top of page

real music to play

Rhodri Williams-Wandoch,

composer, curator and writer-translator, brings people together across the art-forms to make magic and meaning.

RWW portrait summer2020 (1).JPG
Newest

Composer and curator

About (bio)

Contact

Scores - full list of works

​Scores - selection with previews

Posts - delving into music

Testimonial - Audience comments

​

Teacher and coach

Tutoring tailored to you

​

'Sharpen Your Art' - composing and music study

 

Piano, violin and viola lessons; ensemble coaching

 

Testimonial - Students' comments

Scroll down for latest events and videos available to watch

Parafantasy Nr.1

-

- an improvised invention in multiple voices

​

Six writers were asked to record their 75-word paragraphs which I chose from Richard Hearn's writers' website Paragraph Planet. 

 

The readings inspired this piece, my first parafantasy, an intricate and profound improvised invention on a chromatic theme, woven around the readings.  The music forms a complex sonata or fantasy, an intense inner exploration.  I feel that it responds to and augments the paragraphs, which all speak about how we interpret our experience and attribute meaning to it.  I hope you will think so too. 

​

Recorded by the writers and used with their kind permission: Andrea Damic, Ailish Sinclair, Cheryl Snell, Karen Southall Watts, Lucy Welch and Sherri Eckworth.  Thanks to Richard Hearn of paragraphplanet.com.  Click on the title above to hear.

~ ~ ~

INTRODUCING:

A HOMERTON PARADE

I am so excited to introduce you to this fabulous video suite, composed in 2020 lockdowns for remote production by students of my former Cambridge college.  They have made a completely captivating production, which you can now watch HERE.

​

It was filmed in 2021 and put together in 2022.  The acting, playing and cinematography are by students and fellows of the college, including poet-in-residence Dr Mariah Whelan and director of music Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter, with cameo role by honorary fellow Dame Evelyn Glennie! 

​

A Homerton Parade is a musical setting of college archive documents from 1894 up to the 1918 pandemic, which is eerily similar to our recent experience.  Along with the extraordinary strictness and camaraderie of the then all-female teaching college, we find hilarious musical jokes and student diaries.  Find out plenty more here (and see the video).

Events

... Here are two current themes in Writings and Projects:

​

-Music for each season:  a series of articles using a wide range of music, with all listening-links, to delve behind the obvious about what each season of the year means to us, culturally, emotionally and in nature.  Latest:  Summer Music.

​

-Rhodri invites you to encounter the unique and life-enhancing work of Geoffrey Bush (1920-98),

putting together helpful writings, events, and recordings for Bush's  100th anniversary year.

Previous events & collaborations:

-September 2021

It's the little things

​

What are the little things that make the sun shine inside you?  In times of of darkness, Rhodri is delighted to share this heartwarming track, just completed for your enjoyment, where the voices of different people answering this question are combined with music and sounds. 

Free to hear on Soundcloud and also featured by multi-arts sharing resource In the Time of Pandemic.

​

-May 2021

Three 'Conservation Pieces'

​

This intimate and captivating online piano recital is now available to watch for free!  Swanland I, Swanland II and Extinct from Conservation Pieces were expertly interpreted by Natalia Williams-Wandoch (@NataliaWWPiano) in a very unique recital titled The Swan's Way given for the unique nexTus Festival, 9th-22nd May 2021.  The music is choreographed with stunning photography by Paula Cooper (@iceniphoto) and a poem by scientist-poet Lynne Wycherley.  The programme also included very sincere and spirited performances of Boulanger, Brahms and Bach.  It was featured again within September's Groeneveld Festival in the Netherlands.  Rhodri is still feeling delighted to have been able to collaborate with these artists in this beautiful way.

​

Full video (short recital) and trailer video, plus Natalia's most recent filmed piano recital

5 Zoo Pieces cover.png

-September 2020

'Art has to be Contagious' variations

​

My contribution to Adrian Oswalt's* 'contagious' theme (!)

used in the eponymous exhibition in Tübingen, Germany.

​

-Here is my viola & vibraphone final variation.

-The wide-randing gallery of contributions can be heard here.

​​

 

*"The melody [...] will travel round the globe with an invitation for musicians to pick it up in their own musical culture. (...) At the end of this project, a chain will have been forged which hopefully will symbolise the connections people have with each other."

