Duo FAE Dissidents of the Gilded Age
Interview transcript with violinist Charlene Kluegel and pianist Katherine Petersen
Duo FAE violinist Charlene Kluegel and pianist Katherine Petersen join me with a focus on their album Dissidents of the Gilded Age with music of Dame Ethel Smyth, Cécile Chaminade and Amy Beach. We got into conversations around education, what a path to a career in classical music can look like, and how they have dealt with challenges including becoming mothers. This transcript is linked to the podcast and video versions as well as show notes with other important links!
Katherine Petersen:
I think she was definitely, for me, one of the more interesting people to read about, especially about her career and what a phenomenal pianist she was. I've played a variety of her music, some of the solo works, obviously the violin and piano works. Just sort of exploring her music, it's really clear what a virtuoso she was because so much of the technique and the piano part is complex. And not to say that Ethel Smyth and Chaminade are not, but they're different. It seems that that was the outlet through which Amy Beach expressed herself. And what was interesting to me was reading about whereas Chaminade may have had a marriage of convenience that allowed her to have the freedom to do what she wanted. It wasn't so for Miss Amy Beach.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. This episode is with Duo FAE violinist Charlene Kluegel and pianist Katherine Petersen. The first part of this conversation focuses on their album Dissidents of the Gilded Age. You’ll be hearing excerpts from this beautiful program and learning about the composers Dame Ethel Smyth, Cécile Chaminade and Amy Beach. Charlene and Katherine are long-time collaborators and close friends and we got into conversations around education, what a path to a career in classical music can look like, and how they have dealt with challenges including becoming mothers. Wth hundreds of kilometres separating us, I really felt like I was enjoying a thoughtful coffee date with brilliant new friends, and I hope you feel that as well. You can watch the video on my YouTube or listen to the podcast on your preferred platform, and I’ve also linked the transcript. It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast, and other episodes you’ll enjoy!
Okay, Charlene and Katherine, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Katherine Petersen:
Of course. It's great to be here. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I've really enjoyed listening to your album, Dissidents of the Gilded Age. So I thought we'd start today's conversation with a deep dive into that and the composers and then we'll get more into your lives as musicians and of course people can use the timestamps if they want to jump to anything. So this album, had you done quite a bit of research on these composers before you started this project or did you find out more as you went along?
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, the answer is yes and yes, which is that we started out with Amy Beach. We really liked her Romance. That is where this entire thing started. And then we started looking more into Amy Beach because we both really like researching and doing deep dives and we just go down rabbit holes. And then we discover this entire culture around salon music and around women in music at the turn of the 20th century. And then we discovered how women musicians and women composers were active in the women's suffrage movement, specifically Dame Ethel Smyth. And so then we just kept on branching out and branching out and branching out. And then we said at some point, "Hey, there's a program here's a program here." And so the actual linchpin for the idea for the program was actually the Chaminade, right?
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. Yeah, because we found the Chaminade and the more we read about Chaminade and how she gained her popularity through salons and that was really what she was known for. And in fact, there are Cécile Chaminade salons still alive today. That was something that she was famous for around the world and that sort of brought the whole idea together of women coming together in the salon space to be able to freely share their music, but also their ideas and their political leanings. These were spaces where they could be free
Leah Roseman:
All of these three composers, I found it interesting that they died in 1944. Did you notice that?
Katherine Petersen:
But yeah, it was sort of a funny thing that we noticed that we're like, "Huh, is there anything to that? " But it's just sort of one of those funny things.
Leah Roseman:
And they were all pianists as well.
Katherine Petersen:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
So the Gilded Age ... Actually, I watched that HBO series. I don't know if you guys saw it.
Katherine Petersen:
It was certainly the inspiration for some of our CD art. Sure.
Leah Roseman:
For people that haven't seen it, I mean, there's the costume design in that show is unbelievable. Every scene they're wearing something different and very elaborate. It's a very interesting show if people want to check it out. But so The Gilded Age, I was interested to read that Mark Twain had actually coined this term and that it was like a critical term of the age because there was, like now, such a huge divide between the very rich and the very poor and also a time of great technological change and uprising. And I thought it was a kind of interesting parallel with what we're living through now.
Katherine Petersen:
For sure, for sure. And I think those parallels were interesting for us as well, which was when we started cooking up this program, I don't know that we knew how relevant it would be. Nowadays. And nowadays. And especially because we were cooking it up well before all of the current political situation and everything that has been going on with women's rights lately and it was just kind of like we had this premonition of sorts, I guess.
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, this program really started in 2020, 2021. That's when we were starting to think about really interesting curatorial topics. And so it was a completely different time than it is now, five, six years later. It's unbelievable. But you're right that music in that sense can bridge a gap in connecting current events with the past. And I read recently that the inequalities that exist now are at levels that were also present in the Gilded Age right up until about 1913.
Leah Roseman:
So Dame Ethel Smyth, British musician, she lived at the exact same time as Cécile. I was really interested to read about her involvement in the Suffragette movement that she gave up music for two years in order to throw herself into this and that she was in prison for breaking windows. She was really active.
