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.

Unframing

When I was maybe 8 or 9 or so, I heard on the radio a piece that I was practicing that week. I think it was a Clementi sonatina. And I remember being shocked and thrilled by the revelation that the music I heard on the radio and on my dad’s LPs was all made by people, people playing instruments just like I played an instrument. Before that moment I don’t think I understood that what I did at the piano was the same thing as music, the magical sounds that filled the house. I mean, I must have known it was people; I liked to listen to the Aldo Ciccolini LP of Chopin Waltzes (yes, I was a young nerd), and surely I understood that it was by a person. But somehow I didn’t understand that what that person did was the same action that I was doing when I played the piano. It changed how I thought about my practicing and it also changed my listening.

When I was in my early twenties, I spent a summer at the Chautauqua Institute. I was enrolled in the piano program, but was working as a model in the art department, and I spent all my spare evenings and late nights in the art department. I befriended people in the printmaking and ceramics studios and sort of audited the printmaking class. I made some prints I’m still proud of (and not a single pot—clay is hard). I listened to a lot of drawing and painting instruction, and I hung out with a lot of artists. My hands and my clothes were dirty, spattered with ink and charcoal and clay. I also had a lot of issues to work out at the piano then, and I was definitely running away from the practice room, but that’s another story. Anyway, towards the end of the summer the art students went on a field trip to the Cleveland Art Museum, and I tagged along. The teachers gave us a great instruction: find a painting and sit down and draw it. Really look at it and draw it. And for the first time, when I looked at the paintings in the museum, I felt like I could see them out of the frames, could see them stretched on the easels, being made, could see marks being made by the artist. Of course I knew that art was made by artists—but I had never been able to see the paintings, even the famous paintings, out the frames before spending a summer seeing paintings being made.

Now I’m in my fifties, and for the first time I’m editing an edition of piano music by a composer I love (Agnes Tyrrell’s Op. 48 etudes, coming in 2024 from Certosa Publishers). And it feels like a similar revelation: I’m seeing editions as being made from handwritten originals. And of course I KNEW that. I know different editors make different decisions—when I played the Chopin etudes I consulted about 8 different editions regularly, and I often pull out multiple editions of pieces with students to look at different choices and possibilities. And of course I knew that what showed up in the printed edition wasn’t necessarily exactly the same as what showed up in the manuscript. And I have learned pieces from manuscript before; I was in college and grad school right before notation software was a thing, and I used to play handwritten music by my composer pals. But I’ve never made my own edition from a handwritten score. It seems like such a simple thing—but I’ve never done it before, and I feel like it’s making me see the artifacts of the printed editions out of the frame.

I’ve spent so much of my practicing life imagining myself in conversation with composers and, yes, editors. When I was practicing the Chopin etudes, I kept finding moments with discrepancies between editions. Over and over I would look at lots of different editions, and try it the different ways, and agonize about what made the most sense and fit my hands best, and then I would decide how I was going to do it…and what I came up with was always what Mikuli had chosen. So now with other Chopin pieces I go to Mikuli first, and tell my students “there are other editions and possibilities, but I found that Mikuli’s choices fit my hands best, so I’m showing you that to start with.” When I’m practicing from a printed, edited score, it’s always interesting to see what the editor has to say about the fingerings, which finger goes on which note. When I learned a Mozart concerto a couple of years ago with fingerings by Andras Schiff, it was like taking lessons with him: over and over he would make a decision that would surprise me, and I couldn’t figure out why he had made that choice, and then I would see that he was thinking long term, and that putting THIS finger HERE made it much, much easier to remember to make THIS change later in the piece. Brilliant and humbling. So I’m used to thinking about the composer and the editor.

But I’m not sure I ever quite thought about the actual printing of the music. I didn’t quite see the pages unbound, or going through the press, or hanging to dry,. Agnes did publish her etudes in her lifetime, and at first glance it looks like printed music—the (with giant air quotation marks but also, I confess, some sincerity) sacred score. But that edition is a mess. It’s hard to read, and has lots of errors. And now that I’m working on editing another edition, trying my best to have the marks match Agnes’s intentions, I can imagine the person typesetting the original printed page.

