- Good evening and welcome
to the University of Wisconsin- Green Bay.
I am Sheryl Van Gruensven,
the Vice Chancellor for Business and Finance.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you
Sarah Meredith Livingston.
An Iowa native, Sarah Meredith Livingston is a professor of
Music; Women and Gender Studies; and Global Studies at UW-Green
Bay since 1988.
She received Bachelor of Science and Music Education degrees
from Iowa State University;
Master of Music, Music Education/Voice Performance
from Northwestern University;
two-year diploma from Hochschule fur Musik, Hamburg, Germany;
and a Doctorate of Music Arts,
Voice Performance/ Opera from the University of Iowa.
Throughout Europe, US, and South America,
Sarah has performed as a soloist, recitalist,
master class teacher, and adjudicator.
For the last 23 years she has organized student and faculty
groups to perform in Canada, Ukraine, Poland, Romania,
Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic, and Brazil.
Sarah is the founder and director of
the Montréal International Czech/Slovak Voice Competition,
collaborating with Sharon Resch, a Green Bay arts supporter.
This competition is distinctly noted as being the only
competition promoting Czech/Slovak music in the US.
Sarah has performed with the Green Bay Symphony,
Pro Art Quartet, Czech Nonet, Madison Chamber Orchestra,
and Oshkosh Symphony, and has been a frequent guest artist
on the Chazen Museum Series in Madison.
In 2001 and 2002, Sarah was awarded a Rotary stipend for
university professors and taught for one year at the Academy of
Music in Bratislava, Slovakia.
In 2001, she was invited through the Fulbright Commission
to teach and perform at
the First International Choral Music Conference
at University of São Paulo, Brazil,
and has since been invited for five return visits
as a performer and teacher on their campus.
In 2008, she received a Bronze Award from DelBianco Foundation
in Florence, Italy, recognizing her work with singers and music
faculty across the world.
Sarah also maintains an active private studio in Green Bay,
as well as Sturgeon Bay.
She lives in Door County with her husband, Jay Livingston,
and their dog, Bubba.
They have three grown children: Christian, TJ, and Katarine.
Welcome, Sarah!
[applause]
>> I want to begin by thanking you all for coming.
Special thanks to Dean Sue Mattison and the After Thoughts
committee for asking me to do this talk today.
And a big thank you to Jiebing Chen.
This is our special guest artist...
[applause]
...for taking time out of her busy schedule to appear tonight.
I am also pleased to have this chance to talk about one of my
favorite topics: the celebration of women in the performing arts.
When I arrived on campus in 1988,
[chuckling] quite a while ago, I was fortunate to be invited
to teach a class called Women in the Arts.
It was already on the books and had been started by my
predecessor, Marlys Trunkhill, and had been taught only once.
Since then I re-designed it and have taught it every year
at least once and have been able to come up with some very
interesting summary thoughts about the obstacles, challenges,
and patterns of the lives of women in the performing arts.
Today I am going to share briefly
the lives of five performing artists.
I think that... excuse me...
These are the five artists that I have chosen.
And actually at the end of every class,
at the end of the semester, I have students list about twelve
of their favorite people that we talk about during the semester,
and these were always in the top ranks since 1988.
Hildegard Von Bingen, Clara Schumann, Isadora Duncan,
Antonia Brico, and Marian Anderson.
I would like to start, actually, by just reading this poem
that is by Adrienne Rich.
And it's really always been a wonderful way to introduce
talking about women going into the performing arts.
Either you will
Go through this door
Or you will not go through.
If you go through
There is always the risk
Of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly.
And you must look back.
And let them happen.
If you do not go through,
it is possible to live worthily.
To maintain your attitudes
To hold your position
To die bravely.
But much will blind you,
Much will evade you.
At what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
While this poem can be referring
to immigrants around the world,
it really...
I use it in a sense that it's a step deeper:
that we think of ourselves as immigrants in our everyday life.
But it also applies to the performing artist.
Every performing artist needs to make a decision: am I going to
go through that door to become a performing artist, or not?
Here's a list of just some of the women
that we talk about in my class.
