(forthcoming from University of Illinois Press)
American composer, pianist, and pedagogue Louise Talma
began life in the green countryside of southern France,
speaking German, French, and English. When she was six,
Talma and her mother moved to Manhattan where she
started formal schooling. Her musical training began with
her mother (Cecile Talma, an operatic soprano), then
Juilliard, then Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and
later NYU and Columbia. Known as a prickly professor
during the more than 50 years she taught at Hunter
College in Manhattan, she nevertheless had followers and
champions.
Her synesthesia manifested as seeing colors when she
heard music. What was it like to experience a
kaleidoscope while composing? This innate ability tracks
with other aspects of her neurodiversity which likely
contributed to her prickliness yet simultaneously provided
deep focus for composing. Igor Stravinsky was her
primary musical influence.
Talma was in late middle age when second wave
feminism took hold in America, so her comfort with
feminist ideals was mixed. She had difficulty discussing it
in public but was so furious about inequities she exploded
at the MacDowell dinner table when labeled a “womancomposer”. Despite these contradictions, Talma was the
first woman to achieve numerous awards and honors.
Among them were a Senior Fulbright Fellowship (1955-
6), two Guggenheims (1946 and 1947, the first female
composer to receive two - Ruth Crawford won her lone
award in 1930), and first female composer elected to the
National Institute of Arts and Letters (1974). Her three act
grand opera on a text by Thornton Wilder (The Alcestiad)
was the first written by an American woman to be
produced in a major European opera house (Frankfurt,
1962).
Talma was a composer deeply attuned to nature. Her
devotion to the setting of MacDowell in the woods of New
Hampshire is revealed in countless works—not only in
sketches with numerous birdsong transcriptions, but in
melodies and text choices as well. There is a tapestry of
Talma’s appreciation of the natural world throughout her
oeuvre like a theme running through her life and work.
The only piece for which she also wrote the text was her
chamber opera, Have You Heard? Do You Know?
Finished in 1979, this libretto recommends escape into
nature as the solution for worldly angst - ever more
pertinent today.
In a letter from 1974 to the National Endowment for the
Arts (which funded this piece), Talma wrote, “[this project
is] to give voice to the longing felt by everyone to get
away from the noise, dirt, crowds, confusion, rush,
pollution, crime that presently exist everywhere to a saner
way of life. I intend to do this in the comic vein with
undertones of seriousness which will, I hope, convey the
idea that this must be accomplished if we are to survive”
(Louise Talma, to James D. Ireland, 11 August 1974,
Louise Talma Papers, Music Division, Library of
Congress).
63In a central aria of this work, Talma wrote, “I want a quiet
place far away, near a flowing brook and a wood, where I
can watch the clouds go by, or look at stars the whole
night through, and hear the birds sing at dawn. I want to
go to that silent place in the woods where the goldenrod
plumes in the sun, and the trees are aflame in the fall, and
the lilac blooms in the spring, and birches stand slim and
white like sentinels in the night” (Louise Talma, “Have
You Heard? Do You Know?”, Louise Talma Papers,
Music Division, Library of Congress).
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