The pedal markings are probably where I’m thinking about this the most. The first printed edition is missing some of Agnes’s pedal markings, and has some others wrong. When I play from someone else’s edition of someone else’s music, I definitely obsess about exactly when to put down the sustain pedal (which lets the notes keep ringing) and when to take it off (which stops the ringing). Did the composer want it off here or here? But in general when I play I make pedaling changes day to day, piano to piano, room to room. If I’m playing in a room with lots of reverberation, I might use the sustain pedal much less, and if I’m in a really dry room, I might use it much more. But choosing exactly where to put that asterisk * that means “take the sustain pedal off right now” feels much more important. Placing the mark in the edition feels permanent.

I’ll give Agnes’s pedal markings and fingering numbers as clearly as I can, so that the marks someone else looks at are as close to the same as the manuscript as possible. I’m confident I’ll do a good job, and I’m sure there will be at least one error, even though I’ll proofread as obsessively as I can. I’m so grateful that I can have another perspective shift like this at this point in my career. But I can’t help thinking that it would have been so good for me to have this experience much, much younger. Am I going to make my students dip their toes into these waters? Absolutely.

Leipzig weekend

Here’s what I wrote on the train back to Berlin, afterwards:

I failed. Here’s the story.

I flew across the ocean for a whirlwind weekend trip. Why? To hear the premiere of Agnes Tyrrell’s works for piano and choir in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, played by Kyra Steckeweh, the amazing pianist and scholar who released the editions of the Tyrrell’s sonata and other music. I’ve been so excited about hearing her play, and being in the audience to hear Agnes in concert for the first time, especially because it’s such a milestone to have her music premiered in one of the major concert halls of the world. I left campus Thursday at noon, and I’m returning (knock wood) Sunday evening (edit: I made it!) to teach a regular day on Monday. I’ve been feeling very glamorous and jetsetty about this plan. I might have been bragging about it just a tad.

I booked a flight to Berlin with a short connection in Iceland, which worked fine. I decided if the plane got in on time—it did—I’d take a couple of hours to go to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, where they have two Agnes manuscripts. I did that (more on that later). Then I walked over to the main train station, and got on the train to Leipzig in plenty of time. Then my phone charger and cable both decided to stop working, so my battery percentage got lower and lower and lower. That was stressful but okay; I figured there would be a drugstore somewhere where I could buy replacements, but meanwhile I kept my phone in airplane mode to save the battery, so I didn’t have internet. Still stressful, especially with jet lag, but okay. But I fell asleep—just for five minutes!—and missed the Leipzig stop, and ended up in Erfurt, past Leipzig. Yikes. I bought a ticket back to Leipzig, and rushed back to the platform (with my battery at about 5%), figuring I would get to the concert without going back to the hotel to drop off my backpack and change. But then I GOT ON THE WRONG TRAIN, which I realized only when it reversed direction and said “next stop Erfurt.” So I ended up coming back to Erfurt again. I did not cry or have a tantrum, and I’m pretty proud of that. I bought a charger and cable. I asked a friendly Leipzig native to help me be sure I was on the right train, and that was an enjoyable conversation, including very kindly helping me get on the right tram and helping me to get off at the right stop. But I didn’t get to the concert hall till a few minutes after 9, hoping against hope that I could hear the end of the concert. Maybe they would have lots of speeches thanking benefactors, and a really long intermission, and I could somehow squeeze into the second half…but no, the concert was almost over and of course the ushers couldn’t let me in. So I missed the main reason I took this trip, and it’s 100% my fault.

So now the good things that did happen with this trip. Before the train debacle, I enjoyed my visit to the German Staatsbibliothek (state library). I do like a big fancy library building.

It was a thrill to get my very own researcher’s library card, and to walk up the big marble staircase.

And it felt good to be in a music reading room:

But the best part was holding documents by Agnes in my hands again. It was especially nice to see these pages I hadn’t seen in person before, and to recognize the handwriting so completely, now that I’ve been practicing from photos of her manuscripts so much. There are two song manuscripts there, both online already.

Again I found myself very moved by the care of the librarians of the past for these documents. Some librarian painstakingly repaired the edges of the pages with as much care as if they had been by a famous composer.

The scores came to the library from Mary Wurm, who was a well-known pianist (and student of Clara Schumann, and sister to a couple of other powerhouse women composer/pianists). I don’t know how she got them. Were she and Agnes connected somehow? Or did Agnes send copies of her work to other famous pianists besides Liszt? Are there other Agnes manuscripts in family troves somewhere?

