Life doesn't always align with our dreams. This true story is told in the style of a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a golden-haired girl who dreamed of becoming a musician. She studied piano as a girl and then switched to composing music as an adult. Her masterwork, Variants for Orchestra, is a stormy, complex piece that has few rivals in scale and scope. Few conductors know it. Interest in the music has come from younger musicians.
Molly Luther is the composer and the golden-haired girl. You can learn more about her and listen to the Variants for Orchestra at www.mollyluther.com
The Yale Oral History of American Music archive is an important repository of interviews with musicians and their descendants, friends and others who knew them. Included in the collection is an interview that Meg did about Molly with music journalist and educator Tim Page.
At the end of the episode Meg recommends the podcast Fishko Files, by WNYC host and Producer Sara Fishko
@FishkoFiles
20 Golden-Haired Girl
Hello and welcome to Uplifted. My name is Meg Luther Lindholm. And I welcome you on this journey from stories of adversity towards new insights for a better life. Today’s step on the journey is called –
Golden-Haired Girl
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young woman who seemed to have the world on a string.
She had golden hair and a winning smile. She rode horses and sailed and did well in school. But music was her greatest passion. It’s unclear why she began playing the piano at an early age. Perhaps she was influenced by her Aunt Kate who played the organ for silent movies in a small Midwestern town. But the golden-haired girl didn’t grow up in the Midwest. She grew up in a big house in the wealthy town of New Caanan, Connecticut. Her father commuted to his job in New York City where he made lots of money.
But money couldn’t take away the sadness that lived inside the golden-haired girl. Sadness that stemmed from her parents’ divorce. Sadness that came when her father re-married and moved far away. Sadness caused by step-parents whose added presence only increased her loneliness.
But the golden-haired girl seemed well, golden. She was voted most likely to succeed in her high school yearbook. She went to an elite women’s college where she proved to be a natural leader. She was remembered fifty years later for her warmth and her openness. But music was always her anchor, her passion and her reason for living. Music opened the world of possibility and happiness to her. Music was the thread that tethered her to the world.
After college the golden-haired young woman wanted to continue studying music. But her father did not consider that a worthy goal. Instead, he offered to pay for secretarial school. Because that is what graduates of elite all-womens colleges did. They became secretaries. And, they got married and raised children. Which she did. But, she also still dreamed of a career in music.
So, one day, when time and money allowed, she returned to school to become a composer.
During this time she composed a symphonic work called Variants for Orchestra. It was a large, stormy piece painted in colors of smoke and fire. The work was a monument to her talent and skill. It stands today as an emblem of breaking barriers. The barrier of being a female composer at a time when men saw themselves as the natural descendants of Bach, Brahams and Beethoven. She broke the age barrier as an older composer among younger men who she knew liked her but did not fully accept her. She didn’t break the sound barrier, but she came close. The crescendos in the symphonic work scaled upwards like towering ocean swells of sound. A moment of stunned silence at the end – and then applause.
But all was not well on the home front. Her husband was frustrated with her focus on her career. And so, with the birth of her symphony came the death of her marriage. The now brown-haired, middle-aged woman struggled to get by. The struggle to earn a living was hard. The struggle to figure out a path forward in music was also hard. Her confidence dimmed. And eventually the light of her vision and ambition died out.
Fast forward many years to the daughter who was now an adult living on her own. She listened to a recording of the Variants made at the music school her mother attended so many years earlier. And she was awed by its scope and power. She marveled at its virtuosity, its complexity and its moodiness. She knew that it deserved to be heard by many more people.
She did manage to arrange one performance by The Women’s Philharmonic, on Mother’s Day in 2001.
It was the best day of the daughter’s life. Afterwards the daughter contacted other conductors who she thought might want to perform it. But the response was tepid. They were too busy. They didn’t see it fitting into their traditional symphonic repertoire. And so, in time, the daughter let go of the effort to re-birth her mother’s work.
But one day an email showed up in the daughter’s inbox. It was from a college student studying to be a composer at Mount Holyoke College in Massachussettes. The student said she heard about the daughter’s mother from the Director of a Music oral history archive at Yale University. The student loved the mother’s music and wanted to know if she could interview the daughter about it. And she said, there was a second composition student in the same class who also wanted to write about her mother’s music.
And so, the mother, who had been the only female composition student at her school when she started out – was now being emulated by two young female composers together in the same class. The baton of awareness and recognition was being passed – not by people who were the mother’s contemporaries. But by the light of curiosity from the next, younger generation of female composers. This is often how progress happens – carried on the winds from one generation to the next.
This story ends the same way a fable does - with a moral. Which is - if you bark up one tree and don’t get a response. Don’t give up. Another tree may bark back at you. Corny but true.
Thank you for joining me on this step of the Uplifted journey. I’m Meg Luther Lindholm aka the daughter of the golden-haired girl, woman and composer. Her name was Molly Luther. To learn more about her and listen to her music you can go to her website at www.mollyluther.com.
Before I leave, I want to suggest a podcast to you that I find Uplifting. It’s Fishko Files produced by Sarah Fishko at WNYC. Her short, sound-rich essays profile people in the arts, music and media. Please subscribe to Uplifted on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. And it would be great while you’re at Apple Podcasts if you write me a review there. And if you like what you hear I would so appreciate your sharing it. Until next time, take care of yourself and each other.