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American Woman

Mary Howe composer
Amy Beach composer
Margaret Bonds composer
Helen Crane composer
Dorothy Rudd Moore composer
Florence Price composer

Juliana Soltis cello
Ruoting Li piano

Release Date: October 4, 2024
Catalog #: NV6659
Format: Digital
20th Century
Romantic
Chamber
Cello
Piano

The cello-piano duo is justly hailed for its tremendous expressiveness. Cellist Juliana Soltis and pianist Ruoting Li remarkably demonstrate this setup’s emotive power on AMERICAN WOMAN while championing a noble cause — highlighting underrepresented women composers.

Featuring works by Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore, and Florence Price, AMERICAN WOMAN sheds light on a treasure trove of rarely heard gems of cello-piano literature. The general tone is sweeping, romantic, expressive, at times fierce and energetic, then again tender and delicate. Soltis and Li show extraordinary ability not only in bringing out the unique style of each composer, but also in uniting them all in a great artistic effort.

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An Inside Look

Juliana Soltis: The Creation of AMERICAN WOMAN

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Ballade Fantasque Mary Howe Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 10:05
02 Three Pieces Op. 40: La Captive Amy Beach Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 3:15
03 Three Pieces Op. 40: Berceuse Amy Beach Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 3:32
04 Three Pieces Op. 40: Mazurka Amy Beach Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 3:06
05 Troubled Water Margaret Bonds Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 6:42
06 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 1: Andante Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 2:45
07 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 2: Andante con moto Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 2:18
08 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 3: Allegro moderato dolce e espressivo Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 2:00
09 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 4: Quasi adagio Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 2:41
10 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 5: Allegretto Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 1:14
11 Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51: No. 6: Andante quasi allegretto con tenerezza Helen Crane Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 3:09
12 Dirge and Deliverance Dorothy Rudd Moore Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 16:00
13 Adoration Florence Price Juliana Soltis, cello; Ruoting Li, piano 2:49

Recorded September 6-7, October 18-20, November 13 & 16, 2023 at Patrych Sound Studios in The Bronx, New York NY
Recording Session Producer & Engineer Joseph Patrych
Editing, Mixing & Mastering Peter Atkinson

Photos of Juliana Soltis by Sarah Kane Photography
Photo of Dorothy Rudd Moore by Bert Andrews, from the American Composers Alliance (ACA) Archives

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Chelsea Kornago
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Juliana Soltis

Cellist

Raised amidst the diverse musical traditions of southern Appalachia, cellist Juliana Soltis inspires audiences the world over with “exquisite, heart-rending” (Early Music America) performances that are redefining classical music. A “true virtuoso” (Classical Music), Soltis delights in connecting listeners with the forgotten stories of classical music. 

Learn More

Ruoting Li

piano

Chinese pianist Ruoting Li is an artist of wide-ranging vision, known for her “eloquent, musical” (Fanfare Magazine) interpretations of contemporary music, particularly that of women composers. With a burgeoning international career as both a solo pianist and chamber musician, as well as several albums to her name, Li serves as the Resident Pianist with the Boston Festival Orchestra. She also tours with the genre-defying trio, TAKE3, participating in their “bold, aggressive” (LA Times) performances as well as their outreach events to local schools around the United States.

Li has performed with presenters throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and China, including New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Washington DC’s Library of Congress, Boston’s Jordan Hall, Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, and more. This season, Li performs as a soloist with the Boston Festival Orchestra at Jordan Hall, BFO’s chamber series at the Boston Athenaeum, and more.

An accomplished recording artist and producer, Li followed her appearance on David L. Post’s Sonatas & Other Works (Centaur) with the release of an album with acclaimed cellist Juliana Soltis, featuring repertoire by American women composers. She has also worked as a producer on albums for the Steinway & Sons and Naxos labels, and has co-produced an upcoming album by the celebrated ensemble The Harlem Chamber Players, to be released in 2024.

Born in China, Li began playing piano at the age of 6, and was admitted to the Central Conservatory of Music Middle School in Beijing when she was 11 years old. In 2014, Li came to the United States and was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned both Bachelor and Master of Music degree in Piano Performance under the tutelage of Solomon Mikowsky. Her other mentors include An thony de Mare and Kenneth Cooper. Li is currently based in New York City and Boston.