Everyone is assigned a special project
at the end of the semester.
They have to do an eight-page paper and a twenty-minute talk
about them, PowerPoint.
This is just to show you the variety of the time span,
the variety from Country Western singers
to Annie Oakley to Cecilia Bartoli.
There's a whole array of people.
And usually there are about 35 in the class,
so we end up having a really interesting last few weeks
of these presentations.
Here are the five again that I'm going to talk about.
We're going to start with Hildegard Von Bingen,
and actually the music you hear in the background
was composed by Hildegard.
She was a visionary, a musician, a woman composer, a feminist,
and a music therapist of the Middle Ages.
Born 1098 to a noble family,
who pledged their tenth child to the services of God,
she was placed in a convent in Disibodenberg, Germany.
She suffered from severe migraine headaches until about
her 44th year, when she realized that she was having intense
visions from a higher plane.
This is a famous picture that's in her book,
"Scivias." And her assistant, Volmar,
was always writing down her visions.
And here you see her receiving those visions.
Amazingly enough, after she started writing all these things
down, history tells us that her headaches went away.
She felt that is was her mission to have her own convent,
an idea that was unheard of
for a woman at this time.
She eventually moved with her eighteen nuns to her own abbey
at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, Germany.
Here, she really intensified her creative musical output,
composing countless plainchants, and the first opera,
"Ordo Virtutem."
Unfortunately, until recently she was not even mentioned in
standard music history books.
The music history books that I studied for two years with a
professor at Iowa State had no mention of any woman composers.
But that is no more the case today.
Hildegard was also one of the first to use music as a therapy.
To her, music was the only art form that was able
to connect mind, heart, and body--
a theory that is part of modern music therapy today.
She claimed it was a type of unique and comprehensive
medicine, and she clearly understood
the healing power of music.
Today many listeners claim her music
has a purifying effect on them.
She also was an ecologist ahead of her time.
She pinpointed herbs and plants that would remedy
every ailment of the time.
The same remedies we use today.
She was also unique as she recognized the differences
between men and women in a new way.
And she wrote the first description of a female orgasm
in detail. [quiet laughter]
If you are further interested in knowing about Hildegard,
there's a wonderful German film that recently came out,
entitled "Vision."
And it's made by a German film director.
It's really an excellent film, and it is the story of her life.
You can find this at the Brown County Library.
This is another one of the famous pictures
that were in her book "Scivias";
it's a choir of angels.
She believed that anyone who sang,
there was a special place for them in heaven.
I agree with that, too. [chuckling]
[laughter]
Moving on to the next artist, Clara Schumann, 1819 to 1896.
Clara was one of the foremost pianists of her time.
She was one of the first, let alone the first woman,
to play entire solo recitals of the time.
Her fame was at the level of Franz Liszt,
and she was constantly being asked to premiere new works by
Chopin, Brahms, and Robert Schumann, her husband.
She had the longest sustaining performing career
in the nineteenth century, including 1,300 public recitals.
She was often mentioned in history books first as a
pianist, then as the wife of Robert Schumann,
but only in the last twenty years or so is it discussed that
she was a prolific composer.
Interestingly enough, Clara felt that the focus of her life was
being an interpreter of great piano music and an artist,
then a mother, and lastly, a composer.
She married the prolific composer Robert Schumann,
with whom she had eight children.
Then came a series of family tragedies:
Robert's long bout with mental illness and eventual death,
and several of her own children's illnesses.
Three of them had very early deaths.
However, even during this time she continued to perform
throughout Europe and Russia, finding solace and income
in this concertizing.
She had to support her children.
She is now finally being recognized as her wonderful gift
of composing songs as well as piano repertoire.
Later in life she established a very great teaching career
until her death at 87.
Isadora Duncan:
One of Isadora's dancers, Lori Belilove,
describes her as "dancer, adventurer, revolutionist,
ardent defender of the poetic spirit...
She has been one of the most enduring influences
of the twentieth-century culture.
Ironically, the very magnitude of her achievements
as an artist,
as well as the sheer excitement and tragedy of her life,
have tended to dim our awareness
of her originality, depth, and the boldness of her thought.
