Record justice for Catalan female composers of the late 19th century
The Accent Ensemble recovers works by these authors, most of them located after a long search
BarcelonaThe Catalan composer Felip Pedrell (Tortosa, 1841 – Barcelona, 1922) praised women's ability to compose, encouraged them to aspire to more and regretted that they were considered less valid. He did so in 1875 in an article in the magazine Musical illustration. A man ahead of his time who some time ago began to revive Accent Ensemble, a chamber music group from Terres de l'Ebre. "By stretching Pedrell's thread, we have found many ramifications and subcontinents," explains musician David Matheu. One of these threads has led the musical group to recover pieces by Lluïsa Casagemas and Coll (Barcelona 1873 - Madrid 1942), Matilda Escalas and Xamení (Palma, 1870-1936), Agnès Armengol and Altayó (Sabadell, 1852-1934) 1926) and make a record: Composers around Pedrell. Most of the pieces are unpublished.
It has not been easy to follow the trail of these composers. The chamber music group has been able to recover pieces thanks to the search of the singer Maria Teresa Garrigosa, who wrote a doctoral thesis, and the historian Cristina Favà. Originally, they were works for voice and piano, but on the album they are presented with voice, viola, clarinet, bass clarinet and piano. "When I started looking, in 2006, I couldn't find anything. I read the eight volumes of the Great Encyclopedia of Music "They were looking for women's names," explains Garrigosa. "They created a network of complicity because they believed that women should have access to culture. Narcisa Freixas, for example, would sing in prisons. They were pioneering women."
A long investigation
Over time, some of his works have been recovered, distributed in different archives in Catalonia. "At first, we only had 25 works by Casagemas, and now we know that he composed 300; we have the names of 170 pieces and we have recovered 80 scores," says Garrigosa. "For us, Matilda Escalas is the symbol of a free woman. He collaborated with the composer Isaac Albéniz, was friends with Antoni Gaudí and Santiago Rusiñol, lived in Paris, where he also moved in artistic circles, and made a living with his music," says pianist Inés Reguero. .
Among the selection of pieces on the album, the first two lieds composed in Catalan stand out: The white flower, by Pedrell, and Sighs, by Agnès Armengol (1879). "They were brave, because most of the songs were in French and Italian, and they decided to do them in Catalan," says Reguero.