Katherine Petersen:
It's one of the things we love most about her and why we felt so compelled to put her music on this program. Each of these women were Suffragettes in different ways. Ethel Smyth was definitely like the protestor. She was the one that was out on the streets hitting the pavement and really screaming at society to listen to women's rights. I think one of our favorite things about her is that she actually wrote the anthem for the Suffragette movement called March of the Women, which is the piece that we arranged and then actually recorded the teaser video for our CD of us playing that. And we just think her work with the movement was so powerful and just the way that she engaged through her music with the movement.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, if you can share that teaser video, I could edit in a clip of that anthem into this episode for people to hear. For
Katherine Petersen:
Sure. Yeah, we can do that.(Music: clip of March of the Women by Dame Ethel Smyth, arr. and performed by Duo FAE, complete video linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
The whole album's great, but I thought it might be beautiful to start with the third movement, The Romance.(Music: clip Track 6 Smyth A minor sonata, op. 7, III Romanze )And I was very interested in Ethel when I was reading about her that she also conducted. I mean, that's rare now that she was doing that then. And then she became deaf, but she wrote 10 highly successful, mostly autobiographical books. So what a woman.
Charlene Kluegel:
Indeed, yes. She used her time very, very, very industriously.
Leah Roseman:
Are there other of her works that you've worked on or you're thinking of recording in the future?
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, some bucket list items are her piano trio for sure. For me as a violinist, she has a concerto for violin and horn, which is an uncommon to say the least instrumentation.
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. I've played the cello Sonata myself and I mean all of her works are just so passionate and interesting to us. I would say the trio is definitely like the next on the list. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And is this music available on IMSLP or has it been published?
Katherine Petersen:
Some has been published. I mean, I would say actually since we started the project, it's been easier to find her music. I remember visiting her IMSLP page at the beginning and there wasn't very much on there and there's more now on that page.
Charlene Kluegel:
That's true.
Katherine Petersen:
I think one of the things that we always lament about playing female music is that there's not enough good published but edited music out there. A lot of times you're dealing with like first edition reprints, which is the case with the Sonata for Violin and Piano. And so when you get those first edition reprints, there's a lot that needs interpreting and editing and sort of reading between the lines to make sure you're really understanding
Charlene Kluegel:
And wrong notes.
Katherine Petersen:
And wrong notes and figuring out where they are and what they mean. And I mean, that's one of the things that we would like to see more of is just more, we'd love to see Henle carry some Dame Ethel Smyth with the same-
Charlene Kluegel:
Scholarly intent, right?
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. Same scholarly intent and enthusiasm that they carry Beethoven.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, let's move on to Cécile Chaminade. So he father wouldn't let her go to the Conservatoire. He thought it was unseemly and I was also fascinated to learn that she lived separately from her husband in a platonic marriage and that she recorded, it said 1901, like incredibly early recordings.
Charlene Kluegel:
Yeah. Well, being a married woman at the time allowed her certain freedoms and in a certain type of status that an unmarried woman, very unkindly, usually called a spinster, would have not had. So the platonic marriage was not as uncommon as we think. It might have also been advantageous for her husband for various reasons and I will not speculate on that upfront, but for her definitely it was safety to a certain extent.
Leah Roseman:
So these Trois Morceaux very beautiful. Well, I'd like to share a little bit of the opening track. (Music: clip of Track 1 Chaminade Trois Morceaux, op. 31, no. 1) But also this fiery number three, the Bohémienne is- It's the most violinistically virtuosic piece on the album.
Charlene Kluegel:
It is kind of a showpiece and these Trois Morceaux are the closest to true salon music out of the three pieces on the album and she really leans into this tradition that we usually only see with Kreisler and Sarasate of light music in compendiums of two or three pieces. And so there is always a bohemian piece of sorts or a Tzigane or a Zigeunerweisen or something like that. There is always one of those there. So that is how I read the Bohémienne as a nod to that tradition of violin literature in the salon. (Music: clip of Track 3 Chaminade Trois Morceaux, op. 31 no. 3 Bohémienne)
Leah Roseman:
I'd love to hear more about these salons of Chaminade's.
Charlene Kluegel:
So Chaminade sat in an interesting place in music criticism and she was certainly not the only one, but she was very often considered either too feminine as is a composer to be a serious composer quote unquote or when she wrote quote unquote strong music, then she was suddenly too masculine. So she never really fit squarely into a concert hall setting. Now the salon, the salon was really where she made her career and she toured up and down Europe and definitely up and down North America. As Katherine alluded to earlier, there are still Chaminade clubs in existence to this day that are dedicated to performing her works, most of which are piano works and then also vocal works. And so she really made her name going from salon to salon and just presenting intimate house concerts essentially.
Leah Roseman:
Have you played at any of these specific house concerts?
Katherine Petersen:
We've played a lot of house concerts with this program. In fact, it was one of our goals to present the program in the type of situations it would have been heard in. So we've performed at a lot of the Gilded Age mansions that you still see around the Chicago area today, like the Dawes House, the Driehaus Museum
Charlene Kluegel:
The Glessner House.
Katherine Petersen:
The Glessner House, it brings new light to the music, the intimacy when you're so close to it. It's really different when you're sitting on a stage and there's that distance between you and the audience, but just the interaction with the music in front of people. But I can't say we haven't played on any of the Chaminade club series that are still alive.
Leah Roseman:
You should.
Katherine Petersen:
Well, we'll get on it.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of Cécile making a living, how would this work? How'd she get paid?
