Nobody ever called early composer Hildegard von Bingen a babe, and La Jolla author Anne K. Gray said she had no comment on the recording industry’s modern penchant of promoting female classical musicians by dressing them in alluring clothing for their CD covers.
Author of the recently released and humongous “The World of Women in Classical Music” (Word World/Seven Locks Press, $55), Gray appears at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4 at Warwick’s, 7812 Girard Ave. Those who love a good yarn articulately told must attend.
This writer learned just how intriguing Gray’s yarns are while seated in her comfortable La Jolla family room. As she sipped tea (she was born in England), Gray talked about the women in her book, one of whom ” cellist and onetime model Nina Kotova ” did pose on a CD cover wearing only her instrument.
According to a 1999 article in Newsweek, record companies hope to appeal to younger, hipper audiences. The writer named Kotova’s then-current crop of competitors as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Britain’s Vanessa-Mae, who performed Bach clad in a wet T-shirt, and Finnish violinist Linda Lampenius, who posed nude in Playboy.
Babe though she might have been, Lampenius didn’t make Gray’s book, but Kotova and Mutter did.
They are among the string players whose warmly written, personal biographies are included in “The World of Women”¦,” to which Gray devoted more than 10 years of research. The newly published work is a sequel to Gray’s earlier book, “The Popular Guide to Classical Music,” which is now out of print but available new and used through Amazon.com UK and on the Web.
In addition to string players, the other categories in “World of Women”¦” are composers, categorized by era, nation and type, including film composers; conductors; musicologists; women in the business of music; philanthropists; and performers, including singers and instrumentalists.
“I was apparently born with an innate love of classical music,” Gray said.
Her parents were devoted to Strauss waltzes but she needed “deeper stuff.” Earliest memories are dancing to Ravel’s “Bolero” when she was 2 or 3. She began piano lessons at 8, but had taught herself to play prior to that.
Gray spent an hour talking about the suppression of talented women such as Clara Schumann, Nannerl Mozart and Fannie Mendelssohn. All yielded or were forced to yield the spotlight to male relatives. The book is rife with biographies of others, such as Alma Rosé, whose heartbreaking story was told by Richard Newman in his book, “From Vienna to Auschwitz”; and Austrian cellist Elsa Hilger, who following an illustrious career and a long life, was brought at age 101 from a coma by her son. The means were recordings of Hilger’s own playing.
“The World of Women”¦” contains many personal stories such as these, touching and far from the usual pedantic biographies. Gray hopes her book will be widely used as a textbook and even the foundation for a music/women’s studies course, but she also hopes that individuals will relish the stories.
“Who needs soap operas?” she asked rhetorically. “If I got the movie rights [to all the stories in the book] I’d be able to build a second story on my house!”
For information on Gray’s Oct. 4 appearance, call (858) 454-0347.
