Women of Notes

Hilary Poriss joins me for a fun and wide-ranging conversation about 19th century Diva Extraordinaire, composer, pianist, salonniere, and voice teacher, Pauline Viardot who was born into a very musical family in Paris in 1821.Hilary Poriss’ primary research interests are in the areas of 19th-century Italian and French opera, performance practice, diva culture, and the aesthetics of 19th-century musical culture. She has published four books: Gioacchino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Oxford University Press), Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford University Press), Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press), and of The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press). Her newest book project, a biography about the nineteenth-century diva Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), will be published by the University of Chicago Press.Poriss’ articles and reviews have appeared in Music & Letters, Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Verdi Forum, Journal of British Studies, and other musicological books and journals. She has held fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She frequently presents her work in scholarly and public venues. Upcoming appearances include a keynote lecture at the interdisciplinary symposium “Drawing the Line: Race, Gender, Ethics, and the Arts” (St. Anselm College) and a colloquium lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her article, “A Queen of 19th-Century Opera Gets New Attention,” was published by the New York Times.Poriss teaches a variety of courses at Northeastern University, Poriss teaches a variety of courses. She has taught previously at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University.womenofnotes.substack.com

Composer Linda Catlin Smith joins host Sandra Mogensen ahead of Catlin Smith's world premiere of her new work, The Horizon with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on September 24 (26 & 27). Listen in for an exploration of the creative life and an in-depth look at the creative process involved in composing.Linda Catlin Smith grew up in New York and lives in Toronto. Her music has been commissioned and/or performed by manysoloists and ensembles worldwide including: Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tectonics Festival (Glasgow), Huddersfield Festival,Vancouver, Edmonton and Victoria Symphony Orchestras, Tafelmusik, Tapestry New Opera, Bozzini Quartet, Arraymusic,Continuum, Thin Edge Collective, Chamber Choir Ireland, and soloists Eve Egoyan, Philip Thomas, Satoko Inoue, CherylDuvall, piano; Colin Tilney and Wesley Shen, harpsichord; Elinor Frey, Baroque cello; Milan Pala and Maya Bennardo, violin;and many others. Recordings include: The Plains (Cheryl Duvall), Dark Flower (Thin Edge Collective,) Thought and Desire,(Eve Egoyan), and six recordings: Dirt Road, Drifter, Wanderer, Among the Tarnished Stars, Ballad, and Flowers of Emptinesswith the label another timbre. Her string trio Meadow and her choral work Folio were recorded in Ireland by the LouthContemporary Music Society. In 2019, her orchestral work, Nuages, (commissioned by the BBC Proms), was premiered at RoyalAlbert Hall, and received its Canadian premiere in 2023 with the Vancouver Symphony. Many of her compositions weresupported by commissions through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and theLaidlaw Foundation. Her works are available through Composers Edition (UK) and the Canadian Music Centre. In addition tocomposing, Linda has taught composition privately and at Wilfrid Laurier University (1999-2020). She was awarded honorarymembership to the ISCM, and an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of Victoria in 2023.www.catlinsmith.comFor more information go to https://womenofnotes.substack.com and consider subscribing for free, or with a paid subscription as a way to support this podcast.

Molly McCann, aka Henselpushers, is a music publisher/editor/arranger dedicated to making all of Fanny Hensel’s works freely accessible to the world. Since starting henselpushers.org in 2020, McCann has published approximately 200 free PDF scores of Fanny Hensel's original compositions, and has published several arrangements of Hensel’s works for learners or alternate instrumentation. Please follow Henselpushers on Patreon at patreon.com/c/HenselPushers. McCann is also co-organizing Henselfest, a multi-day event of talks and music celebrating the life and work of Fanny Hensel. The inaugural Henselfest will bring together international Hensel scholars and performers and take place in April 2027 in Berkeley, California. For more information, or to join the mailing list, donate, or volunteer, please visit henselfest.org. We talk about the Hensel Pushers project in depth, how it came about and exactly what it offers. Of course we also explore the remarkable and much-too-short life of Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) (1805-1847). A few matters needed debunking, so we took care of that as well. For more information and to listen to some of Fanny's music, go to womenofnotes.substack.com where you can subscribe for free and become a part of the Women of Notes community. An opportunity to help fund the project is also available there for a paid subscription. You'll get advance notice about the episodes as well as other perks.

Sarah Fritz is a musicologist, mezzo-soprano, and music historian who’s contributed to the New York Times, given pre-concert talks for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and appears in the PBS documentary, Mozart’s Sister. She runs the Clara Schumann Channel platform, dedicated to educating the public about women composers, and performs with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Symphonic Choir, including an appearance in the choir scene of the movie Maestro. Fritz teaches on the faculty of the Westminster Conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey.We discuss how Clara Schumann’s compositions deserve to be heard and studied on their own merits. Clara’s achievements were often discussed in relation to her husband Robert Schumann, even though she was internationally famous and hugely influential in her own right. Then there is all the conjecture about whether she and Johannes Brahms had an affair? This episode goes into depth about all that Clara Schumann was, as well as debunking some of the long-held narratives about her.Be a member of the Women of Notes community by subscribing for free towomenofnotes.substack.com where you can also hear the music of this episode's composer.You can also support the making of this podcast with a paid subscription, where you'll get info ahead of time and periodic perks.

Episode 0: The Women of Notes Trailer with your host Sandra Mogensen, who you may know from the 'Piano Music She Wrote' project. Deep dives on the lives, stories, creative processes, and music of women who compose and women who composed. Weekly episodes of Season 1 begin on September 13, 2026. Be sure to follow us here, and subscribe for free at womenofnotes.substack.com so that you don't miss anything. To help fund the costs of creating this project, become a paid substack subscriber. You can also find us on instagram @womenofnotespodcast