Beatrice Venezi’s BLOG – Nadia, Sofija, Björk, and soundtracks. From a closed lid to an Oscar.
There is one sound in music that nobody would ever want to hear: the sound of a piano lid closing. Not just for a moment. But forever.
Paris, 1918. Nadia Boulanger is thirty-one years old, and has already won almost everything there is to win: second place, at a very young age, in the Prix de Rome, achieved by defying a member of the jury, Camille Saint-Saëns, who considered women’s participation in music «a freak of nature»; the close friendship of Stravinsky, who sent her his scores even before they were published; a career as a composer that everyone in Paris now took for granted. Then her younger sister, Lili — the more talented of the two, they say, capable of reading music even before she could read the alphabet — died at the age of twenty-four. And from that day on, Nadia closed the lid of her piano and never composed again.
Last time, I promised you that we’d be moving into the 20th century. Here we are. Today we’ll be telling the story of five women who responded differently to the same question: what do you do when your voice can’t be heard in the way you’d expected?
What do you do with a gift when it suddenly ceases to belong to you, and where does talent end up when it can no longer take the form you expected?
Nadia, for example, decides that from that moment on, her task is to spread her sister’s music: to play it, to make it known, to keep it alive. And, without meaning to, she becomes something else: the greatest composer in the history of Western music.
At 36 Rue Ballu, she teaches every Wednesday. Strict, demanding, a «gentle tyrant» to her pupils, «Baba Yaga» — the witch from the Russian fairy tale — to some others. And her pupils, over the course of seventy years of teaching, include names we all know today: George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones. One thousand two hundred musicians who came to Paris from all over the world to sit in a semicircle before her. She would never write a textbook. She preferred to repeat a single principle to her students:
«Encouraging people to express themselves.»
To encourage people to express themselves. Not to teach them what to say, but to help them find, within themselves, the way to say it. That, if you think about it, is the difference between a teacher and a master. And it is also the profound and authentic meaning of the verb ‘to educate’.
She also became a Conductor; one of the first women in the world to do so at that level, in Boston as well as in Paris, at a time when the mere sight of a woman holding a baton was enough to make entire orchestras turn up their noses. Nadia won them all over, one by one, through the sheer authority of her musicality alone. When asked what it means to be a woman on the podium, she replies without hesitation, and her answer undermines the question itself:
«I’ve been a woman for just over fifty years and I’ve got over my initial surprise. As far as conducting an orchestra is concerned, this is a job where gender is irrelevant, because either you’re capable of doing it or you’re not.»
She was also a much-loved lecturer, able to talk about music whilst accompanying herself on the piano with an elegance that one of her pupils, an American named Leonard Bernstein, would never forget. She died at the age of ninety-two. In one of the last videos featuring her, her voice already faltering, she utters a sentence that is worth reading twice:
«I don’t know why I love music. I don’t know what music is.»
Ninety years spent immersed in music, and yet the question remains unanswered. Perhaps this is precisely the mark of someone who has truly understood something: never ceasing to be amazed by it.
And whilst in Paris a door is closing, a continent away, behind what will soon become an Iron Curtain, another little girl is learning exactly the opposite: never to close anything.
Sofija Gubajdulina was born in 1931 in Čistopol’, in what is now Tatarstan, just as Stalin was beginning to sow the terror of the purges. There were no records at home, nor were either of her parents musicians: just a piano bought with great difficulty, which her older sister played and which Sofija secretly ‘tortured’, trying to coax something new out of it. By the age of five, she had already decided what she would do with her life, and she said so with a simplicity that spoke volumes:
«There’s far too little music in the world. We need more!»
She studies, graduates, and then, with her documents already in hand, ventures into territories that no one in her homeland is permitted to enter. She is a woman in a man’s world, deeply religious in an officially atheist state, of Tatar origin in a country that would prefer a single, unified identity. In short, she is the exact opposite of everything the regime approves of.
Along the way, she has one mentor who is more important than the others: Dmitri Shostakovich, who paid dearly for his freedom to experiment before she did; denounced by *Pravda* with a headline that is in itself a verdict: Chaos instead of music. When he recognises the same rebellious streak in this pupil, he gives her just one piece of advice:
«Carry on down that wrong path!»
Sofija listens, and carries on. Her compositions are accused of being «noisy rubbish, rather than true innovation». In 1979, she was officially blacklisted by the Union of Soviet Composers. Blacklisted: it is the word that still appears in every biography of him today.
In 1973, she was attacked by a stranger who tried to strangle her. And as she felt herself suffocating, the only thing she could say to her attacker was:
«Why so slowly?»
If he has to kill her, let him do it quickly, rather than slowly preventing her from dialling the number. Frightened by that question, he lets go and runs away.
Unable to make a living from her own concert compositions – having been blacklisted as she was – Sofija found the only loophole the regime had left open to her: film scores. Music for documentaries, regarded as a second-rate genre, where nobody kept too close a watch.
In 1980, he wrote Offertory, the violin concerto that cemented her reputation once and for all. The manuscript was smuggled out of the country, just as was once done with Doctor Zhivago; in 1981 it was performed in Vienna, and was a triumph. The cellist Rostropovich, on seeing the score for the first time, described it as follows:
«It looked like a drawing an engineer might have produced – the design for a Concorde. There were countless lines, all meticulously drawn.»
