Louise Talma: A Life in Composition by Kendra Preston Leonard (review)

Abstract

COMPOSERSLouise Talma: A Life in Composition. By Kendra Preston Leonard. Farnham, Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2014. [xii, 263 p. ISBN 9781472416438 (hardcover); ISBN 9781472416445, 9781472416452 (e-book), $109.95.] Music examples, appendix, bibliography, discography, index.It is high time for a book about Louise Talma (1906-1996), the pioneering American composer, pianist, and pedagogue. Talma remains one of our foremost American composers of the twentieth century. Hers is a story that could easily have been lost, but Kendra Preston Leonard has given us an important first in bringing Talma's tale to the world with Louise Talma: A Life in Composition.Not only was Talma the second female composer (after Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1930) to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was also the first female composer to receive two of them consecutively (1946-47), after scores of male composers had received two or even three since the first awards were given in 1925. For years, Talma spent summers studying with the famous French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger; she was the first American to teach with Boulanger at the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau. She was also the first female composer to be invited to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1974, thirteen years after receiving an award from them for her three-act grand opera, Alcestiad, written on a libretto by Thornton Wilder). Throughout her life, she received numerous awards and fellowships for composing, and she taught at Hunter College for over fifty years. When not teaching, she spent most of her time composing at artists' colonies such as the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and others.In her introduction, Leonard presents the analytical approaches used in the eight chapters that follow: music analysis, feminist theory, queer theory, and women's autobiographical theory. All but the last are briefly mentioned, while the author spends more than five pages explicating and delineating women's autobiographical theory. This theory is rich and reveals much about Talma through examination of her music. Leonard presents Talma's life chronologically from Myth and Meaning in Talma's Early Life and Career to Final and Afterlife. In each chapter, Leonard presents pertinent musical pieces, digging more deeply into selected works while interweaving the facts of Talma's life with elaboration on the above theories.One of the strengths of this book lies in the music analysis. Somewhat like a fish riding a bicycle, writing about music can be awkward. Leonard rises to the occasion, making readers wish they could hear the pieces she parses. We are provided with a discography, but unfortunately there is no way to listen to the music. Photographs are also absent from the text. Despite these omissions, Leonard's patience with the analytical process creates a result that is commendable, with music examples that support her investigations. In particular, her parsing of Talma's Piano Sonata no. 1- dedicated to Mrs. Edward MacDowell-is beautifully detailed. Presenting the first movement as a set of non-traditional variations makes sense and echoes several works Talma wrote during that time.For all of its strengths and importance, this book contains a number of questionable assumptions put forward with little or no evidence. Leonard posits that an operation mentioned by Talma in a letter from 1935 was a hysterectomy (p. 66). However, existing datebooks available at the Library of Congress in the Louise Talma Papers (and listed in the finding aid as Date books and address books, 1925-1990) show that Talma often recorded the dates and intensity of her menstrual periods, which clearly would not have occurred after a hysterectomy.There is also an odd category found in the handy-yet now already outdated- works list appendix: Nonexistent Works (though there is just one listed). Leonard states, The Mass for the Sundays of the Year . …