She was an emancipated woman,
living at the turn-of-the-century,
ahead of her time."
And I find this statement to be totally accurate about her.
Living in a time of Victorian propriety and convention,
high-collared dresses, and very conservative clothing,
she not only rebelled against the formality of ballet but she
propelled forward to lay the groundwork for others to
establish what is modern dance today.
She initiated free-flowing costumes, bare feet for dancing,
and loose hair--
ideas about dance that were totally unconventional for the time.
She offended the different clubs that she would speak to...
she would dance for...
and because she was barefoot
and wore these wonderful loose-fitting garments
they would be totally offended
and say they would never invite her back again. [quiet laughter]
She tried to bring dance back to its roots as a "sacred art",
grounded with the early classical
Greek arts and folk dance.
Her concept that movement was directly connected to nature
and natural forces laid the foundation, again,
for what is our modern dance today.
Not only did she have the mission as a dancer but she
became a champion for women's rights, social revolutionist,
and a moral rebel.
She was the founder of three schools dedicated to teaching
her ideas about dance to young girls.
The first was in Grunewald, Germany,
was the most celebrated group of pupils, some of which,
generations down, are still working and living
on her behalf today.
Another one in Paris prior to World War I,
and the third was founded in Russia at the brink of the
Russian Revolution.
Isadora's private life, however, was scandalous,
as she bore two children out of wedlock by different men --
especially after the tragic death of her two children in a
drowning accident in Paris in 1913.
By the end of her life, her career had diminished to
nothing, and she became famous for her financial woes,
scandalous love life, and public drunkenness.
Her life also ended tragically,
as she died as a result of a freak auto accident
at the age of 50,
catching her scarf in her car door.
She is unmatched as a portrait of the pain and glory
that can come with being an artist
and the undying passion she had for her art.
However, today Isadora's legacy lives on through the Isadora
Duncan Dance Foundation, a non-profit organization based in
New York City, dedicated to keeping the dance legacy and
spirit of Isadora alive.
The company offers hundreds of performances of Isadora's
original choreography as passed down through generations of
Isadora's dancers, as well as workshops and creative programs
that nurture the soul and lift the spirit.
Our next person, Antonia Brico, another phenomenal performing
artist, laid the foundation for women composers-- excuse me --
women conductors to come.
She fought hard against the barriers for women conductors
in the 30's.
From 1947 to 1989, she led the Denver Businessmen's Orchestra,
the only permanent conducting job she ever had.
They did only five performances a year.
During the 50s and 60s she lived in Denver but was conducting
only these five concerts a year.
But in 1971 Judy Collins, as you know,
folk singer and activist from the 70s,
decided to do a film documentary about Antonia's journey as a
woman conductor that was released in 1974 and won all
kinds of prizes.
"Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman."
Critic Marjorie Rosen
called it "an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary
woman... a pioneer female orchestra conductor...
an artist and feminist.
... [The film is] a vision of optimism and courage...
a life of brilliant and thwarted promise.
It is disturbing because it details brilliance misused;
brilliance regarded as novelty.
But ultimately it's uplifting because optimism and commitment
and courage ... have a way of renewing and intoxicating us."
The film really depicts Brico's unshakeable will and
determination and her wonderful sense of humor.
In one scene, she says, "I have five performances a year,
but I'm strong enough to have five a month!
It's like giving a starving person a piece of bread."
She also claimed, interestingly enough,
that the most difficult aspects of her performing and lack of
support was not from men but from women.
After this film came out, she did conduct at the Mostly Mozart
Festival in New York City and concerts with the National
Symphony, Denver and Seattle symphonies,
and several other international venues.
After her retirement in 1981 when she was 79, she was a very,
very active teacher until her death in 1989.
Marian Anderson was a coal-miner's daughter,
growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Her grandparents had been slaves,
and she grew up in a very tight- knit family.
She started singing at the age of six in her church choir,
like many singers, and was often scolded for singing so loudly,
as she was drowning out the other children.
[quiet laughter]
Her love and talent for singing became very obvious
by the age of eight.
The local paper even called her The Baby Contralto.
