneath the ground. Now we’re ground-truthing it. Good, right?

I also talked to another research fellow who gratified my nerdy English major heart with a paper on time and bells in Mrs. Dalloway—too long since I’ve read it—and The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I read that last summer along with its cheerier sequel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and haven’t been able to shut up about them…maybe sort of like I haven’t been able to shut up about Agnes’s music: I found a thing! It’s so well crafted and emotional and brings me so much joy, and you have to experience it too! She made me so happy by saying she’s thinking of being a high school English teacher—she’ll be absolutely incredible, and she’ll change her students’ lives. We had a nice talk about festival time, moments outside of the regular cycle when people come together to celebrate something and the focus is away from the regular routine. I said, “like this event.” It felt so good to have a moment, out of the regular Friday afternoon time, to celebrate the students and their excellent work. I want to think about making more moments like that.

So I felt like the English major and I were kindred spirits, as Anne of Green Gables says. I’m rereading AOGG, out loud to my son at bedtime, and I keep thinking about how Agnes’s world was, in some ways, like Anne’s. Of course Agnes is a city European, not a rural Canadian, but the time period is similar: Anne’s youngest daughter Rilla is a teen in WWI, so Anne is probably a child in the 1870s (ah, the internet knows. Anne was born in 1865.) Agnes lived from 1846 to 1883. So I’m revisiting fictional Avonlea, this world I know so well, but this I’m time noticing the technology. There are trains, yes, but a horse and carriage is what takes you from the station. Music is only live. And night is dark. There’s a scene where Anne stops studying because it’s twilight and she can’t really see her book anymore, so she looks out the window at her favorite tree in the darkening sky. I don’t know if Agnes had electric lights in her apartment in her sophisticated city—she might have—but she might have lived some of the time in oil light and candlelight.

And now here I am, typing on a glowing screen.

It’s good that I’m feeling grateful for technology, because I’ve also been really frustrated with it lately. Working on the overture—that is, proofreading Riley’s typeset notes from my photos of Agnes’s handwritten manuscript--uses really different intellectual muscles than the ones I use to learn piano music, or even to edit piano music. I’ll spare you the details—they’re crushingly boring—but I got into the kind of situation where software was crashing, and making me re-enter passwords a million times ,and refusing to save my work, and I had clearly angered the technology gods, and it was really hard not to have a tantrum about it. In fact, I failed, and I did have a tantrum about it. It’s so much easier to look at notes on a page and teach my fingers how to play those notes, without having a computer be involved.

Some of the challenges of editing of the overture aren’t technology’s fault, though, they’re about my own inexperience with reading orchestral scores. I’m used to reading piano music, but orchestral music is a whole different game. Some of the parts are very easy for me to read (hello, my dear violins and cellos and flutes), but some of the parts require an extra cognitive step. The harder ones are in different clefs or transposed; imagine you’re reading lots of numbers, and then a few of the numbers you have to, say, add 3 to them: so you’re reading 3,4,5 for violins and clarinets and thinking 3, 4, 5 for the violins and 6, 7, 8 for the clarinets. It’s kind of like that, and oh my brain. People get great at that with practice, but I haven’t done it much since I took a conducting course in grad school a million years ago. So there’s a lot of moments of trying to figure out what it’s supposed to sound like while stumbling and feeling confused. Agnes also occasionally makes errors with the transpositions, which makes sense: she usually wrote for piano or piano and voice, and once in a while she forgets—say, adds 3 instead of subtracting 3. It doesn’t happen very often, and it’s comforting to know that she was human, and this challenging thing was hard for her too.

And I know that we have to find all the errors—mine, Agnes’s, and Riley’s—before we make the individual parts, because every error in the score is wasting a whole orchestra’s worth of individual people’s five minutes, and that makes my blood run cold. Someone at the poster presentation event asked me how I can tell if something is an error or an artistic choice, and I said part of it is knowing the language, and trusting that knowledge. So if someone says “the violas are in the library” and “the clarinets are in the library” and “the cellos are in the park,” it’s probably an artistic choice to say “library” or “park.” But if they say “the cellos in the are library” it’s probably a mistake in the cellos.

So I’m being really detailed in a different way than I usually work, and dang is it humbling. But tantrums and perfectionism aside, it’s exciting to still be able to find new musical skills and ways of knowing. Lifelong learning, baby!

Laaaa laaaaaa laaaaaaa, dit dit dit

It’s so interesting how much I’m learning from the experience of editing Agnes’s etudes for publication. It’s making me feel like I’ve never really looked at a score carefully before in my life. That can’t be true; I’m certain that when I practice really well I do look for, and look at, every mark. But I really do feel like I’m looking at pedal markings in a way I never have. Agnes is very specific about when to put the pedal down…let me back up. The piano has a damper pedal that lets all the strings vibrate until you release it. If it’s down, the notes all ring, and if it’s up the notes stop as soon as you release the keys. A frequent way to pedal is to put the pedal down with the bass note, so you hear that bass throughout the next few notes; if you have a left hand that goes “boom chuck chuck” you’ll often pedal on the “boom” so that note sounds longer. So even though you move your hand away to play other notes too, the low notes might sound like boooooooooooooooom booooooooooooooooom boooooooooooooooooooom. But Agnes often (but not always!) has you put the pedal down after you release the low note, which makes it sound short, like boom (empty space) boom (empty space). So sometimes the low note is short, and sometimes it’s long. A way I’m enjoying thinking about it is imagining that my bass line is played by an actual upright bass, and sometimes the strings are plucked for the short notes but sometimes they’re bowed for the long notes.

