Episode 197: Facing the Music
/“I won second place. And the feedback from the head judge was that I shouldn’t have worn slacks...I was so upset because he didn’t say anything about the actual playing.”
Renate Rohlfing
“I don’t think it’s a mistake that the people that in a sense guided and founded the work in this country are female. We need all of those qualities to be good collaborators.”
Lydia brown
In this show we meet three musicians, all performers and teachers, and get a sense of how much the traditional world of classical music is changing.
Lydia Brown, now a professor of collaborative piano at Juilliard, began her career mentored by several women who worked to established her profession. Yet despite this female influence, she says she’s had to fight to achieve the same success as a male pianist.
Renate at work
Renate Rohlfing was one of Lydia’s students. Now in her late thirties, she has had a successful career, traveling far and wide to play. But it took her a long time to realize that performing does not have to mean sticking to old expectations of what a woman ‘should’ look like on stage.
French horn player Christine Stinchi is working on her doctorate at Rutgers University. She performs in pants, and has had plenty of women mentors in what was for so long a male field. She sees a hopeful future for women in brass.
“I don’t think about it on a day to day basis, ‘Will I land this job because I’m female?’ because it’s opening up more in the brass field, being more balanced.”
Christine Stinchi
You can also read a transcript of the show.
Music credits:
I want to thank Renate and Christine for contributing their wonderful playing to this show. I loved including their music in the episode.
In the first part of the show you heard Renate playing:
Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words)
Opus 30 Number 4 - Agitato e con fuoco (recorded for Deutschlandfunk Radio in Cologne, Germany).
Composer: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
In the second part of the show you heard:
Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words)
Opus 30 Number 1 - Andante Expressivo, also by Mendelssohn. Also recorded for Deutschlandfunk Radio in Cologne.
You heard Christine playing Tanguito, composed by Dante Yenque, and Hope Springs Eternal, composed by Justin H Bush.