Women’s History Month
Did you know that in the old days, women were prohibited to perform in public?
Did you know that women were not being included in the word “person” until 1927?
Did you also know that female composers were totally overlooked?
This month is women’s history month in the U.S., U.K. and in Australia. We would like to share our world premiere performance of Cathy Kuo, a Taiwanese female composer who wrote a piece for our debut at the Taiwan National Concert Hall back in 2019.
When we approached Cathy to ask if she would be willing to write a piece for us, she right away said yes! She was excited, and she asked if we had any requirements for the piece. We left it all up to her, anything she would like would be fine with us, and we were excited! She remembered when I (Clare) first met her at U.B.C. in the doctoral program, I had just been engaged to Scott, and I was sharing our stories about how we met, how he proposed…you know, girl talk stuff! So, she decided to write The Meeks Suite to document those moments, the development of our relationship from meeting to marriage, for us.
The first movement is entitled “Prologue”, which I believe she mentioned it’s about when Scott and I first met. It’s about the freshness and the excitement of two people who find each other interesting and who learn about each other for the first time. I love how Cathy started the piece calmly, with a little wondering leading into an open feel, just like in an usual daily life, you meet this person, and it opens up a new chapter in your life kind of feel. There are arpeggios running up and down that sounds like the butterfly feeling to me.
The second movement is “Fascination”, which by the title, I guess it’s very descriptive. Fascination is definitely a very interesting movement with the constant change of harmonies and colors from the beginning to end. Thinking back to those moments, when you are fascinated, it really is a combination of feelings of excitement and curiosity… and many more, but I can’t think of some more good words at the moment. You know what I mean! ( :P ) The constant change of mood perfectly portraits those moments of fascination we shared.
The last movement, the Rondo, was really about me according to Cathy. We shared one class, and our TA offices were next to each other, so we did spend quite some time together at school. (Ah, the student days are coming back to me as I type this article!) Because of that, Cathy knows me a lot more in depth than Scott. In this movement, she mentioned how the way she sees me is that I seem to be always happy on the outside, but there are also other sides of me such as the sensitive side, the tender side…etc. So she tried to show the many sides of me with different motives in different sections of the music. It’s very interesting to see myself in a piece of music definitely!
We hope that you will enjoy the beautiful work of Cathy’s and her perspective of The Meeks!