The funny thing is that I could be completely wrong and overthinking it. I don’t think I am—I think she’s logical and clear about it—but I was just looking at the first edition of her etudes, the published one, and there’s a whole section where the pedaling in the printed version is the opposite of what her handwritten version says. In the handwritten version, each measure is

chord (pedal down) little notes (pedal up), so the chord is short,

but in the printed version, it says

(pedal down) chord little notes (pedal up), so the chord is long.

It’s the difference between a melody that goes laaaaaaaa laaaaaaa laaaaaa laaaaa and one that goes dit (silence) dit (silence) dit (silence) dit (silence).

This is where I could really use, say 150 years of aural tradition to know that everyone always plays it this way. And yes, I do have that in Agnes’s contemporaries like Brahms and Liszt…but now I’m mistrusting printed music and, like I said, feeling like I’ve just never looked so carefully at pedal marks before. Hopefully after I record and publish the etudes lots and lots of other people will play and record them too, and then people can disagree and do lots of different interpretations about them. But for now, it’s just me, just possibly overthinking, but having a good time doing it.

Meanwhile, I’m also memorizing, so I’m both looking at pages closely and also getting away from the page. It really is easier to play that way. For example, there’s one particular spot in the 4th etude where I don’t remember what the next chord is—it’s after a B major chord, and it’s at the top of the page, and when I play it looking at the score it feels inevitable and obvious, but I just don’t have it mapped yet. But I’m finding out where the holes are. Once I have it I’ll really have it, and I can’t wait to be able to play these pieces easily. I love how much better they’re making me; the main game of the 4th etude is fast repeated chords in both hands, and when I first started it felt impossible. Now most of it (not all of it!) feels easy. And I love how fun the etudes are to play. I’ve started posting little bits of them, and it’s fun to see people’s reactions. They’re going to be so much fun in concert.

I just turned in edits for etudes 5, 6, and 7, so I’m more than halfway through with the first round of edits. And I’ve decided I’m going to do an official premiere concert of all 12 etudes in September 2025, and then do lots of performances, and then record the album of them in the summer of 2026. Meanwhile, a singer and musicologist in Germany is helping figure out the texts for the unreadable songs, and I’m hoping—and hopeful!—that we can perform some of the songs in Berlin next March.

—-

After writing that, I just had a lesson with a student working on the slow movement of the Beethoven Pathetique sonata (speaking of long aural traditions) where I said, and believe: “Pedaling is going to change depending on the piano and the room and the day. You don’t have to do it exactly the same every time, and you can be convincing lots of different ways.”

So it’s important to think and overthink as part of the process…but then plans can change. In a way I feel I can be cavalier about pedaling through a measure where the notes are marked short in Beethoven (because if I get it wrong a million other people will do it the right way) but with Agnes I really want to make sure I can get it right. I wish I believed in seances, and I could summon her spirit and ask her questions about the marks in the score. How’s that for a Halloween season wish?

IMSLP! FOP! Etudes!

Over the summer my wonderful research assistant, Riley—did I mention I have a wonderful research assistant? She’s the best—had a Kolbe fellowship on campus here at Gettysburg College. And she killed it. She typeset all of Agnes’s songs and most of her still-unpublished piano music, and we’ve been editing them together. We’ve still got lots of expressive markings in the old German, that we haven’t deciphered yet, so we’re holding off on publishing those till we’ve got all of those figured out (it really matters if a handwritten note says “faster here” or “slower here,” for example). But I’m delighted to report that Agnes now has a page on IMSLP! This is important because IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project, is a wiki site with thousands of pages of public domain scores, and it’s become a principal place to look for printed music.

And this week I got some wonderful news: the Frauenorkesterprojekt, a women’s orchestra in Berlin, is programming Agnes’s Eb overture for their March concert on International Women’s Day weekend in 2025. There are some reviews from Brno (Agnes’s hometown) saying the overture is a crowd-pleaser, but it’s unpublished and surely hasn’t been played outside of Brno. So Riley and I are going to focus on getting the score and parts typeset and edited, and I’m bound and determined that we’re going to go to the concert.

And I’ve got someone who can help us with the old German handwriting! She’s the one who connected us with the FOP. She’s a singer and musicologist in Germany, and we met and bonded at a conference last year on Women At The Piano. I’m hopeful that we can also do some of the Agnes songs together in Berlin in March.

