Miriam Gideon
(born 1906)

BARBARA A. PETERSEN

Without a doubt Miriam Gideon ranks as one of America’s foremost women composers of today. Still active (at this writing) as a composer and teacher as she approaches her 80th birthday, Gideon has created over 60 compositions in a career spanning six decades. She was born in Greeley, Colorado, but her family moved eastward, and she studied piano and music theory in both New York and Boston. Her academic degrees include a B.A. in French from Boston University (1926), an M.A. in musicology from Columbia University (1946), and a D.S.M. in composition from Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1970). Gideon considers the late Roger Sessions, with whom she studied from 1935 to 1943, her major composition teacher and strongest influence. She herself has taught at Brooklyn College and City College of the City University of New York; she continues to teach at the Manhattan School of Music and the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as in her private studio. Among her many honors are election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1975), as the second woman composer to be named to the Institute (Louise Talma was the first), and honorary doctorates from Jewish Theological Seminary and Brooklyn College (1981, 1983).

Gideon’s concentration as a composer has been on chamber music, especially works for voice and mixed ensembles. From the early conservative style of her German Songs, Opus 1 (1930—37), which evoke the musical and poetic worlds of Mendelssohn and Schumann, Gideon moved toward a more Expressionistic style with strong elements of chromaticism and dissonance. Most of her works are on a small scale, with clear designs, in a freely atonal idiom, and with a harmonious balance of lyrical and dramatic elements. Without following any rigid compositional doctrine, she has created a remarkably consistent body of works that fuse abstract ideas, poetic images, and subjective emotional experience. Her concerns have always been with “illuminating her inner feelings” and with combining words and music into a meaningful whole. As she has said on many occasions, she writes not as a woman composer or a Jewish composer but as a composer, period. Of utmost importance is her declaration, “What I write has to mean something to me.”

Gideon’s interests extend to many languages, cultures, and periods. She has set texts in several languages, sometimes within the same work: The Condemned Playground (1963) uses poems in Latin, English, Japanese, and French. In some works she sets the poems in the original language as well as in translation (Songs of Youth and Madness, 1977), and in others she uses English translations of ancient originals (from the Japanese in The Seasons of Time, 1969, and from the Greek in Voices from Elysium, 1979). The text of The Hound of Heaven is drawn from an extended poem by Francis Thompson (1859—1907), an English poet and essayist known for his devout Catholicism. Whereas the poet was recording his reactions to specific disappointments in life (rejection for both the priesthood and the practice of medicine), Gideon selected verses that evoke the purification through suffering that underlies the Jewish experience. In crossing cultural boundaries she has created a poignant musical setting that emphasizes the suffering common to all humankind. The Hound of Heaven was commissioned by Lazare Saminsky, one of Gideon’s early composition teachers, to celebrate the centenary of the founding of Congregation Emanu-El in New York City; it was first performed there on March 23, 1945.

Although it is the first in a series of fifteen works for voices and small ensemble, The Hound of Heaven displays the most important stylistic features of Gideon’s writing. As in most of her works in the genre, the vocal line may be taken by either a male or a female (medium) voice. The “mixed consort” of instruments, here oboe and string trio, is also a common characteristic. Lasting approximately seven minutes, The Hound of Heaven is atypical only in its being in a single movement; here the text is drawn from a single poem, whereas in most of Gideon’s other chamber works there are separate movements for individual poems. Interludes such as the one in mm.62-86—or complete, if short, instrumental movements—occur in many of her chamber works and offset the surrounding texted passages. The sinuous vocal line, mainly syllabic text setting, fluctuating meters, and close interweaving of voice and instruments found here are hallmarks of her later works as well.

The Hound of Heaven

Text by Francis Thompson

Miriam Gideon

Copyright © 1975 by Columbia University Music Press.