Charlene Kluegel:
That is an excellent question. I'm not sure that I have an answer for you, but I mean performance fees or donations at the door and then certainly accommodations.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was just curious if it was kind of like how's concerts today because it was a different type of people, right?
Charlene Kluegel:
Right. Well, and these were always wealthy society women predominantly so there would have been compensation in some shape or form. Mozart very often got compensated in valuable trinkets that they then would sell. So I'm not sure that there was always a cash transaction, but she clearly made a living out of it.(Music: clip Track 2 Chamina Trois Morceaux, op. 31, no. 2 Romanza)
Leah Roseman:
So maybe we could move over to Amy Beach probably ... Well, I was going to say it's best known of the three, but maybe not. Maybe pianists really know Chaminade.
Katherine Petersen:
No, I think she is. I mean, for sure. I think her music is more widely available and more edited. The edition that we worked off came from, it was Hildegard, wasn't it? I think so. Yeah. It was from Hildegard Publishing and it was highly edited and we can't say that about any of the other works that appeared on the CD.
Leah Roseman:
So her name has certainly come up on this series a couple times and I did interview the Samantha Ege, the Florence Price scholar. We did talk about how Amy was racist and there were quotes with her keeping out Black composers. So unfortunately there was that divide and I discussed this with Juliana Soltis, the cellist, because her album, which had a variety of composers, including Amy Beach. So we talked about that as well. So I'll link those episodes in the show notes for people because it was all about women composers of that time. But Amy Beach, like incredible talent, even at age four, she wrote music. There's some real interesting stories about that. Do you want to share more about her life?
Katherine Petersen:
I think she was definitely, for me, one of the more interesting people to read about, especially about her career and what a phenomenal pianist she was. I've played a variety of her music, some of the solo works, obviously the violin and piano works, just sort of exploring her music, it's really clear what a virtuoso she was because so much of the technique and the piano part is complex and not to say that Ethel Smyth and Chaminade are not, but they're different. It seems that that was the outlet through which Amy Beach expressed herself. And what was interesting to me was reading about whereas Chaminade may have had a marriage of convenience that allowed her to have the freedom to do what she wanted. It wasn't so for Miss Amy Beach. She married a physician who was much older than she was and basically upon their marriage, he forbade her from performing and in a way that led her to move closer towards composition and so we can be thankful for that aspect of things, but I can imagine how dificult that was for her to give up a part of herself that really was such a deep way for her to express.
And the thing we always take a little bit of joy with is that once he did pass, she returned to it and very quickly.
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, after a suitable time.
Katherine Petersen:
Yes, a suitable mourning period and then she was back to being who she was and performing and touring across the world and obviously she never lost that part of herself.
Charlene Kluegel:
Right. She was clearly still practicing.
Katherine Petersen:
Yes, she was clearly still practicing. She just couldn't do it in public.
Leah Roseman:
Again, such a great album and I can put in more clips if you'd like, but I chose the finale to highlight of the Sonata and A minor.
Katherine Petersen:
Yup, that would be the one.
Charlene Kluegel:
It's a virtuosic feat for both performers. It doesn't get much harder or more complex than that.
Katherine Petersen:
Well, especially culminating in a fugue which-
Charlene Kluegel:
That's right.
Katherine Petersen:
To us is a really interesting just tool of composition to end a work in a fugue. That's something that Beethoven did a lot and-
Charlene Kluegel:
And Brahms and Mozart.
Katherine Petersen:
And Brahms and Mozart. And you have to think that that was intentional on her part to say, "Well, I can do what the boys can do. "
Charlene Kluegel:
Oh, it's such a statement piece.
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. I think the interesting thing about that sonata is just its breadth, both in how loud it is, how soft it is, how wide it is, how long it is, how fast it is. The scherzo is just mind blowingly quick and complex and then she asks for this slow movement that is just so tender and it takes a lot of concentration to perform a movement like that. And then she sends you into this finale when you're already exhausted and then she's like, "Oh, but wait, there's more. A fuque."(Music: clip of Track 2 Chamina Trois Morceaux, op. 31, no. 2 RomanzaTrack 11 Beach Sonata in A minor, op. 34, IV Allegro con fuoco)
Leah Roseman:
When you perform this live, do you switch up the order of the works a little bit?
Katherine Petersen:
No,
Charlene Kluegel:
Not really. Not really. I mean- What order are they on the CD right
Katherine Petersen:
Now? Because the Chaminade was sort of a- I think
Charlene Kluegel:
Chamanade's first, the it's the Smyth
Katherine Petersen:
And then it's the Beach
Charlene Kluegel:
It's the Beach. We usually start with the Smyth now.
Katherine Petersen:
That's true. We sandwich with the Chaminade.
Charlene Kluegel:
We sandwich the Chaminade and then it's the Beach. It's hard to play anything or to order to present anything after the Beach. It's such a closing statement that really nothing should go after that and the Smyth is such a good and strong and dark opener. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you guys met at the Aspen Festival back in 2012?
Katherine Petersen:
Wasn't it eight? 2008.
Charlene Kluegel:
Yeah. 2008, that's right. Yeah.
Katherine Petersen:
It's been a long time.
Charlene Kluegel:
Yes. We were roommates.