Meanwhile I’m practicing the etudes, working on polishing and memorizing them. I can play them all now, sort of, but they’re not all securely memorized or up to tempo or debugged yet. I played the first one, in thirds, at my high school reunion last weekend, and it was fun to feel the energy in the room about it. One friend told me afterwards that he just closed his eyes and felt joyful the entire time I played. I couldn’t ask for a better review.

I don’t have a lot of concerts lined up this fall, and I’m glad about that: there are lots of details in the etudes where I need to take things apart to put them back together, and it really doesn’t work to do that when you have a concert in the next few days. So I’m going inwards and practicing and editing. It’s interesting to see what it’s like to use my brain in different ways; for example, for some reason it’s much harder to make myself edit than to make myself practice. I don’t know exactly when I’ll do the official premiere of all 12 etudes, and it feels like a luxury to give myself time and space to really make them what I want.

Listen: Pastorale in E major and Etude in F# major Op. 48 No. 1

I played some Agnes music in the Piano Faculty Recital at Interlochen Arts Camp on June 25th. My performance starts at 25:55 (but I was so proud to share the stage with my terrific colleagues, so you might want to watch from the beginning). I started with Pastorale in E major, which is a full canon where the left hand copies the right hand, and then played the 11th etude, where the main melody is in three-note chords. I did have one page-turn glitch, but it’s my error, not Agnes’s!

2nd Pilgrimage Part 2

I got to visit the castle at Namest Nad Oslavou, where Agnes worked as a court musician for a while. The rooms are set up as though it’s in the nineteenth century, so I really felt like I got to see what she might have seen. This entry will be mostly pictures.

The floors were beautiful parquet, so they had us wear giant fuzzy slippers over our shoes. I felt like I had Oscar The Grouch feet.

The courtyard must have looked similar when Agnes was here.

They still do concerts in this room, a long library.

This used to be where the musicians lived; it’s now a hotel. I don’t know for sure that Agnes stayed here, but maybe I got to step where she stepped.

I loved the idea that this tree might have been a sapling when Agnes was here.

A view from the gardens…

…and closer towards the castle.

This piano might not have been here in the 1870s, but the room probably looked similar.

This hallway must have looked similar.

This is a main room, and it really gave me a feel for what it might have been like for Agnes and other court musicians to play background music while the Count and his family hung out. It’s a big room. That giant black thing on the left is a stove, and it’s on the opposite side of the room from the instruments. All I could think was that it must have been freezing in the winter.

This is probably where Agnes would have played. I’m not sure whether it’s the same piano (they didn’t let me play it).

Another view of the piano, with a harp too (but no heater this corner of the room!)

Agnes must have looked out this window and seen this view.

Maybe Agnes walked on this staircase.

Agnes definitely did not go to this cafe. But you GUYS. It was absolutely lovely, with simple furniture out in the woods, and probably the best Flat White I had the whole trip.

2nd Pilgrimage Part 1

A week and a half ago I hurt myself, in a couple of arguably avoidable ways, and I’m still kind of mad about it. One was grabbing a handful of poison ivy. I know, know. After I grabbed it I thought “uh-oh, leaves of three let it be, this might not be good” but it was a thought that came about thirty seconds too late. And then some life stress has been happening, and while I was on the phone with my sister talking about arrangements to put our dad in hospice, I bit a ragged cuticle on my right pinky…so severely that it was too painful to play for OVER A WEEK. You might think it would be better to react to stress with self-destructive behavior that ruins, say, my liver, instead of my hand, but I guess we don’t pick our vices. I say this not as a bid for sympathy, but to comment that it’s amazing how all-consuming physical inconveniences can be. Yesterday was the first day I could really practice without my finger hurting intensely, and I’m still waking up in the middle of the night because I have to cover myself with anti-itch cream again. I can’t help but think that Agnes must have felt like this for so much of the time—with all of these exciting musical ideas and projects, but unable to play, unable to tour, unable to sing, because her body was getting in the way. Of course her ailments were much worse than mine. But as an example of how focused I’ve been on my hurting finger and itchy skin, I forgot to tell you:

Oh, by the way, I’m in Brno. Agnes’s hometown. I’m playing a concert of her music tomorrow at JAMU, the main performing arts university here. I have no idea if anyone will come—apparently they’re in final exams right now and high concert season, and everyone is exhausted from going to so many concerts. I hope the people who don’t feel like sitting through one more concert will just stay home—it’s dispiriting to play for people who don’t want to be there. And I hope I play well. The last week of practice really wasn’t good because of my finger, and I’m taking three of the etudes (5, 7,12) off the program because of it. No one will mind, I’m sure, but I’m disappointed that I’m not playing them all yet. Two of the ones I’m leaving out are going to be my favorites, too, when I can play them well—but if I play them in their current state people will only hear that they’re hard, not that they’re great. Once I made that call yesterday I had a joyful practice, and I had another good practice today. Tomorrow won’t be as polished as I want it to be, but part of the way you get to polished performances is by playing some less polished performances along the way.

I’ll report about the concert (and link to video when it’s available).

