December 8, 2025
6 pm CET
Stephen Rodgers: Gathering Leaves: Pauline Decker and the Limits of the Song Cycle
In the 19th century, song offered women composers a socially sanctioned medium of expression, even as monumental musical forms such as symphonies and operas were off limits to them. Yet the song cycle—a monumental form of a miniature genre—remained largely out of reach. Few women produced true cycles, and when they did, their contributions were often minimized or obscured (as in Clara Schumann’s and Fanny Hensel’s joint cycles with their more famous male counterparts). While individual songs could flourish in the domestic sphere, cycles demanded a larger and more public frame of presentation that clashed with prevailing ideas about women’s artistic limits. My presentation focuses on a cycle of songs that I created from Lieder by Pauline Decker (1811–1882), forthcoming from ClarNan Editions. Decker was a celebrated soprano who was forced to give up her performing career after getting married at the age of 21; late in life she published 27 Lieder, most of them individually. Drawing on 19th- and early 20th-century performance practices, in which performers often assembled groups of songs from existing pieces, my cycle (entitled Liebesblätter) unfolds as a dialogue between two lovers who cannot bring themselves to express their love for one another and therefore end up apart, looking back on a future that might have been. The project offers a vehicle for performers who would otherwise have to dig through archives and online databases to access these extraordinary songs, and also an entry-point for listeners who are eager to discover hidden gems from the depths of 19th-century song. Yet even more, it provides Pauline Decker access to a genre that was unavailable to her, as it was to so many other women composers, using curation as a form of advocacy.
Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music, Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship, and Department Head of Academic Music at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. Rodgers’s research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially art songs by underrepresented composers. His edited essay collection entitled The Songs of Fanny Hensel was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press; in 2024 it won the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the Society for Music Theory. His book The Songs of Clara Schumann appeared in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. He also hosts a podcast about poetry and song, called Resounding Verse, as well a website devoted to songs by composers whose music has been marginalized, called Art Song Augmented.
Jenna Ristilä: Music as emancipator in Carita Holmström’s Södergran songs
My presentation is an excerpt from my upcoming article on Finnish composer Carita Holmström’s song cycle Dagen svalnar (The day cools) – 4 songs to poems by Edith Södergran. Holmström composed the cycle in 1977, when she was a young composer in the beginning of her career. Also Södergran’s poem was a part of her first published book of poetry – making this song cycle a combination of two women’s talents in their early twenties. In the talk I analyze the relationship between the cycle’s music and text from various perspectives: how music and text align, how they seem to contradict each other, and how music can add a completely new interpretative element to the poem. I also examine the interpretations me as a pianist and two singers working with me have made of the music, and analyze how the music-text relationship affects our interpretative choices. My analysis combines three different methods: performer’s analysis (Korhonen-Björkman 2019), dialogic analysis (Moisala 2001), and descriptive analysis (Marion A. Guck 1994). This presentation will focus on one of the four songs, “Du sökte en blomma” (You searched for a flower), in which Holmström’s music seems to take the side of the woman, and add aspects to the story that the poem itself does not contain. I will talk you through why I think that this is the case.
Jenna Ristilä is a Finnish pianist and doctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy of University of the Arts, Helsinki. Her doctoral project focuses on Finnish composing women from the 19th century until today. In her four doctoral concerts she performs a wide array of women’s compositions, and in two articles she takes an analytical approach to two of those works, namely Carita Holmström’s song cycle and Laura Netzel’s piano sonata. In addition to research, RIstilä works as a freelancer, mostly with opera and lied. In 2014 Ristilä graduated as a Master of Music from the Department of Performing Arts at the Sibelius Academy, and in 2018 she completed her second master’s degree at the same university, this time with vocal coaching as her major. She is a member of the research association Suoni ry, and feminism and equality are important values for her in all her work.
Lara Venghaus: From gender as an aesthetic category in Friedrich Schleiermachers “Weihnachtsfeier“ to the underrated compositions of Louise Reichardt
A more thorough examination of early Romantic art songs reveals that numerous composers of this era have been completely forgotten. While many poets who are unknown today have been immortalised in Schubert’s songs, the contemporary settings of the poetry of Novalis, Tieck, Arnim and the Schlegel brothers have largely vanished into oblivion. Considering this, it is important to acknowledge the pioneering contributions of Louise Reichardt, who, alongside the now-obscure Wilhelm Schneider, was the first to set Novalis’ poems to music. Friedrich Schleiermacher, who at the time was a professor of theology in Halle, encouraged Louise Reichardt to compose and advocated for the publication of her works. Her first volume of songs was published in 1806 by Schleiermacher’s friend, the publisher Reimer. Schleiermacher commemorated his close friend and her family’s life in Giebichenstein in his last literary work ‘Die Weihnachtsfeier. Ein Gespräch’ (The Christmas Celebration. A Conversation). This work, which until now has exclusively been examined in terms of its theological significance, provides profound insights into domestic musical practices, in which Liedgesang (singing of songs) and the ‘geistliche Lieder’ (sacred songs) of Novalis play a significant role. Even more, women’s singing is attributed an expressiveness that by far exceeds any intellectual digressions originating from men’s reason. This piece’s way of characterizing emotion as a feminine attribute and reason as a male one is by no means a novel concept; however, the conviction that women who create music are inherently superior and stand closer to God than men is remarkable. Schleiermacher’s ‘Weihnachtsfeier’ is regarded as an interface between art song and gender. It offers the opportunity to examine gender as an aesthetic category in depth and to take a closer look at the art songs of Louise Reichardt, an underrepresented composer.
Lara Venghaus studied „philosophy, cultural reflection and cultural practice“ at the Witten/Herdecke University. Supervised by Prof. Dirk Rustemeyer and Christian Grüny, she received her master’s degree with distinction in 2021. In her master’s thesis she already dealt with the interconnection of philosophy and the arts, in particular with the aesthetics of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Since 2021 she has been a doctoral student, supervised by Prof. Rebecca Grotjahn at the Detmold/Paderborn Musicology Seminar. The importance of her research under the working title “On the foundation of the art song from the spirit of romantic philosophy” was emphasized with the award of a graduate scholarship from the University of Paderborn.
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AGiD Session 4
an online lecture