QUINES
Celebrating Scotland's Women in Chamber-Music and Art-song
‘QUINES’ is a brand-new project celebrating the chamber music and art-songs of Scottish female composers. It features works by Helen Hopekirk (1856-1945), Isobel Dunlop (1901-1975), Marie Dare (1902 1976) and Claire Liddell (b. 1937), four extraordinary women whose music has not previously received the attention it deserves.
At the heart of the programme is a newly commissioned song-cycle by Lisa Robertson, which sets texts from Gerda Stevenson’s QUINES poetry collection, written in the voices of neglected women from Scottish history.
Read more about it in our Press Pack --->
Quines: The Song Cycle
Gerda Stevenson's poetry collection 'QUINES' was the inspiration for this project. It celebrates forgotten female stories from Scottish history, stories from women of all walks of life: artists, scientists, activists, campaigners, writers, warriors, singers are all brought to life in Gerda's captivating and direct poetry.
Working composer Lisa Robertson and Gerda, we chose 5 women from the collection to bring together in a song-cycle which would celebrate female Scots voices. Those women are:
1. Mary Garden - opera singer
2. Violet Jacob - writer and poet
3. Williamina Paton Fleming - astronomer
4. Mary MacPherson, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran - bard and poet
5. Moira Shearer - dancer and hollywood star
Find out more about these five incredible women below.
Commissioned with support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Hope Scott Trust.
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Image Credit: Lisa Robertson
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Image Credit: Gerda Stevenson
Mary Garden (1874-1967)
Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen, where she spent the first 9 years of her life. In 1883 the family moved to Massachusetts, and ended up in Chicago in 1888, when Mary was 14 years old. It was in Chicago that she began her singing training, studying with the celebrated teacher and American soprano Sarah Robinson-Duff. By 1896, she had moved to Paris to continue her training, and by 1900 was singing title roles in the Opéra-Comique de Paris.
Mary had a rich and celebrated opera career with many notable collaborations with famous composers and Opera companies. She worked with and regularly performed operas by Massenet, and is perhaps most known for her premier of Débussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and her performance as Salomé in Richard Strauss's opera, which at the time was a contentious work.
Her later career in the United States made her a household name in America, and she eventually ended up in charge of the Chicago Opera House. After her retirement from the stage, she spent the last 30 years of her life back in Scotland, in Inverurie, just outside of Aberdeen.
An early recording of Mary Garden, with Débussy at the piano
An interview with Mary Garden in 1954.
Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. :: Mary Garden (1877-1967) as Mélisande (Half length portrait, facing right) in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, ca. 1908. Copyright 4 April 1908 by Davis & Eickmeyer. | source: Library of Congress
Violet Jacob (1863 - 1946)
Violet Jacob was a poet and novelist who spent her early years in the House of Dun, in Forfarshire. She was born into an aristocratic family, and most of her education came from the House's extensive library, where she developed an early interest in literature and art. Violet seems to have led a double life as both one of 'suffocating responsibility', while also spending a lot of time with the farm labourers on the estate - 'aye in and oot amo’ the ploomen’s feet at the Mains o’ Dun'.
In 1894 she married Arthur Otway Jacob, an Irish major in the British Army, who was posted to India, where she spent five years - her Diaries and letters from India 1895-1900 document her time there. Several other postings followed, and the family spent time in South Africa and Egypt, then living in several garrison in England. She returned to Kirriemuir in Angus in 1936, after the death of her husband, and it was there that she spent the last 10 years of her life.
The family suffered a terrible blow when their only son, Harry, born in 1895, died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Violet wrote of it in her poem 'To A.H.J':
Past life, past tears, far past the grave,
The tryst is set for me,
Since, for our all, your all you gave
On the slopes of Picardy.
Read a very well-written brief biography of Helen here , on the Scottish Poetry Library's website, which also introduces some of her poetry and writings.
By Henry Harris Brown, 1948
Credit: Angus Council. Public Domain image.