Fast-forward through my train fail. In my one full day in Leipzig, I really did the singleminded musician’s tour: I went to the Mendelssohn museum, the Schumann museum, and the Bach museum (including a brief visit to Thomaskirche where he worked), and I had a wonderful three hour meeting with Kyra, the pianist and Agnes scholar, and I went to an evening art song concert/experimental theater piece. After the concert in the city center there were lots of people wearing red team scarves and hats and sweatshirts—obviously there had been a game, and I couldn’t help but laugh to think how different their Leipzig day had been from mine.

Anyway, here are some thoughts from the museums. The Mendelssohn one was my favorite. The house was huge; I had known that the family was well-off, but I was somehow still surprised.

Walking on the steps that Felix and Fanny walked on, holding the banisters they held, is great.

They had some lovely multimedia exhibits, including restored rooms with furniture, where you could imagine seeing a 19c composer at work:

The third floor was dedicated to Fanny, which I found surprising and inspiring. I hadn’t known if she’d be ignored in the exhibits, but she was absolutely given her due, including a lovely display of some of her letters:

There was a costume photo setup; I’ve never particularly gotten into superhero costumes, but turns out I’m all about the 19c salon cosplay:

After the Mendelssohn house I walked over to the Schumann house.

Again, it was exciting to walk on the stairs they walked on:

But my main takeaway from the Schumann museum is GOOD GOD CLARA’S HANDS WERE HUGE. I didn’t manage to get a photo that truly captures how giant they were, but there was a plaster cast of her hand and a wooden model made from that, and my poor little mitts looked like child hands compared to them.

I tried to line up my wrist crease and thumb joint with hers (the wooden hand was an interactive exhibit, so I was allowed to touch it); look at how much longer her fingers are than mine! My poor little pinky is about half the size of hers.

They also have the Schumanns’ music salon, with the original creaky wood floor.

I felt like I really got a picture of life in those 19c musical homes. Not exactly like what Agnes would have had, but maybe from the same universe. Apparently both the Mendelssohn museum and the Schumann museum barely mentioned Fanny and Clara just a few years ago, but have really updated their exhibits to include them in the past few years. So institutional change can happen. That’s heartening.

After the 19th century I went back in time to Bach. It was incredible to walk in the Thomaskirche, the church where he worked:

I didn’t do research in the archive, just walked quickly through the museum. They had one exhibit which really brought home how non-elevated JSB’s day job was: he had to do dorm duty at the boarding school. I took a photo with the famous JS Bach portrait:

I love Bach’s music and always will—I really do believe he had a direct line to the cosmos, however you want to define that.

But. It was quite something, after spending the morning being moved by the inclusion of Fanny and Clara in their museums, to see on the wall that JS Bach made a family tree, with careful notes, of only the male members of his family:

Many—most?—of those musicians had their early musical training with their mothers. And I just don’t believe that absolutely none of those mothers, and absolutely none of their daughters, had any musical talent. But there’s the gap, right there on the wall, written by the master himself: the women are completely missing from the history. Imagine how much more we would know about Bach’s family if we knew about the other half of it.

After all my museuming I got to meet with Kyra, the world’s foremost Agnes scholar, and that was an absolutely wonderful conversation.

She was so generous with her time: we sat at a cafe and then took a long walk through the park, and it was so amazing to talk to another current Agnes scholar, to be with another person who knows the Agnes manuscripts. I was flipping through my phone to find a particular one to talk about, and she recognized pieces from a glance at a photo like I do. More, because she’s typeset ones I haven’t practiced. Talking about the sonata with someone else who’s been practicing it was incredible. It was so fun to talk about the rep we’re going to play and record in the next couple of years: we’re both doing the sonata, and it will be important to have multiple recordings of it. But after that she’s doing the rhapsodies and the second impromptu and the fantasiestucke, and I’m doing the etudes and the third impromptu and some of the small unpublished pieces and the songs. It was a delightful moment when we realized she’s doing the second impromptu and I’m doing the third, so we’re not doing the same one now. She’s also working on some other composers; she’s doing a whole Dora Pejacevik project, which is exciting. We talked about the freedom and responsibility of making musical choices without the weight of an existing performance tradition, and said that we both have the goal of playing the music well enough that others will want to play it. She is such an inspiring scholar—so brilliant and passionate and warm and nerdy and just a fantastic human. I made a new friend, so the trip was absolutely worth it…even if I didn’t get to hear her concert. She said it went well, and that it was very moving to play it, and audience members came up to her afterwards with tears in her eyes.

I wish I had been one of them. But even though I wasn’t, I’m still glad I took the trip.

