Women in the Shadow of the Canon: Forgotten Masterpieces for Organ. A concert as part of the 9th Festival of Restored Music

The Festival of Recovered Music is an event dedicated to music that, for various reasons, has disappeared from our concert halls, our collective memory, and our everyday cultural experience. We bring forgotten works, old performance traditions, unknown composers, and musical worlds—which for years remained hidden in archives, manuscripts, or local memory—back to life. Alongside these rediscovered masterpieces, we also present artists who creatively develop old traditions and give them new meaning. Why Szczecin? The history of our city is a history of constant encounters, migrations, and the intermingling of cultures. Here, every kind of music can feel at home. The program Women in the Shadow of the Canon presents the work of female composers whose pieces have long remained outside the mainstream concert circuit. The repertoire includes works composed in various decades of the 20th and 21st centuries, yet they share one common element: marginalization that has no artistic justification. Most of the female composers featured in the program were active, respected, and published in their own time, yet their music has not secured a lasting place in the organ canon. Works by Joan Tower, Mary Howe, Florence Price, and Libby Larsen represent the American organ tradition, in which the instrument is combined with concert idioms, symphonic gestures, and the sonic intensity characteristic of the 20th century. Tower’s Power Dance and Larsen’s Aspects of Glory cycle demonstrate modern thinking about texture and an approach to rhythm; Howe’s Elegy and Price’s Passacaglia and Fugue bring to life the language of composers who, in their time, operated on the margins of musical institutions. Grażyna Bacewicz appears in the program in a role rare for her—that of a composer of organ music—with Esquisse serving as an example of her interest in sonic concentration and concise gesture. Nadia Boulanger’s works reveal a lesser-known creative side of her, far removed from the stereotype of the “great pedagogue.” Jeanne Demessieux’s Te Deum, on the other hand, is one of the most important examples of 20th-century virtuoso organ literature—a work that, despite its exceptional quality, still remains on the fringes of the repertoire. The concert highlights just how vast, diverse, and still underrecognized the legacy of women composers is. The selection of works not only demonstrates the breadth of aesthetics and techniques but also points to the need to revise the organ canon, in which women’s work remains underrepresented.