Notes

“Women composers should be played more than they are. […] I know I considered it to be a handicap to be a woman when I started composing. I’m not a feminist. But I think that I would have gotten along faster if I had been a man.” — Mary Howe (1882–1964)

Best remembered in the 21st century as a formidable patron of the arts who co-founded the National Symphony Orchestra, one might be tempted to dismiss Mary Howe as some sort of society eccentric: a Real Housewife of the Beltway taken by a precocious fancy to write music. She was, however, a serious musician whose compositions were performed by the New York and London Philharmonics, and whose works so impressed the principal wind players of the Vienna Philharmonic (then considered notoriously tough on foreign composers) that they were moved to commission her Suite for Wind Quintet (1957). Indeed, Howe’s contributions to American music were considered so significant as to warrant her inclusion in Madeline Goss’s 1952 omnibus Modern Music-Makers: Our American Composers, where she appeared alongside Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein.

Though an earlier work, written just five years after her graduation from the Peabody Institute, Ballade Fantasque (1927) already displays the hallmarks of Howe’s self-described “spanning and bridging” approach to composition, in which she sought to hybridize historical and contemporary styles to create a musical language entirely her own. The Romantic melancholy of the opening, marked by the loneliness of the solo unaccompanied cello, gives way to gently falling Impressionistic triads in the piano. An unexpected eruption of ecstatic syncopations, traded between the two instruments, disrupts this sense of reverie as the final third of the piece drives forward with the wild excitement of the Jazz Age.

Criticism of her efforts to span past and present as derivative did not deter Howe: “If I want to use dissonance, I use dissonance,” she said. “If I want to express feeling, I express feeling. I write what I want to write.”

“How much do you care about expressing yourself in music? How much patience have you – how much persistence? Can you face disappointment? Are you prepared to take the thing seriously, or do you merely want to dabble in it? If you mean to be serious, and love the work…by all means enter into it.” — Amy Beach (1867–1944) from “To the Girl Who Wants to Compose”

When Amy Beach arrived on the European continent in 1911, she was hailed as being foremost among American composers. An impressive achievement in the career of any musician, these accolades were still not nearly so stunning as the fact that Beach had managed to have a career at all. A child prodigy whose gifts recalled the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Beach’s musical abilities were a source of great concern for her parents, who feared that a performing wunderkind would face poor prospects for an advantageous marriage. Her eventual union to the noted Boston surgeon Henry Harris Aubrey Beach — in spite of her nascent career as a concert artist — must have come as a relief; Dr. Beach similarly considered remunerated concertizing to be beneath Amy’s station, and instead encouraged his new wife to devote herself to composition. One might regard Beach’s directive with greater magnanimity had he not then denied Amy a composition teacher! Irrepressible, Beach taught herself to compose — acquiring books on music theory and orchestration and studying the works of other composers.

The influence of these silent mentors can be heard in Three Pieces, Op. 40, originally composed in 1898 for violin and piano and transcribed by Beach for cello and piano five years later. While each miniature seems to suggest the stylistic signature of another composer — “La Captive” invokes the moody atmospheres of Fauré; the “Berceuse” suggests the lush textures of Brahms; and the “Mazurka” nods to the Polish Chopin — the expressive harmonies and pervasive song-like quality are clearly Beach’s own.

With every style she inhabited, Beach was learning. “Very few people would be willing to work so hard,” she would later reminisce of those days of auto-instruction. “I enjoyed it immensely.”

“People don’t think that a woman can really compete in this field.” — Margaret Bonds (1913–1972)

In later years, Margaret Bonds would recount how Nadia Boulanger, perhaps the most influential composition teacher of the 20th century, confessed that she “didn’t know what to do with me.” Perhaps Boulanger sensed that Bonds had already succeeded in creating what Czech composer Antonin Dvorak had postulated was not only possible, but necessary, in 1893: the creation of a distinctly American art music grounded in the musical traditions of its Black citizens.

