Winter 2023

Below: Ruth Palmer and
pianist Alessio Enea in ‘Scoring
Suffrage’ at Florence’s Lyceum.
Photo by Marco Berni
in the style of a European Salon. Its intimate
size and salon-like atmosphere seem ideal for
the nineteenth and early twentieth-century
repertoire of ‘Scoring Suffrage’. Ruth had brought
her violin with her and set about testing the
space’s acoustics. We were soon rolling up two
rugs on the original wooden floor and pulling
back a heavy curtain behind the grand piano.
After another sound check, Ruth seemed satisfied
with the result, although the improvement in
resonance was lost on my untrained ears.
‘Scoring Suffrage’ was conceived not solely as
a musical event, rather, it is a weaving together
of the music, literature and personal stories of
women whose lives and careers overlapped
with women’s suffrage movements in Europe.
Through the narration of letters, poetry and other
writings, Ruth’s partner in this project, curator and
academic Dr Claudia Tobin (see feature on p. 14),
provides the context in which woman composers
were working and creating the soundtrack that
accompanied women’s growing political and
expressive freedom. The third member of the
team was London-based pianist Alessio Enea,
who accompanied Ruth in the performance.
On this day in the Hayward’s cafe, we would
talk about the works of the six female composers
featured in ‘Scoring Suffrage’: Fanny Mendelssohn
(1805-1847), Clara Schumann (1819-1896), Ethel
Smyth (1858-1944), Lili Boulanger (1893-1918),
Florence Price (1887-1953) and Gabriela Montero
(b. 1970). A single male composer, Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937), made it on to the programme by virtue
of the significance of two women to his work.
The first piece in the programme was Fanny
Mendelssohn’s ‘Adagio’, composed when she was
just 18. Fanny is said to have excelled as a composer
of short musical forms. This is not surprising
given that, unlike her brother, the composer Felix
Mendelssohn who travelled throughout Europe
8 Restoration Conversations • Winter 2023