Her father died when she was 13,
so hardship fell upon her family.
She did small concerts and fundraisers for her family to
have money.
She started studying voice with a lady who lived on her street.
And everyone realized her talent.
Her church wanted to support her lovely voice and took up
collections to send her to the local school,
but she was turned away for one reason and one reason only:
because she was black.
Her church continued to find support for her,
and she finally returned to high school when she was 18.
When anyone heard her sing, they knew she had an incredible
talent, and finally she graduated from high school at
the age of twenty-four.
During this time she met an Italian voice teacher,
Giuseppe Boghetti, who ended up being her mentor for life.
She soon found herself performing in Europe,
mostly in Germany and Scandinavia.
And then the famous agent, Sol Hurok,
heard her and set her up with lots of jobs
throughout Russia and Europe.
With World War II ensuing, she decided to come back to the US
in 1935, only to be forbidden to sing at the Constitutional Hall
in Washington, D.C. by the Daughters of the American
Revolution, who said they were sticking to their rule of white
performers only.
As a result, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR
and arranged for Marian to sing at the Lincoln Memorial
on April 19th, 1939.
There you see it.
She also became the first black American to sing for the
Japanese Imperial Court in 1953.
In 1954 Marian met Rudolf Bing, the director of the Met
in New York City.
He at that time was wanting to break the seventy-one-year-long
history of not having a black American performer.
So, in 1955-56 she broke the color barrier at the
Metropolitan Opera House and performed there.
She then went on to perform in twenty-six concerts in twelve
countries, and was later appointed as a delegate to the
United Nations.
Her final concert was a sell-out at Carnegie Hall, New York City.
Her legacy was really not only her contralto talent but also
her graceful persona and her strong democratic principles,
using her voice to bring people together.
So in conclusion, I want to just look briefly at our classes'
observations that they made.
Over the years we've always talked about at the end of the
semester what are the things, the patterns that you see with
these women performing artists.
So you can just read these.
First one: many of the successful performers came from
musical families or background.
All of the performing artists were dedicated to their art
more than anything else in their life.
They had an undying passion for their work.
Those performing artists with difficult childhoods definitely
had more difficulty in their adult life
and developing their art.
The successful performers never gave up,
even when the obstacle seemed insurmountable.
Most of them-- this is an interesting one--
were told at some point in their life
that they couldn't or shouldn't do it.
All faced financial challenges at one time or another
during their careers.
All of the performers had a role model,
whether it was a family member, teacher, or mentor of some sort,
and needed a community of supporters,
not necessarily family members.
Many had difficulty balancing family/relationship issues
and were married more than once.
Actually, several of them were married more than once.
Many had to make a conscious decision
to have or not to have children.
All of the performers were at some point hindered
or challenged by gender or race.
Most of the performing artists started at a very young age.
Many of the successful performing artists
did not come into their own until their 40s--
which is really a pattern that surprises the students always.
I like it actually. [laughing]
[quiet laughter]
Some of the successful performing artists
were born with exceptional talent,
others had to struggle and work very hard
to develop their talents.
And lastly but not least: some performing artists had great
difficulty coming to terms with their fame, fortune, and talent.
Once they were successful and famous,
that was a problem for them.
So what was happening?
What are the blocks?
What are the problems facing performing artists,
men and women actually?
Food, alcohol, drugs, work, painful love, sex, money,
family/friends sometimes.
And what were some of these challenges?
Julia Cameron in the book "The Artist's Way" summarizes some of
the issues that performing artists have to deal with,
which, really, all people sometimes have to deal with.
One being jealousy, the desire to be better than can choke off
the simple desire to be.
We can't afford to worry who is ahead of us...
competition is like a spiritual drug...
one has to face it head-on,
be honest with themselves and then be honest about what is
making them jealous and how they can get over it.
Taking action is the solution.
Perfectionism.
This is a difficult one.
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.
It's a refusal to let yourself move ahead.
It's not a quest for the best.
It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves,
according to Julie Cameron.
Workaholism.
This is what we call process addiction,
or an addiction to a behavior rather than a substance...