Meanwhile, I got to spend yesterday at the archive in the Department of History of Music. It was so good to be back there. I love handling her actual pages—I’ve been so happy to play from photos on my iPad, but I forgot that her pages are actually much bigger than my screen. There’s one missing page in a set of short pieces, and I really hope I can find it in her collection of fragments and homework, but I didn’t find it yet, and it might not be there. I took photos of all the pages—more than 500–of her opera, and that’s going to be an exciting project: she didn’t make a piano reduction, so I’m going to make one. (That will probably have to wait till my next sabbatical). I also took photos of the libretto, by Franz Keim, and I’ve already started looking at AI translations of the last couple of pages. AI can read handwriting, but it has trouble reading handwriting in lyrics, because it tries to read the music notation too. So it’s great that the libretto is written out separately. I don’t know how the opera will be…it’s called, and about, Bertran of Born, a troubadour who revolted against a couple of kings. I’m fuzzy in the details but it’s definitely a tragedy—the final scene has a king crying out for his dead son. So that will be a cheerful project. But I actually do think it could be really exciting. I’ll have to figure out how to stage it…but that’s a project way, way, way down the road.

I also took photos of Agnes’s poems, which I’ll have AI read and translate, and of her letters. She mostly writes in German, but she was fluent in English and occasionally added a phrase or two in English. The first one I saw was disappointing but not surprising: it was an account of being harassed. Her music is so full of joy and good humor, so fun, that I think of her as being cheerful and not stressed out by anything—but of course she had so much stress in her life. I’m going to have AI read her letters, so I’ll know her better soon. I’m curious how her poems and letters will match the personality of the music. I feel like I know her so well, and in some ways I think I do, but in other ways of course I don’t know her at all.

And now I’m itching again, and it’s all I can think about.

Onstage, Offscreen

This past weekend I got to play the Agnes trill etude in the student opera performance here at the Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, and it was a delightful experience. The show was Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon (Cinderella), and in this staging the show began with a scene from Madame Viardot’s salon. I got to dress up as Madame Viardot, and I played a Chopin mazurka (that Viardot set to words for an aria in the opera) and the Agnes trill etude. It was really fun to wear a big fancy dress and fascinator in my hair. You can see me smiling with my friends and colleagues, opera director Susan Hochmiller and orchestra conductor Cesar Leal. My dress came with a hoop and you better believe I wore it, even though hoops were out of fashion by the time Viardot premiered the opera in her salon in 1904. But of course I was thinking not just of dressing like Viardot but dressing like Agnes. Here’s one thought: I mostly wear knit fabrics, especially in my post-pandemic, comfort-is-fashion lifestyle, but the dress had structure. Like, I really should have ironed it. And I kind of liked it. It made me think about what kind of fabrics Agnes wore, and what her clothing felt like. There’s something about feeling the clothing having its own shape. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there somewhere about musical structure…

I enjoyed performing, and I definitely performed for the camera, planning to share the performance with you here. And you can listen to the video here. But oh my dears, it’s a video fail. The camera was very much in set-it-and-forget-it mode, and I’m almost completely off-screen. You can see the piano in the lower left-hand corner, and get a glimpse of the dress at the end when I take a bow. But you can’t really see the rest of my performance. As videos go, it’s definitely a bust. I decided to post it for now, though, because there’s something so perfectly fitting about that: the live experience in the community worked, but getting the wider recognition gets stuck. The performance felt joyful and sincere, and I got warm applause, and people have been stopping me ever since to tell me how much they enjoyed it. It was a moment of feeling like a star in my community, and I know Agnes had lots of those experiences. But when she tried to make a name for herself in the wider world, it didn’t work. So let’s call this video a little art project about obscurity…and I will, I promise, make some videos of her etudes where you can actually see them, not just hear them. Stay tuned.

Under the Weather

In most ways, my life is unimaginably different from Agnes’s. I’m a mom. I have a job as a professor of music, and that salary goes into a bank account with my name on it. I drive, I stream music, I vote. But once in a while I imagine I’m having an experience similar to Agnes’s. Mostly that’s at the piano, but the past few weeks I’ve had some moments where I’ve felt that just maybe I’m feeling something like what she felt.

Agnes was sick, starting when she was in her late teens. She died of heart trouble, and she also had some throat problems that kept her from singing; there’s a program that lists her as the alto soloist in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and she wrote all those songs and all that choral music, so that was probably hard for her. And her health problems kept her from touring, which is one of the reasons we haven’t heard of her.

I’ve mostly always been pretty healthy, I’m happy to say, but the last month has been a little different, and I wonder if I’ve been feeling any of what Agnes felt. I had a scare about a month ago. Spoiler alert, a mammogram and ultrasound found nothing wrong; as I happily texted my sister, it looks like fighting cancer will NOT be my next big project. But while I was in the couple of weeks waiting for the imaging appointments, I was definitely looking at my mortality and feeling like my time might be running out, and like my remaining time might be me feeling terrible. I’ve had a couple of mortality brushes before, and here’s what was new this time: I had a very clear feeling that I have to live not just for my kid but also for my project. I have to get Agnes out into the world, to get other people excited about this incredible music. And of course Agnes obviously felt that she had to get her music out into the world, and knew her time would be shortened, and knew she might be feeling rotten the whole time. She probably did feel rotten the whole time. But she wrote so much music, and left such careful copies. She doesn’t strike me as a complainer or a drama queen—it seems like she just got on with it and did her work.