Williamina Paton Fleming (1857-1911)
The story of how Williamina Paton Stevens came to make her contributions to the astronomy is an incredible one. Born in Dundee, one of the six children of Mary Walker (gilder) and Robert Stevens (carver), she was a sharp and intelligent pupil at school, and became a student-teacher at the age of 14.
When she was only 20 years old, she married James Orr Fleming, an accountant from Dundee, and gave birth to their only son, Edward. The next year, in 1878, they emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts. A few months later, James had abandoned Williamina and their baby son, and she was left alone, at the age of 21 on the other side of the world from her family.
She found work as a maid in the household of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory. Pickering soon hired her to work in an administrative role at the Observatory, but her role soon developed as she was placed in charge of the Henry Draper Catalogue, identifying and classifying stars from photographic plates.
In 1898 she was appointed the first female Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard, and throughout her career made many notable discoveries of new stars, nebulae and novae, including the famous Horsehead Nebula.
She was a strong advocate for women in science, and aware of the value of her own work - in a diary entry she noted:
I do not intend this to reflect upon the Director's judgement, but feel that it is due to his lack of knowledge regarding the salaries received by women in responsible positions elsewhere. I am told that my services are very valuable to the Observatory, but when I compare the compensation with that received by women elsewhere, I feel that my work cannot be of much account.
- Williamina P. Fleming, April 18, 1900
See Williamina's journal here.
Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (1857-1911), circa 1890s. (Courtesy Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard College Observatory.) Public Domain.
Mary MacPherson, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran
(1821-98)
Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Big Mary of the Songs), née Mary MacDonald, has sometimes been called the unofficial bard of the Highland Land League. Her poetry became strongly associated with the Highland Clearances and the Crofter's War.
She was born at Skeabost on the Isle of Skye and moved to Inverness in 1846. She married shoemaker Isaac MacPherson and had five children with him. On his death in 1871 she worked as a domestic service for a British Army officer, where she was then accused of stealing her employer's clothing. This charge, which she fiercly denied all her life, and the sentence of 40 days imprisonment, proved to be the sparking point for Màiri's poetry and song to emerge, in her 50s.
S e na dh’fhulaing mi de thamailt a thug mo bhàrdachd beò (‘It’s the injustice I suffered that brought my poetry to life’)
She went on to live in Glasgow, then Greenock, studying nursing and obstetrics at the Royal Infirmary for 5 years, and going on to work as a midwife. She was an active part of the Gaelic musical scene in Glasgow, and in 1882 returned to Skye at the age of 61, the year of The Battle of the Braes - a major act of resistance against the evictions taking place at the time.
Màiri's poetry and songs are full of fire, outrage and challenge against the huge changes that were taking place across the Gàidhealtachd during her lifetime. Many of them ring true today.
Read this excellent article on Màiri's poetry in the context of the Clearances and Land Resistance.
Mary MacPherson. From the archive of 'Am Baile',
Highland Folk Museum.
Moira Shearer (1926-2006)
On January 17th 1926 Moira Shearer was born in Morton Lodge, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. When she was 5 years old, her family moved to Ndola, now in Zambia, then in the British protectorate Northern Rhodesia, where her father worked as a civil engineer. It was there that she received her first dance lessons, and on the family's return to Scotland in 1936 she was taken down to London and joined the dance studio of of Russian ballet master Nicholas Legat. After three years there, she joined the famous Sadler Well's Ballet School aged 14.
The First World War led to ups and downs in her career and training, but in 1942 she joined the main company of Sadler Well's and began a flurry of leading roles, creating many of them for the first time.
Her ballet career lasted until 1953, when she retired from dancing, but in 1948 she had launched onto the international film stage in her role as Victoria Page in the sensational film, The Red Shoes, the story of which centre's around a production of 'The Ballet of the Red Shoes', based on a fairytale about a pair of red shoes that grant the wearer superhuman skill at dance, but which cannot be taken off until the wearer has danced herself to death.
Although primarily known for her starring role in this film, as a ballet dancer Moira was praised and celebrated for her ability to marry a superb grace and technique with a vivid sense of emotion and character.
Moira Shearer 1954, photograph by Martin Feinstein, publicity director for Hurok Attractions, New York. Public Domain.