It's difficult to call it, to find it,
and to label it when you are doing it sometimes.
But learning to say no can be the ultimate self-care.
Risk and procrastination and fear,
these are sort of lumped together.
Procrastination really comes out of having fear.
The inability to start is usually not because of laziness,
but it's sometimes related to fear: fear of failure,
fear of success, or fear of abandonment.
And lastly, fame is one of those addictive problems and leaves us
hungry spiritually.
It's a dangerous byproduct of artistic work.
So the real artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline.
It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender
to our creative process.
So it's really important that we approve ourselves just as we are
and nurture ourselves as performing artists.
This brings me to a wonderful example
of this kind of commitment.
It's our incredible guest artist today, Jiebing Chen,
erhu player.
Jiebing was born in 1962 in a time of cultural and political
turmoil in Shanghai.
At age four she was thrust into the Cultural Revolution in
a time when possibilities and promise seemed to ebb
from her world.
But she found a way out: music.
She is the first woman to play the erhu as a solo instrument
with an orchestra.
What a distinction!
She plays all over the world today,
and she truly is an international star.
Actually, her next performance is in May when she appears as a
guest soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in
Shanghai, China.
She has had an amazing journey and career,
and she has generously offered to share it with you today.
So I'm very, very pleased to present to you Jiebing,
a woman who dares!
[applause]
*
[applause]
>> That's me. [laughter]
I'm serious, it's me.
But I have to tell my story
then you can listen
Can you see I wear a uniform?
Can you tell this?
The first one.
And the second one--
I think I was nine years old in the first picture.
The second one maybe a little bit older.
Then the third one is maybe a couple years later.
Okay. [chuckles]
So, I have a little bit, you know,
less too because I don't want to just tell the story for, like,
a whole night.
[chuckle] I have to tell myself don't go too far.
Anyway, doesn't that look very easy, the instrument, to play?
It's very easy.
Actually, there's two string.
Like violin but only two string.
And also when I play
the bow always between two strings.
Also there is no fingerboard.
I think you already see it.
Basically, my fingers
just on the string.
When I touch the string there is no fingerboard, just the string.
Think about the violin, it has a fingerboard,
but I don't have that.
Yeah, it's very easy instrument.
[chuckle] So it is very, I would say,
one of the popular instruments in China still today.
People like to try play this instrument, you know,
young or older they just love this instrument.
But that was not my choice.
Actually, my father picked the instrument for me.
The very beginning, he give me this instrument.
He said you have to be famous.
[chuckling] He told me already.
[laughter]
So, you know, just give you
a little bit of my background,
I born in Shanghai during Cultural Revolution in China.
which at that time it was very, I would say,
very dark time for us.
My father, actually, made to go-- what do you call it?
Camp?
Day camp.
Just because being history professor.
So we ... actually, I have four sister and one brother,
six of us, I was younger one.
I am younger one.
So we didn't have a lot of choice during that time.
My father decide that, you know, don't want to feel victimized by
the circumstances, so he made all of children learn music.
Each of us, we had actually different instruments.
He gave to us, you play this, you play this.
We didn't have any choice.
We started the instruments.
But during that time in China, we didn't have a lot of choice,
for example, like music school.
Or you didn't have a lot choice to go to a professional group,
like a symphony.
They almost all gone because this all belong to cultural
things.
So we didn't have any choice, we were basically just waiting
for some opportunity to come.
So by the time I was nine years old,
this military professional group, like entertaining group,
entertaining for the soldiers.
So they actually come to big city to choose young musicians
to, you know, audition young musicians to go to their group.
But you have to be a soldier first,
but of course you have to have music talent to go there.
So they come to big city to choose one.
I was only nine; I know I was very young,
not allowed to go military because they already tell you
have to be 18 years or older, but I thought I should try.
With my another two sisters, they are older than me,
I was nine and I went there.
I told them I was twelve years old.
This was a little bit better than nine.
[chuckling] When they saw me they said even twelve years old
you are too young to become soldier.
So I say, "Why?
Just listen to us first, you know.
We will perform to the Army and we will do duet or do solo."