That’s really inspiring. I love the idea of just getting on with doing your work, because you know it’s really important, no matter how you feel. But I’m afraid I don’t quite live up to that. Right after the negative screening, I managed to catch a nasty cold, and it hasn’t quite gone away. I’ve soldiered through some of the time, teaching my students and practicing some and doing a big performance—more on that in a minute—but over the weekend I gave into the cold and just collapsed on the couch in my jammies, with fiction and cough drops and a tissue box. Just as I’m not the pianist Agnes was, I suspect I’m not the patient she was, either.

Fortunately, performance adrenaline does work really well to make me feel better for at least a couple of hours, and I got to play Agnes for a big audience, maybe her biggest audience yet. My dear friend Sonya is a medical doctor, and we do a talk together called “Practice Medicine Like A Concert Pianist,” with deliberate practice tips for doctors. All the musical examples in the talk are from Agnes etudes, and at the end I play an etude they’ve been hearing me practice. We were a plenary talk at the Academic Internal Medicine Week conference last week, and we estimated that at least 600 people were in the audience. It was interesting and fun to play Agnes’s music without her story—there are examples of challenging spots, and I talk about how I practice them—and then to play the F# major etude at the end. So it wasn’t an introduction of “here’s a neglected woman composer, and you should care about her because she’s an inspiring example”—it was all about how to practice music, and then as an example of music it was “here’s this piece.” People loved it. I think the most up-voted question in the conference app was “can she please play more?” And it was really fun to bring Agnes to an audience who wasn’t expecting to hear a woman composer, and have her music be enjoyed and appreciated, as music for its own sake. Ultimately that’s the whole point: the music deserves to be heard.

And it will be! In a little over a month I’ll be playing the 12 Agnes etudes and the amazing sonata in Brno, Agnes’s hometown in the Czech Republic. I bought my ticket and booked my hotel. It’s really happening. And I’m going to be able to visit the castle where Agnes briefly worked as court musician, and I’m going to be able to go back to her archives. I can’t wait. But I also need to practice a lot, and I’m afraid I’m not as good as Agnes at working really hard when I have to keep blowing my nose.

Agnesversary

Two years ago, this week, I found Agnes. I have a five-year journal, a little yellow book with a paragraph for each day, and I can see that on March 18 2022 I wrote:

I read through some Agnes Tyrrell pieces today and I’m excited about them—sort of Brahmsian. All I want to do is practice. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this kind of purpose.

Then on the 21st I wrote:

The Kapralova Society sent me Agnes’s Grand Sonata. I think it might be really good—I’ve only read through it once.

I didn’t keep a record of when I first found Agnes’s name; I didn’t know it was important at the time. And I know memories are constructed, not trustworthy. But I have a very clear recollection of standing in the Interlochen library, taking a look at the reference section, and picking up the Dictionary of Women Composers and flipping through it. The Tyrrell entry caught my eye, and the detail about Liszt suggesting fingerings for her etudes really made me think she probably had interesting piano writing. Something made me remember her name and keep googling her every once in a while, even though nothing was published, and there was nothing, and there was nothing, till Kyra Steckeweh published the piano collection in December 2021. Last year at Interlochen I went to the library stacks and the book was right where I remembered it.

There’s another anniversary this week, a sadder one; my brilliant beautiful artistic hilarious quirky loving mother died on this day fourteen years ago. She would love Agnes’s music and she would be so thrilled that I’m acting as her champion.

In fact, I have an unshakable thought (to be clear, not something I declare to be factually true, but something that feels sort of truth-in-art-true).

It’s easy to imagine my mom running into Agnes in some afterlife situation and saying “oh, you’ve got to meet my daughter Jocelyn! Let’s make sure she finds your music!” In this scenario my mom made the book catch my eye and made it open to that page, and then reminded me to google Agnes once in a while. If that’s how the afterlife works—and my position on that is a staunch what-do-I-know—that’s definitely something my mom would do. And here’s a thing I love about this particular idea: it IS how my mom believed the afterlife worked. She felt like her beloved ancestors were watching over us, and sometimes she’d ask them to intercede.

So if Mom was the one to introduce me to Agnes, I’m grateful. And I love feeling like she’s part of this project.

Here’s a picture of Mom and me in about 1975, probably eating oranges, probably in Berlin.