Katherine Petersen:
We were roommates and it was by chance Aspen had run out of housing that year and so they stuck the people who were- I know. They stuck the people who were left over in this apartment in the mountains. We were by ourselves. We had no way to get into town and Charlene and I were first to arrive. There were two other women in our apartment, but we didn't get to meet them until later. But we arrived the first night and it was snowing and- In June. In June and there were no blankets and no heat and we had our towels and we just kind of had to survive that night. It was quite funny and that whole summer was a bonding experience.
Charlene Kluegel:
It really was
Katherine Petersen:
living in that way.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I think back of the summer festivals I did when I was young, they were ... I wish I had kept in touch with more people, but it's that you're young and you're being exposed to so much and meeting like- minded people can be so powerful.
Katherine Petersen:
For sure. For sure. And we had a lot of really great experiences there and aside from the whole freezing to death on the first night thing, it was overall a very positive experience and in some ways being isolated in that apartment together, it really helped us to know more closely the people who were around us. There was one more apartment in the complex of people who were left over and-
Charlene Kluegel:
Of boys.
Katherine Petersen:
Of boys. And so we had some fun.
Leah Roseman:
So this program that we've been talking about, Dissidents of the Gilded Age, you played it at Musikverein in Vienna?
Katherine Petersen:
We did.
Charlene Kluegel:
Yeah, we did. Just in what, January? Yes. Oh, it's only been a couple of months. Look at that. Yeah, we did. So we went on a little mini tour in January, nice and cold and snowy, very slushy actually, less snowy. We performed in Munich and then in Vienna. What beautiful spaces and what gorgeous instruments in particular I rarely had the pleasure of getting to play with such perfect piano specimens.
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. I mean, it's always a struggle. I think performing this program in a lot of salon spaces, oftentimes you're working with historic instruments which have their own beauty and their own merits, but they can be challenging because of their age. I think it was a really nice experience for us to be in the salon space at Musikverein and be with the most perfect piano, brand spanking new, well regulated and just sort of ... It was a beautiful experience to sort of culminate having performed this program for a long time now.(Music: clip Track 9 Beach Sonata in A minor, op. 34 II Scherzo)
Leah Roseman:
And the name of your duo, so Frei aber einsam free, but alone. So it's interesting that it's associated with Brahms and Joachim. I've been reading a novel somebody sent me that's about to come out in June called Brahms Comes to Dinner and it's about Brahms's relationship with Clara Schumann, it's a novel.
Katherine Petersen:
OOhh!
Leah Roseman:
So the author, Boman Desai, he did a ton of research and there's There's a lot there. I think even Robert Schumann's medical records were released and all these letters. Wow. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I haven't read a novel about composers before. I know it's a genre, but it's been interesting to get in that world and just how society was and lots of things about it.
Charlene Kluegel:
Yeah. Katherine and I bonded over Brahms.
Katherine Petersen:
That was kind of the first love for the duo is when you're young and you're a student and you haven't discovered yet where your voice is, I think we were both kind of Brahms obsessed and
Charlene Kluegel:
Well still are.
Katherine Petersen:
And still kind of are in a way. And one of the first pieces we played together was the Brahms D minor Sonata. Brahms always holds this tender place for us. And for us, the idea of Frei aber einsam the it's such an interesting motto, free but alone. And that's really how the duo took shape because we had met at Aspen years earlier and then we went our separate ways and we went to totally different schools and totally different parts of the country. And we kept talking and we kept being friends and we would visit sometimes. And we were sort of lamenting to each other like, "Well, really want to start a chamber group. I'm not just not finding the right fit. This one worked for a little while and then so and so moved away or whatnot. I just can't really find someone to commit to it. " And then we were like, "But wait.
But wait."
Charlene Kluegel:
Why is distance a problem
Katherine Petersen:
Why is distance a problem? And we came up with this hairbrained idea to just start traveling to perform with each other and to rehearse and record. And in a way, it's like the best of all situations because you're not just sort of with, for lack of a better word, stuck with people who are just immediately around you. You can make those groups that mean something and distance doesn't have to matter, especially when there's only two people that's not a lot of coordinating to do.
Charlene Kluegel:
That's right.
Katherine Petersen:
And so we had that freedom just by being as we were. And at the time that the duo began, I was in Canada and she was in Indiana. Yeah, right,
Charlene Kluegel:
Indiana.
Leah Roseman:
I went to both McGill University and Indiana University.
Katherine Petersen:
Oh really? What a cool coincidence.
Leah Roseman:
Well, so Charlene, you also studied baroque violin with Stanley Ritchie?
Charlene Kluegel:
Yeah, I did. I did. And it was kind of a culminating portion of my studies with Baroque violin. I had started in my undergraduate. I went to Cornell University and they do not have a performance program, but they have a great performance practice program up there. And so little undergraduate me just started tagging along to things and I got to work with Neal Zaslaw and Malcolm Bilson just playing the baroque Violin, learning how to hold the instrument and how to think of the music. And it was marvelous since they were not violinists, that there was nothing technical about it. Just here's the research, here's what needs to happen, go figure it out kind of an approach, which was fun, really, really fun. And then I went to Peabody and there I studied the Baroque violin with Risa Browder and she's obviously a violinist and so we got more into the technical things of how to really play the instrument.
