Photograph by Whitney Curtis, Illustration by Sam Wiley
Musical America proclaimed Barbara Harbach “nothing short of brilliant.” She teaches music history, orchestration, composition, and organ at UM–St. Louis. She performs all over the world and composes symphonies, ballets, film scores, musicals, string quartets, operas, and works for the keyboard.
Such a résumé is impressive—even more so when considering her field as a whole: Less than 2 percent of all pieces performed in the American Symphony Orchestra League’s 2003–04 season were by women composers, notes Women in the Arts, a 2010 book that Harbach co-edited, and less than 5 percent of Pulitzer Prize winners in music through 2004 were women.
So to pay tribute to those before her, Harbach digs up forgotten women composers for Vivace, the musical press that she founded. Until recently, Harbach published a periodical, Women of Note Quarterly, dedicated to women in music. Last fall, she founded WomenArts Quarterly Journal, which covers “all women creators, whether it’s poetry, sculpture, drama, music—all the way across.”
Part of how Harbach fights hard to promote the work of other women artists is by getting her own work out there and showing them it can be done. This spring, she traveled to England—the London Philharmonic Orchestra was recording a CD of her work. “They were not used to working with a living composer,” she laughs. “They didn’t want to hear too much from me!” This will be her seventh CD to be issued by respected label MSR Classics, part of her larger output of 50 CDs, which includes performances of other composers’ work—such as some women composers published by Vivace—released on 11 other labels.
This summer, she premiered Harriet’s Story, her three-movement piece for violin, piano, and soprano, inspired by former slave Harriet Scott and her daughters, Eliza and Lizzie. Also this year, Harbach debuted a related piece, Freedom Suite for String Quintet (also extant in orchestral form), which she wrote for UM–St. Louis’ Dickson String Quartet after meeting Lynne Jackson, Dred and Harriet Scott’s great-great-granddaughter, when Harriet’s grave was discovered in St. Louis a few years ago.
And this month, Harbach is presenting the Women in the Arts Conference, November 10 through 12, a “multivenue celebration of women creators present and past.”
