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.