As a child, Margaret’s family home on Wabash Avenue in Chicago both hosted and sheltered some of the great Black artists of the 20th century, including the poet Langston Hughes, who became a frequent collaborator (Bonds’s setting of Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” with its “jazzy” chords, was the work that famously flummoxed Boulanger); and the composer Florence Price, who sought refuge with the Bonds family following the end of her second marriage and became a teacher to Bonds. The discrimination that Bonds later faced at Northwestern University – where there weren’t even accommodations for Black students – contrasted sharply with her early experiences with Black exceptionalism and engendered in her a fierce desire to create a musical style unapologetically inseparable from her own identity: one fully drawn from the Black musical traditions that had shaped her life.

This genesis is realized in Troubled Water, which Bonds transcribed from the final movement of her own Spiritual Suite for piano for the cellist Kermit Moore in 1964. Here, Bonds transforms the traditional spiritual “Wade in the Water” into a veritable tone poem of Black American music. The infamous “jazzy” chords; the ecstatic call-and-response of a Gospel choir; the heart-pangs of the blues — all are accounted for in a style Bonds knew to be uniquely her own. “[When] I write something,” she said, “and it’s jazzy and bluesy and spiritual and Tchaikovsky all rolled up into one, I laugh to myself… No wonder Nadia Boulanger didn’t quite understand what my music is all about.”

​​”…women by no means lack artistic productivity.” — Helen Crane (1868–1930)

Absent from any modern text on classical music, the life of Helen Crane instead reveals itself in a series of fragments. There is the church baptismal registry, recording the christening of the infant Helen Cornelia in New York in February 1869. A smattering of passport applications chart both her transatlantic crossings and the progress of her education and career. In 1895, she was a “student;” by 1905, she “[follows] the occupation of music.” An emergency application to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin describes Helen as seeking “protection;” it is 1914 and the Great War is engulfing Europe. Passenger manifests, entry lists, census records — all serve to illuminate the life of an extraordinary woman. But what about her music?

Tucked-away in forgotten encyclopedia, recorded in century-old periodicals, and cataloged in archival boxes, references to Helen Crane’s musical exploits reveal a composer whose 21st century obscurity belies the success she enjoyed in life. Described as a “contemporary composer,” Crane was found worthy of inclusion in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians in 1905. Meanwhile, in between essays on “Music is War Work” and a saucy gossip column (“Studio Tea”), the September 1918 issue of The Musical Monitor profiled Crane as a winner of the national Composers’ Prize Competition. A regrettable bit of editorial bungling misstates her family name as “Carver,” rather than “Crane,” which is unfortunate as Crane, whose biography is otherwise correct, cuts a rather impressive figure: not only was her Symphonic Suite featured at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition (of Meet Me in St. Louis fame), it was also performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. The author of the Monitor profile laments the “unsettled conditions” that forced Crane to return to the United States; sadly, in the aftermath of the war, the momentum of her career never recovered.

Written in 1918, the Six Idylls for Cello and Piano, Op. 51 are redolent of the evolving musical styles Crane encountered while living and working in Berlin. The late Romanticism of Wagner and Strauss permeate Idyll No. 2, while the jarring harmonies of Idyll No. 1 and the chromaticism of Idyll No. 4 suggest the tonal distortions of the early Expressionists. By contrast, Idyll No. 6, with its clearly-defined character motifs interspersed in the landscape of a recurrent walking bass line, is reminiscent of the episodic musical dramatizations associated with the then-newfangled moving pictures.

“[If] a young woman is inspired to become a composer because I’m a composer, that’s great. And if a Black person is inspired, that’s great. From that point of view I like [being known as a Black woman composer], and I don’t mind the terms. But I don’t like them being used to set me apart from anybody, and say it makes my music better, or not better.” — Dorothy Rudd Moore (1940–2022)

A childhood spent attending concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra may have given young Dorothy Rudd Moore the impression that all composers were “male, white, and dead,” but it did nothing to dissuade her from becoming a composer herself. She wrote her first work, Flight, at 16, and though admitted to the Boston Conservatory at the urging of a favorite uncle, she chose to pursue her musical studies at historic Howard University instead. Though she famously never sought the spotlight, Moore enjoyed her first professional successes while at Howard — including the performance of her Symphony No. 1 by the National Symphony Orchestra — and upon graduation was awarded a fellowship to study with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in France. Though Moore’s work impressed Boulanger and the young composer had intended to settle in Paris, homesickness brought her back to the United States, where she met and married the cellist, composer, and conductor Kermit Moore in 1964. Together, they were founding members of the Society of Black Composers, and Dorothy would go on to write several pieces for her husband.