After that they decided, they said, "Okay. You go home.
Wait for us for the result."
On the third day, they actually came
to our home and they told my parents that they only want one.
It's the little one, which is me.
So I was very happy, but my parents is not quite happy
because they thought they should choose my sisters.
They are much older than me.
But I was very, very happy and I just tell them,
"I want to go, I want to go."
Finally, my parents decided okay.
If you can go, better than nobody go, right?
They decided okay so you can go with them.
Actually, I laughed--
become soldier when I was nine years old.
So I was very happy because the first thing I am thinking:
I don't need to practice anymore.
[laughter]
Because when I at home, my father actually make me practice
like eight hour a day.
So I have to get up at 5 o'clock and practice before go to school
for years.
Actually, I was totally wrong.
When I become soldier, even I'm musician,
actually work much harder.
They treated me as adult, so I had to practice the instrument,
but not just that.
They also are training you as soldier.
Basically training you.
Anyway, long story short,
I actually spent thirteen years in Navy.
Actually, now I look back
those thirteen years is very important for me.
I learn so much.
I learned how to become independent;
how can be,
you know, best by yourself, you have thinking, right?
After 13 years I left Navy and I come back Shanghai.
I decide to go to school, which I went to Shanghai Conservatory
of Music.
I went there and two years later I had a competition in China.
I got first prize in China,
and after that I become a very busy performance schedule
all over in China and different countries.
Then I become little bit like bored.
What am I going to do next?
I'm still very young, in the 20s.
So I want to learn something,
and also I want to do something different.
So I try to play some new music on my instrument, you know,
but during that time people not very open-mind,
especially my teacher.
He think I'm crazy.
[chuckling].
So I feel that, you know, it take a long time if I want to do
something very new in China during that time,
so I decide come to America.
Actually, during that time it wasn't that easy to come here,
but also because the time.
So finally I came to America and I actually went to
University of New York at Buffalo.
You know, there are many Chinese too.
[chuckling] No, I'm just kidding.
There's no Chinese that time. [laughter]
I went there and...
I went there and I couldn't speak any English at that time.
I just want to tell one story.
So I came to America that day when I went to Customs
I totally didn't understand what they telling me.
In fact, I forgot.
Usually you go to overseas or you come to America you go
through Customs.
Then after that you continue if you change a flight you need to
bring your luggage with you then you continue, right?
They told me everything, but I totally can't understand.
I didn't do anything I just went to next flight.
So by the time I arrived Buffalo, New York,
I realize all my luggage is gone.
I didn't find it.
But most important, my instrument because I packed six
of them, standing instruments in one case.
I thought what am I going to do without these instruments?
I realized because I didn't take the instrument with me through
the Customs my luggage and my instruments is gone
So of course a week later, actually, they found for me.
[chuckling] Another thing, I actually was thinking,
"I'm going to New York, that means New York City."
So one month later, finally, when I can speak little bit of
English, I asked my teacher, I said,
"Where are all these high-rise building?"
[laughter]
Anyway, so I finally graduated with my Master's degree in same
school two and a half years later.
Then I decided to move to San Francisco.
You know, I watch all these movies and I thought at least
they have Chinese food over there.
[chuckling]
I went there and I decided to move there and then
after that I started to play my instrument.
I have a lot of opportunity to play with
all the jazz musicians, Indian musicians, you know,
all this kind of music I have never played before--
on this instrument.
All this story, it's a very short story actually, you know.
I just want to tell you I learned from my father that I
can control and change my own life even if I cannot control
the circumstances around me
when mindset is more important than circumstances.
Another thing is take accountability and accept
responsibility of your own life.
There are many opportunities and the possibilities
that are around you, around us.
We need to look beyond what is just in front or next to us.
So, now I'm here.
I'm sure some of you want to know why I am here in Green Bay.
I guess there must be a lot Chinese here.
[chuckling] [laughter]
Actually, in 2003 I was in San Francisco and met my husband.
Because my husband work here,
works for Associate Bank,
four years, I think about four years ago,
we moved here in Green Bay.
So that's my story! [chuckling]
[applause]
*
[applause]