Classical Sprouts Podcast

Last summer I got to talk about Agnes on Classical Sprouts, the music podcast for kids out of Interlochen Public Radio. You can hear the episode here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/classical-sprouts/id1626305555?i=1000625923406

Happy Birthday Agnes!

Agnes Tyrrell was born on this day in 1846! I’m celebrating by practicing and editing her concert etudes and working on a lecture that will include them as examples (and also teaching young people to play piano). Here’s a snippet of her 2nd concert etude , which I’m unofficially thinking of as “the jumpy one.”

Podcast Interview

You can hear me talk about Agnes Tyrrell, and hear me play some of the first movement of her Grand Sonata Op. 66, in this interview, starting 38 minutes in.

Practice Party

One of the challenges of this project has been committing to which pieces I’m going to work on now, which pieces I’m going to practice now. I keep wanting to play through, like this…

instead of getting down to work, like this.

It’s really tempting to play through one piece, and then play through the next and the next, without doing very much actual practicing. It’s like you’re at a party full of kind, fascinating people, and you have really fun interesting conversations but then when you refill your drink you run into other people, and those conversations are fun and interesting too. Every once in a while you glance over at a former conversational partner, and you grin at each other—you really did make a connection—and then you whirl into another conversation with still another interesting person. And all those conversations are enjoyable, and it’s hard to pick one to turn into a long intense introvert conversation where the rest of the room vanishes and it’s just the two of you, starting the work of really getting to know each other.

Okay, that might be a fantastical version of a party, the kind of idealized visions I had in the depths of pandemic isolation. Anyway, in this analogy maybe everyone else at the party is from the same family, or the same town, and you’re getting to know the culture and habits of the people. It’s a blast to find out who all is there and get a sense of what they’re about.

All of that is really different from going home and doing the relationship work.

This finger goes on this note, no, this finger (see, I knew I’d get back to talking about practicing music). My hand goes from this shape here to this shape here—no, THIS shape here to this shape here—do it again. This shape here to this shape here, no, to this shape HERE. Again. This shape here to this shape here—yes!—to THIS shape here. Again. This shape? Yes. Again. I can’t do it fast yet but I can do it slowly, and I can trust that doing it slowly today and a little faster tomorrow and a little faster after that will work, will get me to the tempo I want.

It’s easy to take myself out of hard-core practice mode, really being intimate with the piece, and back into flirting: reading through pieces slowly (or faster in a simplified way, like leaving out a lot of the notes) to get a sense of what they’ll be like. And I can feel guilty about that: as a pianist, I have a lifelong relationship with Not-Practicing-Enough Guilt. In the past year and a half since I fell for Agnes, I’ve done some really good focused practice that I’m proud of (no way I could perform the grand sonata if I hadn’t, I tell my N-P-E Guilt) but I’ve also done a lot of sight-reading through pieces that I’m not necessarily intending to perform now. Picking what to program is truly one of the biggest challenges: the sonata, yes, and as many etudes as I can muster, and the Mazurka because it will be a fun closer, and what else? So much else! Idyllen, Fantasiestücke, Impromptus, Charakterstücke, Album Leaves…I want to play them all someday, and it’s not always easy to commit to what I want to play in the next program (right now I’m leaning 2 characterstucke, a pair of Idyllen, etudes, impromptu, intermission, sonata, mazurka). I’ve sometimes felt a little guilty for reading more than practicing, for being broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep.

Agnes described herself, in the frontispiece of her translation of Egmont (into English! Be still my liberal arts heart!), as “a very dear little thing, with an ugly face, but who is notwithstanding as industrious as any living creature.” I gasped and laughed out loud when I found that page in the archive. I don’t think I can live up to that: I’m not as industrious as any living creature. I do have not-practicing-enough guilt. I hope I can do what I tell my students to do: use the fear of not being good enough to get you to the practice room, then leave it on the other side of the door while you do the work.

But I actually think this precious sabbatical time in the past few months has been well-spent, even when I’ve been sight-reading instead of practicing, and maybe even when I’ve been reading novels or taking walks or napping instead of practicing. One of the magical things about reading through the music, even without getting into the hard-core practice mode I do actually need, is that the pieces are showing up in my head. The human brain is amazing, and I’m walking around with Agnes earworms all the time. By reading through so many of Agnes’s pieces I really am learning her style. Imagine playing a Brahms intermezzo without ever having heard any Brahms…that’s what I’ve been doing with Agnes Tyrrell. Maybe flirting with all the other pieces in the room is exactly what I need to get to know any one of them really well.