IMG_0385.JPG

2019 & early 2020

Rosalyn Hart &

Krassimira Jeliazkova-Jones        violins

​

Four Polish Carols

​

Recital for two violins, St Peter's Church, March, Sat. 7.12.19, 11am.  

​

Sarah Garford and Allegro Strings

 

Concertino for clarinet and strings

​

St Peter's Church, March, 9.11.19

​

Natalia Williams-Wandoch

piano

​

Swanland I & II

from Five Zoological Pieces;

​

Fen Scene

 

in

piano recital at St Peter's Church, March, 19.10.19

​

and Yatton Music Society, 29.02.20

​

& in 2018:

'OUT OF CONTROL'

​

Rose Newbury, Andrew Tait, Carol McEvoy &

Rhodri Williams-Wandoch

Clarinet, piano, cello, viola

​

Interrupted Introduction

Malachi

On Strings (ensemble & improvised dance)

Inconclusive Music

​

in collaboration with

20 photographic artists, dir. Mark Woods-Nunn,

and

Jodie Scully, dance

​

St Peter's Church, March, 10.11.18

In support of FND Action, for epilepsy/seizure awareness

​

Allegro Strings

​

Fugue on 'The Holly and the Ivy'

 

Wisbech Grammar School, December 2018

​

© 2020 Rhodri Williams-Wandoch                               

Contact

Top of page         

Contact links

I was recently talking to a group of talented and aspiring young composers (female and male), about the great myth around 'women composers.'

​

They were knowledgeable and intelligent people, but knew hardly any of the prolific and great composers from my list - because all the names were female.

 

Being astute, they were very much aware of the subjugation and limitations that our patriarchal history has always imposed on women, and for this reason they hadn't needed to think twice about why their repertoire and music-history education was virtually all male. Makes sense, doesn't it?

 

But no! - That is only part of the truth.  We may have got past the once-common belief that women can't compose, and have reduced the patronisation about their 'feminine music' that they have put up with and still experience, but we perpetuate the legacy of these ideas when we presume that all women in history have been prevented from professionally composing or not been able to develop their art.

​

How many times have you heard that women composers before the 20th Century were invariably stifled and came to nothing? 

​

Certainly, it has been the overwhelmingly normal story.  The oppression and repression of women through the ages, and perhaps particularly in the 19th Century, has been really staggering in its forcefulness, passionate drive, violence, and support across all sectors of society.  Women who have managed to develop their art to a point of greatness and mastery, and to achieve a professional or even international reputation, have always had to sacrifice everything else to it and suffer.  Even then, it has demanded of them continuous grit and perseverance.  Any number of women have indeed been stopped in this way.  Even now, in our very different times, the balance of expectations tends to suppose that a woman will first and foremost commit herself to her family, even that this is in her genes, and she may be treated as a perverse anomaly if she doesn't.

​

However, many female composers, pushing through all this, have gained not only success in the concert hall and publishing but also international renown and respect, through the centuries - all the more amazing considering the adversity they had to battle through and what they had to sacrifice.  Barbara Strozzi, for examle, along with many of her now-forgotten contemporaries, was able to compose prolifically and famously but only because she was a courtesan. This meant that she was owned by an aristocrat who could literally command over whether she live or die.

​

Then along came the 19th Century, the age of 'progress,' institutionalisation, systematisation, and hand-in-hand with these, the setting-in-stone of absolutist official sexism. Diverse spheres of life and commerce that had been open to women, and many that had been predominantly women's realm (such as many 'cottage industries') became men's realm because industrial, commercial and cultural activity was now to be the domain of men. Increasingly, artists were not patronised by the rich but made their own professional living, on their own terms, selling their own service - something that had become completely out of the question for women. The 19th Century was the time when loose social classes were turned into rigid pre-set castes, not only the working, middle and upper ones but also in all the other dimensions:  vague racial ideas were set into pseudo-scientific racial theory, new knowledge of evolution was turned directly into ‘social Darwinism’ and then eugenics; it became a matter of absolutely normal belief that skull-shape indicated a person’s character and abilities; and the idea of the criminal class, and the inherently criminal person, came about.  The capacity and role of a woman were set down in just the same way.  The 19th Century thus not only attacked women composers with really unbelievable ferocity – training otherwise-good men to believe adamantly that their art must take precedence over the womanly ideas of their wives – but also did its best to edit out women from the previous history of music.  For that was precisely the era that began the chronicling of art history –  the age that ceased to be concerned only with the fashions of the moment and to revere (sometimes even in the language of worship) those past masters whom it deemed to be ‘Great.’  Alas, it was inconceivable anyone female could have been significant – or even worthy of any note at all – in the progressive advancement and sophistication of European art which they grandly envisioned.  To many thinkers, women composers were a sort of perversion.

