Harpist Elisabeth Remy Johnson’s New Recording ‘Quest’ Highlights Works By Women Composers

“About half of the pieces on the album are transcriptions. All of the historic composers for the pieces were originally written for the piano. So when I transcribe something from piano to harp, I have to make sure that it’s going to still sound like the piece as the composer intended it. So some things are going to work great, some things are not going to work well. And if I, at any point, even if I’ve spent hours working on it, I really try to have the discipline to make that call, and the ones that don’t work are not on this album.”

“What makes a piece work on the harp, versus on the piano has to do with the way the strings of the harp vibrate, and how we go from musical key to musical key. So for example… if I saw [a work] that had all this big, bombastic, exciting stuff in the lowest registers with lots of repeated notes, even as fun as that might be for a pianist to play, that’s going to be a big, buzzy mess on the harp.”

Rediscovering Mel Bonis, of whom Remy Johnson’s a ‘superfan’:

“I remembered, at the Rio Harp Festival, I heard a trio play a piece by Mel Bonis… but I had no idea it was a woman. And that’s sort of what she was working with, that’s why she changed her name from Mélanie to Mel, so that she wouldn’t be rejected because she was a woman in the early 20th century.”

“She lived two lives; she was Madame Domange, the wife, the mother, and they were a very wealthy, prominent French family in Paris at that point. On the other side, she composed all these beautiful, beautiful works,” said Remy Johnson. “Though she did not enjoy the spotlight of performance, so she turned almost all of her energy towards composition instead… Near the end of her life, she said to one of her younger daughters that not hearing her music performed was one of the greatest sorrows of her life.”

The underrepresentation of women in classical music that inspired “Quest”:

“Some of the music I had already started becoming familiar with; for example, I included two Mel Bonis transcriptions on a recent concert, and I really had started to delve into the composers that we have ignored for too long,” said Remy Johnson. “There’s an extreme bias, as I’m sure many of your listeners are familiar with – when they go to a concert, chances are that the composers listed are all men; chances are, they are all white men. And I think it’s important for all of us – performers and audience members, and anybody who loves music or, quite frankly, any field – to make sure that more voices are being listened to, and presented, and appreciated.”

“In March of 2020… all of a sudden, I had all of this time available… and a bunch of half-started projects, delving into these women composers,” said Remy Johnson. “So first I started recording one selection a month, of a piece that I had newly transcribed, or a piece that I had found online that was new to me, just to try to get the music out there. And I started off by calling that, the ‘Even-ing Standard’… I call it a project to even out, and open up, the concept of standard repertoire.”

“The genesis of that project was actually one of my February 2020 recitals… afterward a harpist friend said to me, ‘Oh, I loved the program, but do you ever play the standard repertoire?’ And I took a moment and then I thought, ‘Well, that’s the whole point. This should have been standard repertoire all along.’”