Some technical nitty-gritty

I spent about half an hour this morning mapping the a minor etude that I think of as “the tantrum.” It’s long, with lots of fast notes in both hands, and I hadn’t really looked at the big picture of it. I scheduled five minutes to map it but I kept resetting my timer, like hitting snooze, because I got so interested in the structure of the piece. So today is the day I officially fell in love with the a minor etude. I had been feeling intimidated by it, because it’s lots of emphasis on the pinkies, with a pattern that’s 51543 (that’s pinky, thumb, pinky, ring finger, third finger). My pinkies are both shorter than usual (not quite making it to the joint on the ring finger) and also, irritatingly, in the habit of collapsing the middle joint. I don’t know if that’s something that has been happening for years and I just didn’t notice, or if it’s something that started in the pandemic when I went through a phase of only wanting to play easy music, so I didn’t have to be careful about my technique, or if it’s just a thing I’ve lived with forever and not noticed. But now that I’ve noticed, I’m deliberately working on strengthening my pinkies, and I’m also feeling like I need to be careful about that and not hurt myself. So the a minor etude has been feeling like something I didn’t quite want to deal with yet. But it was really fun this morning to just play the outside notes and see the larger harmonic patterns. Once I have my pinkies as strong as I want them, I think it will be really fun to play. I can also be smart about having that piece be part of my training my pinkies to do what I want: let the etude sculpt my hands like it’s meant to.

I also have to be careful with the octaves etude and the—gulp—tenths etude. The octaves I’m mostly practicing with my thumb for now; I want to make sure my hands absolutely know where to go before adding in the octaves. The tenths are broken, thank goodness, meaning that instead of playing the thumb and pinky at the same time I play first the thumb, then the pinky. But I still have to be really thoughtful about how I play them. I’m having to think about my technique a lot, which is of course what a good etude is supposed to do. But it doesn’t necessarily make me the most compelling conversationalist, these days.

I also made a discovery that I’m trying not to be downhearted about. I’ve been playing the sonata for about a year and a half now, and just performed it last week. Then the next morning I was looking at a tricky part in the left hand in the first movement—one right at the beginning, and a similar spot in the transition to the slower theme later, and I realized that THERE’S AN EASIER WAY TO DO IT. When I first learned it I was assuming that Agnes had much bigger hands than mine so I needed to do it the stretched out way, because that’s probably how she did it. I do think that’s true. But I hadn’t really taken seriously the idea that I could do it in a way that meant more hand positions, but easier ones, so I hadn’t tried to find an easier way. (That, by the way, is exactly the opposite of what I preach to my students and anyone else who will listen, which apparently in this case did not include me. Drat.) I don’t think I was entirely wrong to learn it the open-hand way—it IS possible, but what’s interesting is that playing the left hand in an easier way makes the right hand part feel much easier. And as soon as I tried it it felt easier in the way that feels like it’s the obvious choice. This is good news, exciting in the long run, but oh man is it going to be tricky rebuilding those habits. I’ve practiced those spots so much, because they’ve been so hard, and now I have to make an entirely new habit, and make that new habit stronger. So there’s partly a feeling of “hooray! It will be easier!” and partly a feeling of “oh no…undoing the hard way is going to be a big project.” I learned the sonata before from the gorgeous printed score that Kyra Steckeweh made for the Kapralova society, but I think when I relearn this I need to learn it from Agnes’s handwriting. That will help me build the new habit, because the visuals will be so different.

Again, again

I played the Agnes Grand Sonata and the US premiere of six of her concert etudes yesterday afternoon (1,2, 9,10,11, and 8, if you’re counting). It was fun to leave the concert and see my name in lights in front of a beautiful sunset. Then this morning I couldn’t wait to get up and practice them again. This music is so fun. Profound and beautiful, yes, but there’s just so much joy and mirth in it. The audience was great yesterday, and really enjoyed the music; the etudes are crowd-pleasers, and that makes them delightful to play. I played partly really well and partly with some messy moments. That’s standard for a premiere, and I deliberately didn’t record it: I’m being careful about what I release, and I wanted to put my energy towards playing for the audience in front of me, not towards striving for perfection for the forever audience of the recording. It reminded me that performing really is a muscle you have to keep exercising; it was the first formal solo concert I’ve given in several months, and I felt that. In the first few minutes onstage I had to keep putting my attention on feeling the floor and the bench, to literally ground myself. I was almost more nervous about talking than about playing; I came up with my patter, and the story to tell to go with the music, and I think it worked, but I was still tweaking my script right before I started, and I felt nervous about remembering my lines. All opening-night jitters. So I need to play this concert more, and I need to add the other six etudes in.

And I need—deep breath, here—to have the courage to play the music from memory. I’ve been choosing not to, because I want to make the choice that’s about honoring the music, not my own hubris: it’s about Agnes, not me. And being able to turn the pages on the ipad with my face (you GUYS. I can turn the pages with my face. We live in the future.) is a game-changer.

But. Somehow yesterday my contact lenses decided to do gymnastics, or something, and I really truly had trouble seeing the score while I was playing the etudes. So I was glad that I had the pieces mostly memorized! I changed my contact lenses at intermission, and then it was better, but I still had some moments where I just couldn’t see the score as well as I wanted to. I bet I blink less while I’m performing. And I had lots of moments where I just played from memory anyway, because the hands are jumping so much.