Independent Arroyo Duck

I want to tell you about the moment I had this morning, which I might choose to interpret as the universe telling me not to take myself so seriously. Or maybe it’s just the very nineteenth-century experience of thinking about music while walking in nature.

I’m visiting Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, and I’m fortunate to be staying at the home of friends in Corrales, where it’s just ridiculously beautiful. This morning I was walking along the arroyo, looking at the mountains and the sky and listening to a recording of music by Robert Schumann (an Agnes contemporary) performed on a historical piano by someone who has done lots of research about performance practice.*

As always, always happen when I listen to those recordings, I was struck by how free the timing was. Not everywhere—there are moments where there’s a strong, clear beat that you could dance to—but wow are there a lot of moments where there’s not. There’s such a sense of freedom and permission there. I’ve tried for that in my own historical recordings, all my performances really——there’s always always a line to walk between expressive and accurate. And of course the expressive IS the accurate. One of the things I tell my students, and myself, over and over, is to

play the music not the notes.

Yes, practice for hours and hours to get the notes right, but they’re not the point: the music is. The phrasing, the timbre, the emotions—the notes are the means, not the end. When I perform or record music that people have heard thousands of times, I give myself permission to take liberties knowing that people might not like my interpretation, but at least they won’t dismiss, say, Chopin. I’ve been feeling a weight of responsibility about Agnes: because there are no recordings yet, I’m feeling a real responsibility to be true to her meticulous scores, to play exactly what she wrote. But exactly what she wrote doesn’t include subtle timings or where you take a breath or exactly how loud a loud sound is: that’s interpretation, and the notation system just doesn’t tell you.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling like I need to perform a real Accurate Historical Record, and then other performers can take liberties and put their own selves into the music once it’s in the canon, but for now I need to give an exact representation of what’s on the page. I need to play Agnes, not Jocelyn Playing Agnes. That’s been feeling a little depressing. And of course it’s exactly wrong: I AM Jocelyn Playing Agnes.

So I’m walking along the arroyo, listening to a recording with

so         many       expressive         pauses

and

somespeedyparts

and I had the thought:

Maybe one of the best reactions someone could have to hearing me play music by Agnes is: “I hate the way she’s playing this—I’m going to play this piece so people can hear how it ought to sound.”

While I was forming that thought, I noticed a group of ducks paddling along the arroyo. I got ready to take a picture to send to my sister with a note about “ducks in a row” (we have a tradition of duck photos), and right then the last one turned around and clearly decided “Nuh-uh, I’m not going in the same direction as all of you.” And off it went, the other way. I laughed out loud.

So here’s to the independent duck. I know I’ll keep wrestling with these questions of expression vs accuracy in every phrase I learn and play—it’s a lifelong thing—but I hope I can keep that duck in mind when I do. It made practicing the etudes really fun today.

By the way, the other ducks went their own way for a while, but then decided to turn around and follow the independent duck. I never saw them catch up.

*That is, figuring out best we can how people actually played back then. There are no recordings, but there are diaries and letters and other written records. For example, it’s useful to know if a pianist liked to practice with a metronome (I really wish I knew that about Agnes).

Barbenheimer and Agnes

I just saw the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer, a few days apart and in that order, and I can’t stop thinking about the juxtaposition of the worlds of the two films. In Barbieland’s bright colors, the Kens existing only for Barbie’s attention felt to me improbable, too far, too made up. But then the black-and-white world of the Manhattan Project has scene after scene of rooms with only men; the women’s roles are lover, wife, secretary. One scientist does join the team, but after she answers the single interview question “can you type” with “my graduate chemistry degree didn’t teach that” we don’t hear from her again. And if I may get annoyingly meta for a moment, I wrestled with the opening of that last sentence, struck that even though a) I’m the one writing it, in b) an essay about a feminist movie, and c) I’m picturing a particular actress, I still read “one scientist” as male, and wondered if I should clarify the phrase by changing it to “one female scientist.” In the Oppenheimer world (I know, I know, not always only in the film), scientist=man. Sigh.

“Can you type?”

I keep thinking about that one female scientist in the movie. Of course there must have been more women than just the one, but they must have felt so lonely in those rooms. And of course it can still be so lonely in some rooms.

“Can you type?”

What’s the equivalent musical question? “Can you copy my music?” “Can you play my music?” “Can you host me in your salon?” “Can you be my muse and inspire me?”