In the end, the wrong path takes her further than any right one ever could, so much so that in 2013 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice.
Let’s stay in the 20th century, but take a completely different path — from the Soviet underground to a hippy commune in Iceland, where an eleven-year-old girl released her first record: covers of the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, paid for with the family’s savings. Her name is Björk.
The album that the whole world will come to know as his debut, Debut, released in 1993, after a sixteen-year career: even here, in this slight paradox, lies the essence of Björk. Before the Sugarcubes, before striking out on her own, her life had always been spent as part of a group, and it was only when she decided to remain the sole protagonist of her own music that the world took notice of that petite, raven-haired Icelandic woman. First and foremost, her voice: the one with which she experiments, attacks, soothes, and with which she rejects every label — rock, techno, jazz, classical, Icelandic folk, pop — blending it all together to create a new language unlike anything else.
In 1997, it was released Homogenic, the album that, more than any other, transforms his homeland into music:
«The strings are the snow; the rhythm, the volcanoes.»
Music that becomes synonymous with nature: with shifting ice, with breaths rising from the earth.
His music brings together worlds that might seem incompatible: erudite references to Ravel, the influence of Stockhausen and Messiaen – whom she studied as a young girl – symphony orchestras, and, alongside these, samples, synthesisers and ever-newer technologies, all harnessed in the service of a single, simple yet elusive ambition: to make music. It is perhaps this, more than anything else, that marks her uniqueness: never choosing between physical and electronic instruments, between classical tradition and the avant-garde, but holding them together in a single voice unlike any other.
In 2000 – before Björk became Björk – she wrote the soundtrack for Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, and won the Palme d’Or for Best Actress at Cannes. It was an excruciating experience, she would say: «Music is joy; the film was pain.» That very path — film soundtracks, the last refuge for those who could compose nothing else — would, decades later, for another woman, become, despite the pain, an absolute triumph.
For a long time, composing film scores was another field dominated almost entirely by men. And here too, as everywhere else in this series, someone had to be the first.
Her name is Rachel Portman; she was born in 1960 in West Sussex, and in 1997 she became the first woman in history to win an Oscar for Best Original Score. The film is Emma, adapted from Jane Austen, the author who, two centuries earlier, wrote of heroines trapped by the social conventions of their time and who, despite everything, never gave up entirely. There is a touch of irony in this: an Austen character who, almost two hundred years after the novel was written, breaks a taboo very similar to the one her author had written against. As Portman herself recalls, before her, there were hardly any female composers in the industry.
Hers is an old-fashioned talent, and she proudly embraces it: simple, intimate melodies that stick in your head, written for a real orchestra, in the tradition of Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota and Henry Mancini. She describes herself as a ‘cantastorie’ — a storyteller, but through music. We find her in Chocolat, in The rules of the cider house, in Oliver Twist, in Mona Lisa Smile: that same conviction that a melody, if it’s the right one, doesn’t need to hide behind anything else.
Twenty-three years after Portman, another woman takes to the same stage to collect the same award, but she comes from a completely different musical world. Her name is Hildur Guðnadóttir; she is Icelandic, like Björk, a cellist even before she became a composer, and it was on the evening of 9 February 2020 that she lifted the Oscar for the soundtrack to Joker. She is only the third woman to have achieved this in the entire history of cinema. And her relationship with her home island is the exact opposite of Björk’s: whilst Björk has always returned to Iceland in search of refuge, Hildur left never to return.
And it is also the antithesis of Portman’s music: whilst hers tells a story through melodies, Hildur’s creates atmospheres.
For Chernobyl, the miniseries that won her a Grammy and an Emmy, does not use a single traditional instrument — she records the sounds of the actual nuclear power station where the series was filmed, in Lithuania, and transforms them, distorts them, and rearranges them, adding just one human element: her own voice. In Joker It is the cello that engages in a dialogue – or rather, a clash – with a 90-piece symphony orchestra that grows, minute by minute, until it suffocates it. Just as, on screen, anger suffocates Arthur Fleck before he becomes the Joker. The theme is often played on a halldorophone: an electroacoustic cello devised in 2005 by an Icelandic luthier in collaboration with Hildur herself.
Sampling, physical and digital sound blend together, with noise elevated to the status of musical material.
Two women, two contrasting styles, the same door finally opened. And if you think back to Sofija Gubajdulina, forced by her own regime to write music for documentaries because it was the only freedom she had left, you realise that, before it was a triumph, that door was, for some, a gilded cage. It took decades for that very same profession to become, for two other women, a moment of recognition on the world’s most photographed stage.
Five very different stories, but a single thread running through them all: what happens when a woman’s voice finds – or fails to find – a way to be heard. Nadia has locked her own voice away under a lid, and has devoted her life to bringing out the voices of others. Sofija had to smuggle her voice across a border, hidden inside a rolled-up sheet of music. Björk never confined that voice to a single genre; she let it burst out in every possible direction. Rachel and Hildur, finally, took that voice all the way to the stage of the Dolby Theatre, in front of the whole world watching.
There are other stories in this book that deserve their own space: Maria Callas, Martha Argerich, Jacqueline du Pré. But those, as always, are a story for another time.
For now, just bear this in mind: the sound of a lid closing is never, truly, the end of a story. It’s just the point at which the voice changes direction.
Beatrice Venezi