And so it was a really different relationship that really helped cement how much I do actually like and love playing the baroque violin. And so when I went to Indiana, it was a very easy choice for me to choose early music as one of my minors for my doctorate and it gave me lots of time with Stanley. I got to learn how to play Scordatura, how to read Scordatura, which is mistuned violin playing. So although the strings are in different tuning spots, it's fascinating and really do a deep dive in repertoire.
Leah Roseman:
Did you play some of those Biber sonatas? Oh yeah. Yeah. And you wrote a pedagogical handbook on style considerations in orchestral excerpts?
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Juliana Soltis, Samantha Ege, Jennifer Johnson, Gail Archer, Euclid Quartet, Teagan Faran, Martha Anne Toll, and Michael Stephen BrownIn the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Katherine and Charlene!
Charlene Kluegel:
I did. So that was my final project and it really came out of a place where the honest truth is I don't like playing orchestral excerpts. I don't like the audition process and I'm sure that many people feel very similar about orchestral audition processes. I really dislike how separated from the actual music excerpt playing can feel and that made me reconsider what the excerpt actually is because the moment that you take it out of its musical context, it turns into an etude and that is just not what music making is about for me personally. So in a former lifetime, I was going to go be a scientist and so I took upper level math, I took up all those kinds of things in college. And so I said, "Well, hey, why don't we look at this from a scientific standpoint?" Which is, this is a huge, huge, huge opportunity for musicians to make or break a career, to make or break their finances.
And if you look at, let's say professional sports, they have statistical analysis upon analysis, numbers, upon numbers of how this player does this exact thing and things to modulate, but we don't have this in music. Everything is very much rooted in oral tradition and how one teacher teaches something and if you don't have access to the right teacher, you may never win something. And so my attempt at this was twofold, which was to somewhat even out the playing field of looking at all of the recordings, all of the commercial recordings and say, "Well, some of these are outliers, maybe not listen to these ones, but these are good ideas." And then also look at the context of what does a dot over a note mean, means something different for different composers. And so I did all that with statistics and math.
Leah Roseman:
I'm an orchestral musician and I've been sitting on audition of panels for most of my career. I completely understand where you're coming from and it is such an issue. I'm curious about a couple things. So this was an academic thing, but can people read this handbook?
Charlene Kluegel:
They can. It is available online. It is available through Indiana University. If you search for my name and the title, it's also available on my website, I believe, and I can also send you the link or the actual PDF to it and I have graphs and everything. Okay.
Leah Roseman:
Well, of course I'm a nerd, which is why I have this podcast. Well, of course your website will be linked in the show notes for people. And my other question was that decision to not go into science full time, what was that like for you, Charlene?
Charlene Kluegel:
It was actually surprisingly easy, which is I got to college and I was doing homework, but I was practicing more than I was doing homework and I was in more orchestra and I was doing more chamber music and I was taking more lessons than I was doing my homework. I've always been a very serious student and I love studying and I love learning. So that was an important conversation to have or realization to have is how willing I was or not to let go of music in my life because that was going to be necessary in order to make it anywhere and I realized then that was not going to be an option for me personally and so we had to make that shift and rather than go straight back to conservatory, which is where I had come from and it turns out I needed a break from that, I decided to stay.
I got a degree in music but not performance. So I got to do everything else around music, early music, new music, music history, musicology, music theory, you name it, everything. And that was so eye opening and it's really been the foundation for everything since then, including our recording project.
Leah Roseman:
How about you, Katherine? Was there any doubt ever that you do music full-time?
Katherine Petersen:
No!
Charlene Kluegel:
(laughing)I love it though. I love it.
Katherine Petersen:
I mean, that's kind of the hilarious thing. I was the child that was lining up her stuffed animals to give concerts on her pillow. When I was really young, I was exposed to a lot of concerts and concerts of pianists and just classical music in general and I don't know, there was something about it that just really struck me. And so I'm not kidding. I used to take my teddy bears and they would give piano recitals and I would have this music in my head and it makes me sound like some sort of deranged genius and I'm no genius, but I was really drawn to it and music for me was an escape and I just loved being at the piano. I mean, I'll admit it got me out of chores when I was a kid so I would practice more because I figured out early on that like I didn't have to go clean my room if I was practicing and that's not the only reason I did it.
So for me it was just, I can't say why I never questioned it and I think it's just I decided I liked it and there was really no reason to stop and I ended up going to a performing arts high school. I went to the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Massachusetts and that was really a place where I could like immerse myself even more and I was attending the NEC prep school before that, but that was only on Saturdays and for me that wasn't enough. I just wanted to be doing it all the time and it was nice being at a place like Walnut Hill because we had our academics in the morning and then the afternoon was filled with theory and ear training and solfège and music history and practicing and chamber music. And for me, chamber music was the best part of everything.
Yeah, it's cool to practice by yourself, but there's something a little bit lonely about it. I think especially for pianists, like we spend so much time doing it by ourselves and getting to play chamber music with other people, I was like, "What is this? This is so interesting." And it was just another way to communicate through music and so I just kind of ended up doing more and more and more chamber music and more ... I think maybe what's funny about it in the end is that I never went into a collaborative degree and obviously for your undergrad, you don't usually take that kind of specialization so much, but I always knew that chamber music would be my career and actually half the reason I chose McGill was that at the time they had like a chamber music focus masters for pianists, then they cut the program the moment I arrived, but I still got to do that focus and I got to make that a real part of who I was.(Music: clip Track 10 Beach Sonata in A Minor, op. 34 III Largo con dolore)
Leah Roseman:
So I was curious, Katherine, in terms of your role as a collaborative pianist, like dealing with the stress of other people. I know you've accompanied for things like the OSM competition. How do you deal with that?
