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 She typeset all of Agnes’s songs and most of her still-unpublished piano music, and we’ve been editing them together.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 There are some reviews from Brno (Agnes’s hometown) saying the overture is a crowd-pleaser, but it’s unpublished and surely hasn’t been played outside of Brno.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.