When I was a girl taking piano lessons in the 1970s, composer absolutely equaled male in my mind. It never even crossed my mind to wonder if there were women composers: it was simply unfathomable to even ask the question. I know now, of course, that they did exist, and I’m so incredibly grateful to live in a time when there’s such an explosion of interest and information about them. But they really were invisible. So many stories are of women denied the training their talent deserved, and that can get disheartening. I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus, but sometimes you can tell that composers didn’t have the training and the support they needed: the counterpoint isn’t quite strong, or the piano writing isn’t quite fluent, or the overarching structure doesn’t quite make satisfying sense, or the pieces are only small and charming and never big and profound.

I’ve fallen so hard for Agnes’s music, and it truly is the music. Her music deserves to be heard because it’s fantastic, and was hidden because she was a woman. I’m wary of promoting her as a woman composer: I want her to just be a composer. I’m sure I’ll be wrestling with that for a long time. But practicing Agnes Tyrrell’s music really does feel like having a conversation with a genius. I think it’s because her story, or at least part of her story, is different.

Not that she lived in the colorful Barbieland where absolutely everything was possible for women, but she did have surprising opportunities. There’s maybe a tinge of pink. She had rigorous training: I’ve seen some of her homework notebooks and how she came by her incredible mastery of chromatic harmonies.  She had a model of a female composer-pianist: when Agnes was 13, she had the chance to see superstar Clara Schumann perform. She had a family who supported her musical training: her mother and sister were also pianists, and her sister Bertha also composed a few pieces. And she did have a musical community where she could be an active performer: she performed as a pianist and had some of her pieces performed, in her town, to positive reviews. So Agnes seems to have lived in a rare situation where she was able to develop and master her craft in a vibrant musical community. The rest of Europe was less supportive, though: she tried, but couldn’t get more than a few pieces published. It’s back to the black and white world where composer=male.

“Can you type?”

I can’t ask my mother anymore, but I think I remember her telling me that she purposefully didn’t learn how to type, so that she wouldn’t be stuck typing men’s papers instead of writing her own. And I definitely remember her telling me that she wanted to be a diplomat. She would have been a great one—her superpower was connecting with people, and she had a PhD in languages—but when she tried to apply to the State Department, they told her they were only hiring women as secretaries. Our country, and all the people she would have worked with, really missed out. It’s at least a little different now: I’m so grateful that I can perform and research and teach and lead. I can have a career as a professor, and it can be completely commonplace for my students to play music written by women. I get to live mostly in the world in color.

When I visited Vienna in May, on my Agnes Tyrrell research trip, I went to a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic at their gorgeous Musikverein building. They played Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn and Hindemith, all great performances, and it was a pleasure to be at the concert and hear that orchestra (which did have a few women in it) in that beautiful hall. And do you know what? The hall is lined every few feet with life-size gold statues of identical topless women. My sister and I laughed and laughted about that: generations of male musicians, playing male composers, looking out at all those topless ladies. The hall was built in 1870; Agnes probably went to concerts there (Brno citizens often took the train to Vienna to go to concerts and the opera). Did she imagine hearing her music played there? I think she must have: she did write a symphony. I want to hear it performed in that hall someday. I want to live in the world in color, yes maybe with a tinge of pink, and I want to hear Agnes surrounded by gold.  

A Flight of Fancy and a Small Win

I’m home now, still working on the etudes, and I’m running into the frustration of working on projects that stretch you: for most of the process, you’re not big enough. Once I can play the thirds and octaves and giant jumps as fast as I want, they’ll sound incredible, but right now I have to play them under tempo (they still sound beautiful—it’s just a different energy). It’s funny that the black key-white key geography of the thirds is so different from in Chopin’s thirds etude—being able to play chromatic scales in thirds in g#minor doesn’t help me play clean turnarounds in thirds in Bb (though it does give me confidence that I’ll get there). And she has spots where the hands jump really fast from one side of the keyboard to the other—sometimes after I practice that I can really feel it in my obliques, which makes me laugh. So I’m getting a workout.

But I also get impatient.

So I’ve been taking breaks and looking at some of Agnes’s shorter unpublished works for piano, and I’m so happy to report that there are some much more accessible pieces, even some I think I can assign to my students. Some of them sound almost like something out of Tin Pan Alley or early Hollywood musicals—that’s an exaggeration, and probably not something I should tell listeners: they’re not “jazzy” or swung, so anyone looking for that would be disappointed. But if I picture people dancing to this music, it’s not the nineteenth century ballroom scene with hoop skirts: it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That makes me think about all the Tin Pan Alley composers from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century; maybe it’s not all that far-fetched to hear Agnes sounding similar to them.