Katherine Petersen:
Stressful. It's not always stressful. I actually think that one of the reasons I collaborate so much and do so much chamber music is that it's more comfortable to me than being alone on stage. Being alone on stage is stressful to me and being with other people is comforting and I like the aspect of communication and sort of like jointly bringing something together. When I first started doing more collaborative work and really thinking like, "Well, this is going to be a part of my career," I got roped into doing brass music by some friends of mine who were also grad students at McGill. And the funny thing about brass players is once they realize there's a pianist out there that knows their repertoire, they go, "Oh." And then they're like, "Well, but can you play this Hindemith?" And so I got pulled into doing the OSM competition and it was actually like the worst timing because it was right before my comp exams and I hadn't been like playing like all semester and then one day the OSM calls you and you're like, "Okay." And so I agreed to do this thing and I mean,
It was a bit of a crazy experience, but I knew I'd been like reading for my comp exams for so long I just kind of had to trust that everything was in there and so I did and I did OSM was the week before my comp exams and it was just like so much music because the finalists prepare these multiple programs and you don't actually know which ones are going to make to the finals. Do you have to prepare that program anyway? And one of mine ended up making it, which was pretty cool. It was just really a fun experience to contribute to that and to work on it and everything in the end ended up working out well. My comp exams, they happened. I got a doctorate so it did happen. But I would say since then it's been just sort of like relying on experiences like those that I had when I was a student and knowing that like those skills are there and to me that's comforting.
Charlene Kluegel:
And you still get called a lot for brass rep.
Katherine Petersen:
I do. I really should stop advertising that I know Hindemith.
Leah Roseman:
I know he wrote the trumpet Sonata. What else did he write for brass?
Katherine Petersen:
Oh, you name the brass instrument, there's a Sonata.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Katherine Petersen:
Unfortunately, no wait, I can't say this out loud. No, okay, I can. I have unfortunately played the tuba sonata more times than I would like to admit and the trombone one.
Leah Roseman:
Let me just ask you, Katherine, you've worked with a lot of great mentors. If there's anyone you wanted to reflect on and what you learned from them
Katherine Petersen:
My time with Dr. Laiman at McGill was I think some of the most formative for me. I had a lot of really great piano teachers growing up and a lot of really great connections with my piano teachers, but Sara was one of the people that really just brought everything together for me because to me she was who I wanted to be and I think it's so important for women in music to have like that person that they can look up to and see themselves in. She's a chamber musician, she does modern music, she's playing solo, she's got two kids, like she got her doctorate, she's full time at McGill and kind of like juggling a million things and she was just kind of always so stable for me. I really looked up to her not just like with what I learned from her, the piano, it was everything else that she taught me about how to have a career because I feel like up until that point, sometimes you make it through conservatory being like, "But how at the end of it, but how?
How do I do this? " And she was really important in sort of guiding what to do and when and like what do you say yes to? Like where do you put your priorities? And that was really important for me.
Leah Roseman:
That's great to hear. And Charlene, it was interesting you reflecting that you were a bit burnt out from conservatory and that you had this break that was more academic but still music making. Like for myself, I worry about this very narrow conservatory mindset and even like I went to McGill and I took academic courses for my undergrad, but I definitely had some burnout I think. So when I went to do my master's, I didn't take full advantage of things because I was just ... Yeah, I think I should have taken a different kind of path, but there was no one to really guide me. It's like, exactly what do you do now?
Charlene Kluegel:
Right. Well, I mean what's so special about our profession is that unlike pretty much any other, except for athletes and dancers, we start when we are very, very young. So by the time that we get to college we have been at our craft for 10, 13 years, 10 to 13 years easily and so there is so much history and sometimes some baggage there too before we even consider seriously doing this professionally and then that's the point in time at which you should be accelerating. And so I think you are absolutely right that if the education is too narrow that acceleration can't happen because you've already been too narrow for too long and it stifles in intellectual and curiosity. I
Katherine Petersen:
Mean, that's half the reason that I went to McGill in the end was that I felt like being so conservatory focused for so long to me, that felt really narrow and I didn't know what the world was like. And I wanted to know more about research and academics. I know that the undergrad program at McGill is really intense, but for me being in the graduate programs, there was a certain amount of freedom there and also just sort of more exposure to things that were outside of just piano and it's really important I think also for developing a career because if you only know how to play the piano or you only know how to play the violin, you're not going to last very long. Like you have to know how to basically like run a business and that business is yourself and you have to know how to market yourself, you have to know how to apply for grants.
I think we're both thankful that we had the experiences that we did that helped us to write the grant that got distance of the guilt of age off the ground, for example. That was a really important part of just making it come to life is sometimes you can't do it without that support.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Actually I was curious, like are you thinking of another album of women composers?
