Urgent questions asked gently
The pianist Simone Keller has recorded music by female composers and people of color, primarily from the USA and Switzerland. An additional book sheds light on the compositions and the background.
"100 minutes of piano music from the last 100 years in the context of social inequality and unequal power relations" promises the double CD by Thurgau pianist Simone Keller. The result is a highly heterogeneous and diverse anthology of structurally disadvantaged music by female composers and people of color, primarily from the USA and Switzerland. Inequality in music history is an explosive topic, but of course you can't hear it in the individual pieces. Because when they are interpreted as wonderfully as they are here, you wonder once again what went wrong.
Some personalities such as Ruth Crawford Seeger or, more recently, Julius Eastman are now part of any basic course in modern music. But there are others to be discovered, such as the St. Gallen poet and composer Olga Diener (1890-1963), whose texts Hermann Hesse described as "far too much dream and far too little poetry". Her "secret language", according to Hesse, speaks again today with its peculiar twists and turns.
Despite the background, it has not become a riotous anthology, but a rather calm one. It also includes something new: the slowly unfolding piece Black/blackness: After Mantra(s) for piano and electronics by Jessie Cox, which touches on questions of the climate crisis. Or a Properly Scottish of Cristina Janett, who comes from a family of folk musicians. "I discovered folk music with its diverse influences much later," writes Keller, a pianist from a farming family, "and it was only when I worked with Cristina Janett that I realized how much it was part of my identity." It is precisely such processes of awareness that are central here.
Finally, there is the composer Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988), known or barely known for having written the song Good Morning Heartache wrote for Billie Holiday. He appears three times on this album and gives it its title, as well as a book that Simone Keller has published in two languages, German and English. It not only contains further texts on the compositions, but also sheds light on the socio-cultural background against which they were written and at the same time leads us beyond this into our own time. The questions posed here, seemingly gently, are urgent.
Simone Keller: Hidden Heartache. Intakt CD 419
Simone Keller et al: Facetten 21 - Hidden Heartache, Kulturstiftung des Kantons Thurgau, 320 p. with music booklet, Fr. 32.00, Jungle Books, St. Gallen 2024, ISBN 978-3-033-10349-8