​

Thus, it has been left to us in more recent times to dig out the existence and the oeuvres of the great pre-19th-Century figures who didn’t happen to be male. 

​

A retort is sometimes made, saying 'history cannot remember everyone.'  But history does remember the names of a multitude of middling and muddling composers, artists and writers.  The names of many composers who did excellent work but didn't make it onto a pedestal, those who simply were not pivotal, groundbreaking or influencial, and of those who were genuinely second-rate, are regularly found in the literature and the repertoire - if they were male.

​

Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen, by contrast, was a star pupil of one of the music-school orphanages in Vivaldi-era Venice, and a celebrity guest at Paris’s prestigious private royal concerts, published prolifically, was received in London as a VIP, and lived a long and creative life as composer and performer – far outstripping her husband who hoped to hitch an easy ride on the back of her reputation but didn’t do well.  Yet we knew nothing of her till recently and most copies of her many published concertos, sonatas, quartets and so on are still facsimiles of hard-to-read 18th-Century manuscripts. 

​

Marianna Martinez was similarly famous, composing many major works in the Classical style of her age, with people travelling from all over Europe to her salon in Vienna.  Her family lived alongside the librettist Metastasio, a great influence on her, and then took in the penniless young Joseph Haydn as a guest – they mutually supported each other and he was a lifelong friend.  Yet we do not know about her.  Nor, generally, about her contemporary Austrian Marie-Therèse von Paradis who did not let her blindness prevent her from a composing career, nor generally very much about Maria Szymanowska, one of the 19th Century’s first professional virtuoso pianists and one of the first to perform memorized repertoire in public (well before Liszt and Clara Schumann) – yet Szymanowska wrote the very first Concert Etudes and Nocturnes in Poland and was the inspiration in this for Chopin.

 

Soon after, Fanny Hensel was having to publish her brilliant and gripping music under the name of her brother, Felix Mendelssohn; internationally touring virtuoso pianist and composer Clara Schumann was lectured by her husband Robert that the life of a composer-performer was now only for him - they had been each other's muses and fans during their passionate engagement, 'but it's different in marriage -' he wrote to her - 'because then there is the cooking to do!'  Louise Farrenc struggled against the odds to become the first woman professor at the Paris Conservatoire... and the last, for an extremely long time.  Rebecca Clarke had to estrange herself completely from her violently furious father and leave the house with no living and no accommodation, after he sabotaged her graduation from the Royal Academy.  And yes, up till the end of the 19th Century virtually all the names I could offer you here have been from outside Britain.  It really does speak about the culture here, I belive.

​

One of the young composers I was talking with looked lost in thought for a long while, and then burst out ‘She was famous!’  This was about Sirmen, and I think we were all moved by the expression of pride and indignation in this realisation that we – ourselves, our own generation, even the young among us – have been taught that these careers simply couldn’t have happened.  The knowledge of the people, their sacrifice, their labour, their lifelong dedication to their art, and their wonderful music itself, has been kept from us.  It has been kept from us, and so have the names of so many composers who were black or not European, because we are still living in the shadow of that caste-bound age.  Even if we live beyond this shadow, we will always live in the age of humankind with its unending patriarchies, hierarchies, castes, outcasts, blacklists, scapegoats, repressions and evils.

​

The playlist MUSIC BY WOMEN which is inspiring me to write all this, compiled by Natalia Williams-Wandoch, is an absolute joy to listen to.  As with any playlist, you can stop part-way through and resume at another time, or listen all the way through since it is painstakingly curated to work beautifully that way.  I found the opening incredibly compelling (what a piano concerto – surely ought to be top repertoire!) and the whole sequence kept that up.  The composers are mostly 19th-21st Century, and Natalia warmly invites listeners to suggest to her some earlier music to add – but please listen to the playlist and specify where in it you think your proposed track should go, and why!

 

Playlist here (click) - Happy listening!

​

​

​

​

bottom of page