Charlene Kluegel:
Yes. Oh yeah. It's in the workings right now. Well we're doing multiple things, which is we are compiling the program, the actual program. So we're currently curating. We're also looking for funding because these things do not come so cheaply and it is a lift and unless you have 501 status for those in America, which is not for profit status, a lot of grants are not open to you, which really limits the playing field. Now we are just two people and so we don't necessarily need not for profit status because that comes with a whole board attached. So then we would have a board that's larger than the ensemble!
Katherine Petersen:
Doesn't make much sense to us.
Charlene Kluegel:
Right. There is that aspect of planning another project like this as well, but we're definitely looking at strong women voices in the 20th and 21st century leaning into this idea of dissidents in the larger sense of the word.
Leah Roseman:
Great to hear. So I was actually curious because I knew you're both involved with new music and commissions. Yeah. So you formed relationships with composers over years?
Charlene Kluegel:
Yes,
Katherine Petersen:
We have. And we're actually working right now on funding for a commission as Charlene already alluded to, we sort of want to see how far we can take the idea of the dissidence and bring it into the modern age. And I'm not saying that we'll necessarily release a CD called Dissidents of the Modern Age, but it's sort of like that's where we're going is wanting to see how we can bring this into the 20th and the 21st century
Leah Roseman:
And on your website there's an audio of John Adams Road Movies First Movement
Katherine Petersen:
That recording is really old. That's actually one of the first recordings we ever made together and- And it is
Charlene Kluegel:
Live.
Katherine Petersen:
And it is live and that's a really ... It's not that old. It is because that was one of your grad ...
Charlene Kluegel:
Okay. We're done now! (Laughing)
Katherine Petersen:
I'm going to reveal something right now. That was from one of her grad recitals and the duo was fresh and at the time we had an Americana program and it had the Adams, it had some Ives, Gershwin, there was a piece by a Canadian American composer and there was one more thing on there and I can't remember what it was.
Charlene Kluegel:
It shall come to me.
Katherine Petersen:
It'll come to us. It's been a long time, but that was a program that we felt really showed off all of the duo's strengths and we were learning it while not with each other and we got together to play that at Charlene's recital and it was just this like magical performance where like everything fits together and when you've got a piece like that, that's all like hockets and 16th notes and the patterns are changing and we just really felt it was like a beautiful representation of what we can do together. And so we've always kept it up on the website because I don't know, it's just-
Charlene Kluegel:
A good recording's
Katherine Petersen:
Always a good recording. A good recording is always a good recording.
Charlene Kluegel:
And you know, beyond that, it's really kind of emblematic. The energy of that first movement really is emblematic of the energy that keeps driving us forward too. I love how you start and you're just on this as train and no matter how hard you try, it just pulls you in immediately and it takes you for that ride. It's a very good title for the overall piece I have to say and so it's lived with us for a really long time. We want to bring road movies back actually. It's been in the works as well. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Great to hear. So does either of you compose or improvise?
Charlene Kluegel:
Well,
Katherine Petersen:
I do not compose. I'm like an accidental arranger. You know, what's funny I think is like we both have like really traditional training and one of the things that we've been asked to do more and more over the years is especially working in new music and-
Charlene Kluegel:
Crossover projects.
Katherine Petersen:
... crossover projects and more in chamber music. We've been asked to improvise and we've been asked to sort of like let loose from our really boxy roots and it's something we've done. It's not something we've done as a duo, but occasionally we'll dabble in arranging, but it's not something that we're, I would say super ... My Smyth arrangement is decent enough.
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, the only thing that I will say is that in early music you're expected to improvise to a certain extent, right? So that is the only place where I will say that I've had formal training in improvisation. Actually, that's not true. That's not entirely true. All of that was true, but now I do remember that my senior year of high school I was living in Switzerland at the time and I was also at conservatory there and I had a class, a formal class called Atonal Improvisation.
Katherine Petersen:
Oh yeah.
Charlene Kluegel:
I know it was a thing and in hindsight now as a person who plays a lot of new music, I understand, but at the time it seemed like the dumbest thing ever, but it was surprisingly hard to not suddenly go back into some form of tonality. Everyone kept on gravitating back towards, oh, fifths and beautiful major thirds and major sixths, but the idea was truly bounce off of an idea and do not go with your instincts. Now I get it, but so that is the only formal improv training.
Katherine Petersen:
It's funny because I've been through a class like that too and I forgot I'd done it, right?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So Charlene, was your education in Switzerland quite different than the States?
Charlene Kluegel:
Yes. Well, I grew up in German speaking schools K through 12. I came to the US for college. I will definitely say that the education systems in general are vastly different. I mean, one of the biggest things is that, especially in the US Everyone goes through high school. Everyone goes to the school for 12 years and not everyone goes to college afterwards though. Whereas in the European systems you get funneled down specific tracks pretty early on. The first fork in the road if you're in the German speaking world is at around fourth grade where you get funneled into university track and not. Then there are on and off ramps throughout that time, but if you're in a non-university track, you finish school after 10 years of school and then you go into an apprenticeship and it is only those people who will go onto college that stay in school up until 12th grade.
One of the weirdest experiences for me was that come 11th grade, so once school's no longer technically mandatory, I started being addressed as Frau Kluegel, Miss Kluegel, rather than my first name. Acknowledging a certain amount of adult agency in your education and I just turned around. I was like who? That's my mom. That's my mom. That's not me.