I had one nice late night of sight-reading manuscript pages straight from the photos app on my ipad (once I really work on pieces, I put them into a music reading app instead), and I fell in love with a quirky little waltz—the very first few bars made me exclaim aloud “what!? sounds like Gershwin!” But then it was missing at least a page, and I agonized. The first couple of pages do end with a cadence that works for a final cadence, with a double bar (that can signal a final ending), but then there’s more: two more pages, where the first one begins in the middle of a thought, so something is obviously missing. I played through it a couple of times and then put it away.

But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it: should I play it without the final pages, knowing something is missing? or should I record the final pages as an extra? or should I try to write some kind of filler to glue them together? Or should I wait till I can go back to the archive next year, and look through the collection of fragments to try to find the missing page? Finally, I decided that I’d see if I could reconstruct what’s missing, so I’d see if the thought that starts the final page is one that shows up anywhere else. So I went through the pages really carefully, side by side, and made a really exciting discovery: the last page and a half is actually just…the last page and a half, recopied. But it’s exactly the same music. I think she wrote it out again because there are some blotches and she wanted a cleaner copy. And now that I see it, it’s obvious (she doesn’t start at the same measure at the top of the page, so I’m not a total dunderhead for missing it). I’m so happy that I went back and checked, and now I can play the waltz without worrying that it’s missing something.

Researching song texts in my backyard

I’ve been so happy sitting outside with my computer looking at old romantic German poetry—pianists don’t get to practice outside, and I’ve always been jealous of people who can. And I keep feeling moments of We Live In The Future: I’m here on my back deck in my small town in Pennsylvania, working with texts from libraries across the world. The process is fun, in a hardcore nerdy way: read on if that sounds interesting, and definitely don’t if it doesn’t.

Agnes wrote lots of songs (“lieder”), mostly in German but a couple in English, and it’s tricky to figure out what the lyrics are, so that’s my main focus right now. Agnes was so gorgeously clear in her musical notation, but for words she uses an old German cursive that’s harder to decipher. I asked a Viennese pal to take a look and she said she couldn’t read it either. So it’s much better if I can find a printed version of the text somewhere else, and then map it on to what she wrote in the music. Once I find the lyrics, Kate the Stalwart Student Research Fellow adds them into the song when she enters it into music notation software.

Usually Agnes names the poet; when she doesn’t, I think it probably means she wrote the text herself (in some cases the card in the card catalog says she did), so those songs sadly go to the bottom of the pile for now. But there are lots of songs where she does name the poet, and often I can find that poet’s work; she set a couple of poems by Goethe, for example. Those two songs will be a really nice set, An den Mond (To the Moon) and Die Liebende Schreibt (The Lover Writes). It’s fun to find a poem, then look at the first few words in the printed version and see if the music manuscript looks like it matches. I tend to squeal when I find a match. When I do, I copy the words into a word document and add that document to the folder with the pages of the song, so Kate can add them into the notation. Then that whole folder goes into the folder called “Lieder with text available.” That folder has 13 folders in it now, so I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to publish a substantial body of Agnes’s work.

Sometimes the poets are published but out of print, or really obscure. I spent a while this morning looking at poems by Franz Keim; Agnes has a set of 5 songs with texts by him. Two I found, and I think the rest might be from the same large collection. I’m still looking for the other three, and it’s hard to see what the first words are, so it might be more of a challenge to find the others. But it’s fun to look at the words and try to figure out what they are and what they might match.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m learning and exclaiming about on my back deck. Agnes has a song called “Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy No.1,” with no poet listed. At first I thought it was a set of songs (“Lieder” means “songs”) with lyrics by someone named Mirza-Schaffy. Well, sort of. Mirza-Schaffy was an Azerbaijan poet and teacher, and a German writer Friedrich Bodenstedt traveled to study with him, publishing a book about him including some translated poems. Bodenstedt later claimed the poems were his own original works, but apparently the original Persian versions exist. At any rate, Agnes set text from the famous German version by Bodenstedt.