So this morning I played through the sonata from memory with only a couple of holes, and played the etudes from yesterday from memory, which I partly can do and partly can’t. So that’s the next goal: learn the rest of the etudes and memorize them, and perform them and the sonata from memory as much as I can. It will feel better to be free from the score.

And I need to play this music more: I need the third and fourth and twelfth performance of this music to play it at my best (I’ve found that with really complicated music I usually like to have about six performances before I really feel like I know what to expect). So I just spent an hour researching retirement homes with pianos within driving distance, and I’m going to arrange to play at as many of them as I can.

Meanwhile, the night before my concert I spent a while rereading the google translate version of Martina Schulmeisterova’s dissertation on Agnes; she kindly let me have the Czech file, so I could translate it and read it. I’m so impressed by how thorough she was, and there were a couple of stories (from obituaries and other contemporary sources) that hadn’t struck me before. One was that someone told a conductor in Vienna at the time, “hey, there’s a young woman in Brno who has written a symphony,” and he laughed, put his hand on the guy’s shoulder, and said “oh, you know I don’t believe in fairy tales.” Another was that apparently Agnes accompanied a violinist in concert when she was 9, playing the Beethoven Spring sonata, and the violinist had a moment where he skipped a measure. Agnes did what all heroic and quick-thinking collaborative players do: she skipped a measure too so the ensemble didn’t fall apart. Someone who knew the piece clearly noticed, though, and was really impressed. That’s pretty amazing if she could do that when she was nine. It might not be true, of course…but it’s a good story.

The concert was in a church, so when I was off “stage” in the sacristy I appreciated reading the stained glass window that said: “O Lord God, I am indeed unworthy of the office and ministry to make known thy glory, to serve this congregation. But the people are in need. Grant me a right understanding of thy word and send thy holy spirit that he may work with me. Amen.” I felt that, I feel that, with Agnes, and I said a sort of agnostic prayer about that. We need, the people need, music that is fun and beautiful, and I hope for a right understanding.

My ridiculously kind friend Natalie left me a home-cooked dinner and a Guinness on my porch for after the concert, and I felt very happy eating chicken and mashed potatoes and broccoli and chocolates. I feel lucky that I got to play this music, that I get to play this music. I want to play it again, again, again.

Audiences

I have my first official concert including Agnes Tyrrell etudes this coming weekend; I’ll be playing six of her twelve concert etudes, and some of her shorter pieces, in what will certainly be the US premiere. It’s possible that it will also be the world premiere for some of it; the etudes were published in Agnes’s lifetime, but I don’t know if they’ve been performed or not.

Something tricky is that these pieces are gorgeously complex, and I’ve had enough experience in my life playing hard music before now that I know that it will take about six performances of these pieces before I really feel like I know what I’m doing with them. It takes a while to feel like you know what you can expect. And there’s a tension there, of course: the only way I can polish my rough draft of this music is by performing it. The official premiere is an important moment, but it won’t be my best performance of this music. It can’t possibly be. So I have to let go of perfectionism and trust that, even though I’m still discovering what this music does when I play it in front of a live audience, my preparation will be good enough to let the music shine through. I do trust that. But I also feel much more pressure to be perfect playing Agnes than when I play someone known: if I play Chopin and it’s not great, people might think I’m a rotten pianist, but they’ll still think Chopin is terrific. The messenger doesn’t have so much power over the medium. But I worry that any flaws in my performance might make people think Agnes is flawed. So I’m being very careful about what I share, including on the internet.

That being careful is its own tension. I tend to have a little bit of a schtick where I complain, in what I think is a humorous way, about some of the hard moments learning hard music. That’s partly intentional, as a way of hopefully giving music students, or really anyone working on a hard project, some inspiration and hope and solidarity: here we all are, alone, working on a hard thing, but you’re not the only one. You can do it, and I can do it, and if I complain about technical virtuoso moments in my practicing maybe it makes you feel better about your own rough patches. But I’ve learned that I have to be careful when I complain about Agnes’s music being difficult. It IS difficult, but it also is difficult with a clear foundation of being absolutely worth it, just like with other great composers. Brahms and Robert Schumann wrote all their Clara Moments, as I call the spots that you KNOW they thought “well, this feels awkward when I try to play it, but I know Clara* can handle it, so I’ll just write it anyway.” And we pianists learn the spots because we know it’s worth it: we know that the resulting music will be glorious. And right now I do know that the resulting music will be glorious. Every day I find another connection, another realization, and even the moments that are really difficult are ones that I know are teaching me something, making me a better musician the way the best music does. But I still find myself wanting to do my usual bit of complaining about difficult moments. I want to say “can you believe this? I’m supposed to play thirds in my left hand here? How am I supposed to do that!?” and “so many sharps! this would be easier to think about in flats!”