Among these, Dirge and Deliverance (1971/1980) is one of Moore’s most deeply personal works, exploring themes of despair and hope that preoccupied her for much of her adult life. Highly contrapuntal and featuring an extended, quasi-improvisatory cadenza for the cello (Moore regularly cited J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington as her favorite composers), Dirge and Deliverance is an existential battle in which the cello struggles to free itself from the oppression of the piano. Despite a self-professed pessimistic world-view, here Moore allows the cello to emerge victorious.

“There is a little part of me,” she admitted, “that doesn’t want to be defeated.”

“To begin with, I have two handicaps – those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold [your judgment] — until you have examined some of my work?” — Florence Price (1887–1953), Letter to Serge Koussevitsky

In 2009, the much-publicized discovery of a forgotten cache of manuscripts by Florence Price suddenly thrust her music into the spotlight. In the rush to celebrate this musical “unknown,” however, two facts were overlooked: that Price was one of the most acclaimed and regularly-documented composers of the Depression era; and that efforts to restore her place in the American canon had already been underway for 30 years, ever since noted Price scholar Rae Linda Brown first encountered Price’s Symphony No. 3 in a Yale University archive. In short, unbeknownst to the public, Florence Price and her music had been hiding in plain sight for decades.

Born in post-Reconstruction Little Rock AR, Price studied organ, piano, and composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston before returning home to teach, marry, and start a family. A plot to kidnap and murder Price’s youngest daughter in retaliation for the purported killing of a white child by a Black man led the Price family to flee Little Rock in 1927; seeking safety in the North, they settled in Chicago. Price first came to national attention in the Windy City, claiming the 1932 Wanamaker Prize with her Symphony in E Minor. A subsequent performance of this winning composition by the Chicago Symphony made her the first Black woman to have a work played by a major orchestra. In spite of intense personal hardships during this time, including an abusive first marriage to a man who regularly beat her, Price was a prolific composer whose output rivaled that of many of her male contemporaries. Including art songs, popular songs, symphonies, chamber music, and commercial music — as well as works for both solo piano and organ. Price’s music is more European in style than that of her student, Margaret Bonds, though it still makes frequent use of Black musical motifs, including spirituals and Juba dance rhythms.

This blending of the Old World and the New, of the culture of the enslavers and that of the emancipated, can be heard in her Adoration (1951). Bookended sections in which softly pulsing chords in the piano support a simple cello melody suggest the tranquility of a church organ prelude, while the brief central interlude evokes the deep emotion of a spiritual. Believing herself an equal citizen of two musical worlds, “I have tried,” Price said, “to cultivate and preserve a facility of expression in both…”

Many thanks to Bob Lord, Danielle Sullivan, and the entire team at PARMA for their tireless efforts on behalf of these composers and their music. Thanks as well to the small-but-mighty army of librarians across the country who supported and assisted me throughout the research process, sourcing rare books, sniffing-out lost manuscripts, and granting access to their collections: Lynn Vandenesse and the entire reference department of the Richmond Public Library; super-sleuth Rebecca Littman, Alex Teplitzky, and the rest of the intrepid staff of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts; and the librarians of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who managed to find what everyone else thought was lost.

Additional thanks to Joyce Miller and Alan Gavalya for being enthusiastic guinea pigs throughout this entire process; to Jaime O’Leary for reading all my notes; and to my parents, George and Peggy, for watching the grand-dogs and putting-up with everything else.

And finally, profound gratitude to the late, great, and utterly inimitable Joseph Patrych: none of this would have been possible without you, Joe. We all miss you, every day.