Once I figured out that I was looking for the Bodenstedt book, I found a public domain text that’s a pdf of the entire book of poems…in an old English font that’s hard to read and thus hard to tell which poem might match with which handwritten lyrics. My heroic local librarian Clint—this whole project is making me appreciate librarians so much—ran the pdf of the book through an AI program that turned the images into readable text, and I was able to find and read the actual poem once it was in a friendlier font. It doesn’t have a title, but it’s the first poem from the book. Now I know why Agnes titled the song “Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy No.1” (I was hoping it meant one of many, but it’s just one). Once I found the poem, it turns out that other composers have set it too. There’s a translation at the incredibly helpful resource liedernet.

I’m excited and hopeful about another AI possibility that HLL Clint let me know about: AI software is learning how to read old handwriting, and I might be able to teach it to read Agnes’s handwriting. If I can, that means I can go back and photograph her letters and read them, which would be incredible.

Archive visit report

I had such a wonderful time on my Agnes Tyrrell research trip. I have new questions and new answers and new friends and about a thousand photographs of manuscript pages; many are from already published works like the incredible Grand Sonata, but lots are from unpublished songs. I’ll be working with a student this summer—we got research support from the Kolbe foundation—on notating the songs so that we can publish them. This entry will be sort of a babble brain dump about the archive.

I’m so happy with my visit to the Department of Music History at the Moravian Museum (MZM); the staff was so incredibly generous and helpful. I didn’t know what I would find: I didn’t know if my access would be severely limited, or if the archive would be a cardboard box full of coffee-stained unreadable fragments. But everything is beautifully catalogued and organized and kept in acid-free paper. I’m so grateful to the librarians of the past (and today!) for their careful stewardship. It was really moving to see the handwritten cards from the catalog: they had a stamp with a staff, so each card has handwritten incipits of the music as well as the title and other information. Just beautiful. I don’t have permission, by the way, to publish images of documents from the archive, so I won’t be including them, but I’m delighted to report that they generously gave me permission for publication and performance of the work once it’s transcribed.

It was such a thrill to hold Agnes’s manuscripts in my hands and get to know her handwriting. Her musical notation is incredibly clear—she was definitely writing for posterity. It’s harder to read her German handwriting (most of her writing is in German and English); I asked a Viennese pal to take a look, and she said she couldn’t read the old cursive “but maybe my grandmother could.”It’s fun to see Agnes playing with different fancy signatures—I love the calligraphy A she landed on—and to get to recognize her handwriting. Figuring out the texts will be a challenge but at least the musical intentions are unmistakable.

I feel like I got to know her personality better, too. She was ambitious: I knew that from her music, but it’s fun to see that confirmed in her words. In one song (where she wrote the lyrics, in English) she imagines gaining “the gold that comes with an artist’s fame and all the pride of a deathless name.” But she didn’t take herself too seriously: on one title page she wrote “translated by the honourable and noble lady Agnes Tyrrell, a very dear little thing, with an ugly face, but who is notwithstanding as industrious as any living creature.” When I saw that, I exclaimed out loud (and got a good laugh from the librarians in the reading room. Did I mention I love librarians?)

It was also great to see some of her theory homework,working out counterpoint and harmonic exercises. It’s obvious from her music that she got excellent training, but it’s different to actually see the school notes.

I got photos of the manuscripts for the 12 etudes, and also of the letter from Liszt, which was how I first found Agnes in the first place. I had what might have been my most vindicating moment of my life as a pianist (another moment where the librarians laughed at me for gasping). Liszt suggested some fingerings for some of the etudes, and I couldn’t wait to see what he would suggest for the first one. It’s in thirds, and there are about five different sort of okay fingerings but I can’t find the one fingering that actually feels any better than the others. And Liszt couldn’t decide either! He suggested two possibilities and wrote “oder(?)” [or?]. So if Liszt—probably the greatest pianist who ever lived—couldn’t find fingerings either, I don’t feel so bad for not being able to decide on one. I think I’m just going to use Agnes’s suggestion in that spot.

So what did I get photos of? The manuscript to the great Grand Sonata and the 12 etudes, and also lots of songs. There’s a full symphony, which also has a piano reduction, so that will be interesting to think about how she envisions orchestral colors at the piano. I haven’t played through it yet. There’s also a mazurka which she did publish—it’s a cheerful show piece that will be a fun encore—and she also orchestrated that, and I think it will be a really nice addition to the orchestral repertoire. Sadly, there’s no chamber music beyond the string quartet and a couple of vocal duets and trios—I was so hoping for a piano trio or some string and piano sonatas, but no. But there are lots of songs—at least an album’s worth—and I think there are some smaller solo piano pieces that could be accessible for younger students.