But. Even writing those two complaints, and believe me the struggle is real with those two, I feel protective. I’m afraid of the obvious comebacks: it’s probably hard because she didn’t quite know what she was doing. Or: why play it if it’s so hard?

I’m not quite sure I want to put those out there.

Several months ago I wrote to one of my former profs, a man who has done some good service to uplifting women composers, to ask for advice about publicizing Agnes. In my email I said something like “the music is hard, just my luck.” His response was, in a nutshell, that we don’t need more hard music, and I should forget Agnes and instead find smaller, easier, more accessible pieces. I think, in the big picture, he meant to be inclusive—let’s find music that young people can play, not just young people who are hard-core piano nerds with the best training. I’m sure he has a point. But I also think it’s really important for those young people to know that there is big music, hard music, significant music, written by women. Even if they just play the easy music, I think it could be important for them to hear the hard music. Even if you only go around the block, you can know that it’s possible to go to the moon.

I never answered my old prof’s email. I feel a little bit bad about that, and I also have been feeling a bit shut down about that. If even someone sympathetic to the cause of women in music thinks I shouldn’t do the hard thing, how I am going to convince people who aren’t even interested in hearing a new composer? What do I say to audiences that may not be friendly?

Fortunately, there is one answer: just play the music. Play it well enough that the genius of Agnes comes through, even if my playing has a few flaws. Get the music in front of an audience. If they hear it, they won’t need convincing.

And I’m happy to report that I’ve had some good experiences with informal audiences in the past couple of weeks. I got to give a tiny house concert—that is, a tiny concert, not a concert in a tiny house, although if anyone has that venue please get in touch immediately because I am THERE—in Brooklyn to some friends and their neighbors, including a young girl who is taking piano lessons. It was so fun to see how much they enjoyed the music: lots of laughs and whoops and excited comments. Then last week I ran through most of my program for a retirement home, and I couldn’t believe how fun the etudes were to play for a larger audience. People really enjoyed the music—I heard lots of chuckles and gasps. It’s so fun to feel the energy of an audience having a really good time, and to find out that the etudes are really fun to play in front of people, not just by myself. There’s a joyfulness about them, and I loved feeling the audiences discover that.

So the official premiere of half the etudes is next Sunday. It won’t be my best performance, because it’s a necessary step along the way towards the best performance; some tricky patches don’t reveal themselves until you’re in front of an audience, and I feel a little bit like inserting a statement like the authors do: “any errors are completely my own.” But I’m so excited for this music, even if it’s still in rough draft form, to live in more ears than just mine. I’m certain I can play them well enough that people will enjoy them. I feel like a kid waiting for a birthday: I can’t wait to play the etudes in concert.

*Clara Schumann was married to Robert and close friends with Brahms, and she was one of the most famous and accomplished pianists of her time. She championed their music, so they knew they were writing for someone with monster technique.

*The Laughing Audience after William Hogarth is from the Metropolitan Museum’s public domain collection.

Idyll

I’m really happy because I found out last week that my institution has awarded me funding for a few hours of weekly student assistance to help me typeset some some of Agnes’s music in the spring. This is going to be important because my own typesetting chops are…well, it would be charitable to call them rudimentary. I’m fine inputting notes for a while, but then when I want to add any mark that’s different, or move something around, it’s forty-five minutes of me swearing and googling how to do it. I need someone who can type music like I can type words. (Yes, I’m editing the etudes, but I’m not typesetting them: I’m proofreading and marking up someone else’s typesetting). So I’m delighted that I can have a student assistant or two to work on that this spring.

We’ll start with some of the unpublished solo piano pieces. I’m going to play six of them on my concert program next spring, and now I can say “these will be available for you soon.” It’s so nice that Agnes did write some easier pieces—so much of her work is only possible for professionals, but there are some pieces that are perfect for students and amateurs, and I want to get them out there. She calls several of them “Idylls,” and they really do evoke the countryside. I feel very lucky that I get to practice them and then go for walks in the countryside where I live. One of my best practicing moments last week was figuring out that a lovely short Idyll, Pastorale in E major, is a canon. That’s where both parts do the same exact music but one after the other, and the combination is magic. It’s also a bit of a flex: look, this beautiful music also demonstrates mastery of counterpoint.

One assistant I’m hiring is a first-year composer, who came up to me with her eyes shining after I did a presentation on Agnes. I’ve been enjoying having her in class; I emphasize to my students that it’s important to celebrate your triumphs, not just yell at yourself when you get things wrong, and I love that she gets excited when she gets something right. I got to see her play violin in the school orchestra concert last Friday, and it was thrilling to see how into the music she is. She’s absolutely focused and involved, not just on her own part while she’s playing, but also on the other parts when she’s not playing. Now, typesetting is different from feeling the music—they’re different skillsets for sure—but I’m really happy to know that this talented young woman composer, who’s so inspired by great music and by the story of Agnes, will be getting paid for intensive score study. She’s going to learn so much from Agnes’s music, and I’m thrilled for her about that. I also bet Agnes would love knowing that she can finally start influencing other composers.