So because there's this specialization earlier on, everything is a lot more rigorous and narrow and very precise. It does not necessarily allow for discovery processes or reinvention and if you want to change majors in college which gets declared before you even start, you have to restart the entire program. The stakes in many ways are higher and so what was really nice for me in coming here was having the freedom to just figure things out a little bit.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Interesting. How about self-care balance a holistic life in music?
Katherine Petersen:
I'm sorry, what was that? We both have kids. So self-care is like this fleeting idea. No, I'm just kidding. But it's definitely something that we have to constantly work at
Because we do both have families and we're busy and we teach and we perform and we're doing the have it all thing. Sometimes self-care is just setting the boundary to say, "I need to practice right now." And I think that for us is really important. I mean, I don't want to speak for Charlene, but we talk about this a lot about sort of the compromises you have to make and where you find the time for things because I think in some ways society expects that when you have kids you're just going to stop practicing and somehow people seem to be surprised that we still do. And I know why it's hard. It's very hard and your time is already very valuable as a musician and then you add something like a child into it and then your time becomes even more valuable. But in some ways I have to say I haven't practiced as efficiently as I have since having a kid.
Charlene Kluegel:
Oh, that's so true. If I had known about practicing what I do now. Oh man. Yeah.
Katherine Petersen:
I think it's actually like we waste so much time when we're students. I remember being a student and practicing for like six hours a day and like what was I doing? I was getting nothing done and I just think of sort of like the efficiency now, like you know what you have to do, you have a plan, you make it, you do it. And I think for me that's been really enlightening in some ways and comforting in others and just being able to trust that my technique is there for me and you don't need six hours to do it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, my kids are now well into their 20s, but I can relate and my husband's also a musician, but it struck me at a certain point that I needed to, I think it was after my mother died, that I needed to set an example for my daughters for self care. I started going to this weekly exercise class that somehow fit into my crazy schedule, but I could mostly Tuesday evenings I was able to go to this one little thing and at that time it was very beneficial for me also to be in community and not feel isolated. And I remember thinking I want them to not see me as someone always making sacrifices because I don't want them to be that type of women. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Charlene Kluegel:
That's a really good point that you raise. I mean so much of self care as a musician is taking care of your body because if your body's not functioning optimally, good luck playing, right? And so I've also recently learned to carve out time to just take care of things like my abs and all of the muscle groups that I did not know were important until I was pregnant and no longer had them.
Katherine Petersen:
I'm lucky I get to sit to play.
Leah Roseman:
And how about, how has your teaching changed? I'd like you to both reflect on this. Like you've both been teaching a long time, you've had all these experiences. Who wants to go first?
Charlene Kluegel:
My teaching has become more and more efficient because even though we study pedagogy in school, we get all these great ideas, all this great guidance on here are things that work, here is the methodology, all those things. You don't actually know what it's like until you test it in the wild. And so much of what my teaching now is knowing the sequencing, knowing the exact sequencing, but being super tuned into and empathetic to where my students currently are both technically and emotionally. I think that's probably the biggest thing that also happened with being a parent, quite frankly.
Katherine Petersen:
Yeah. I mean, certainly experience over time changes a lot of things and I think you learn a lot about pedagogy in school and then you start doing it out in the wild and it's different than it is in practice and there's so much more variety in your students and there's so much more variety to the people you will meet and the repertoire that you encounter. I think over time I've become very flexible with my students sort of understanding that they're all in different places. They all learn in different rates and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses and what you want to do as a teacher is find the ways to really prop up the strengths. It's hard today when you're competing with like a million sports that your students have going on and what do you want them to get out of their lessons with you?
And at the end of the day, it's got to be that love of music, like that's got to be above everything else. If making them play that scale perfectly is going to destroy all of their loves, sometimes you have to put that aside and find other ways to get them there. I think that's one of the fun things about teaching because we already alluded to this earlier, how conservatory training can be kind of strict sometimes and it sort of puts things into a box and sometimes the box isn't very fun and I think one of the joys of teaching for me has been helping my students find the beauty in a scale and find the beauty in a technical exercise and that it doesn't just have to be about your metronome and feeling like you're in front of the drill sergeant. There's a lot of beauty in there and there's other ways to access it even when you're just doing technique.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, I love that. I love everything you guys were saying. I want to make a repertoire suggestion for you.
Katherine Petersen:
Oh, please.
Leah Roseman:
Have you heard of Robert Khan? K-A-H-N?
Katherine Petersen:
Can't say that we have.
Charlene Kluegel:
I don't think so.
Leah Roseman:
So actually on my YouTube, I do have his Sonata in A minor from a concert I did. I think he was in Berlin. I should have looked him up again, but I linked in the show notes information about him. So he had to leave because of the Nazis. He was already a very well established composer and he lived out the rest of his life in England and continued to compose hundreds of works, chamber music, solo piano. It's very Brahmsian, very much he was at the end of that era, just gorgeous music and there's so much out there that just hasn't, people aren't playing it yet.
Charlene Kluegel:
Well, thank you for that recommendation because we are actually also working on an exiled music and arts program. So we will definitely look at this one.
Katherine Petersen:
I know that was like an aha moment. Did you read our minds?
Leah Roseman:
I just thought I want to advocate for his music and yeah. Okay. Well, thanks so much for today. It's great getting to know you.
Katherine Petersen:
Thank you. Likewise, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
