Why is going first at something always a struggle? Even highly talented musicians know the feeling!
Amy Beach, Ethel Smyth, and Gustav Mahler all experienced the distinct difficulties of going first. Beach was the first American woman to premiere a major symphony. Smyth was the first woman of any nationality to premiere a work at the Metropolitan Opera. And the Budapest premiere of Mahler’s First Symphony was such a disaster that he kept revising it for years. Delivered by an epic procrastinator terrified of being the first at anything, this lecture explores how charting new territory changed the lives of these composers and continues to shape how we hear them today.
This pre-concert talk directly complements the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra performance at 7:30pm in Stude Concert Hall. While the talk is free and open to the public (no tickets required), tickets are required for the orchestra performance and can be reserved here.
⸺
The new Music and Ideas Series explores the depths of musicology through a lineup of talks by distinguished experts and leading scholars in the field. "Going First is Always Hard" marks the inaugural talk of this new series organized by the Shepherd School of Music's musicology department. Explore more here.
Artists
Douglas W. Shadle is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. He is the author of two books—Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016) and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford, 2021)—and has won publication awards from ASCAP, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. His other writings have appeared in the New York Times and the program booklets of performing organizations around the world. Shadle’s current project is a biography of composer Florence B. Price for Oxford University Press’s Composers Across Cultures series.
