Chloe Flower’s She Composed: The Holidays
Harold Julian
Chloe Flower knows her music history.
It’s hard for her not to.
She’s spent her life dedicated to the craft, becoming one of the most respected and renowned pianists and composers of her generation.
With her musical talent, stunning beauty, and natural charisma, Flower has brought classical music into the mainstream, collaborating with artists such as Celine Dion, Lil Baby, Meek Mill, 2 Chainz, and Nas. Flower’s iconic performance with rapper Cardi B at the 2019 Grammys propelled her and the interest in classical music overnight. From there, she infused contemporary pop styles with the refined elegance of classical traditional sounds, a style she coined as “popsical.” She released several albums and EPs, all with a fresh take on the traditional chamber music. While she’s not composing, arranging, or performing, she advocates for music equality and uplifts women in these spaces.
Flower may be the new face of classic music, but she makes it known she remembers the women who came before her.
It’s why her latest album is called She Composed: The Holidays.
While planning for her Christmas release, Flower began researching composers and discovered that women wrote less than 1% of the music performed during the holiday season. She decided to highlight these great, underrepresented female composers who had often been ignored or forgotten throughout history.
“The holidays are my favorite time of year,” Flower says over Zoom from her home in New York. “I’ve heard so many versions of ‘Sleigh Ride’ and [George Frideric] Handel’s ‘Messiah, HWV 56.’ There are just so many Christmas pieces that are known, which are stunning, but there’s actually so many women-composed holiday music out there that haven’t been given the opportunity to be performed.”
Chloe Flower’s She Composed: The Holidays
Chloe Flower
She decided to create an entire album composed of female composers, so that conductors could use them for orchestra arrangements. She began her research for holiday pieces, reviewing the albums that came before her and even asking ChatGPT to “give me all the most well-known classical music pieces for the holidays that were written by female composers.” The answers that were given were disappointing, naming Mariah Carey and Diane Warren, neither of whom is a classical artist.
“I knew this was a problem,” she sighs. “If ChatGPT can’t find female composers, then we really need to be performing [their music] more.”
She Composed: The Holidays is the first of its kind, an instrumental holiday album across all genres, entirely composed by women. Flower was saddened by this fact because there was such a rich history of women composers, especially in the jazz realm.
“I just really wanted to highlight female composers, especially American women,” she explains. “When you think of classical composers, you think of European composers, but actually a lot of American female composers had a huge contribution to classical music and gave it an American sound.”
Her album includes works from American composers Betty Jackson King, Undine Smith Moore, Linda Kachelmeier, Florence Beatrice Price, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Flower’s own original composition. She highlights European composers from centuries past, including Byzantine Empire composer Kassiani and German Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen.
“I think Kassiani was the most compelling and surprising to me,” Flower says. “Actually, Hildegard von Bingham as well. They’re both quite old. It was surprising to me that we had existing work from long ago that was by women. The reason we have that is because it was written for the church. Kassiani is important to Byzantine culture music as the only woman to have music in Byzantine liturgy.”
Back then, women were not allowed to write anything for the church, so Kassiani’s work was hidden and uncredited for centuries. It was the most surprising thing Flower found in her research.
“When Kassiani wrote it, it was written for one tone and didn’t have any harmonies,” Flower shares. “That was really cool to not only discover this work, but to be able to create harmonies under it and reimagine it, but still honor her composition and melody in that way, was really fun and challenging.”
Working closely with the Dean and Director of the Music Division at Juilliard, David Ludwig, on Kassiani and von Bingen’s arrangements, they were able to bring these classically core pieces to life and make them more cinematic and digestible for today’s listeners.
“I really wanted to lean in on how far I could take this because Kassiani is music,” she says. “If you hear the song, it goes towards the end, and you start to listen to it go into the major key. Her melody did that. With classical music, I try not to be too crazy. I really wanted to honor the music itself, knowing it was written for Christmas Day for the church. So I really leaned on [Ludwig] for advice and help.”
Flower’s lead single, “O viridissima virga,” was originally composed by von Bingen, who was a nun, mystic, philosopher, scientist, and writer during the High Middle Ages. While the original piece was approximately 15 minutes long, Flower shortened the arrangement to 6:34 minutes, weaving in her style of gentle piano and strings to make it more cinematic. In the piece, she is joined by the English National Opera Chorus and The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Jessica Cottis.
“It’s so fun what women can do with their voices and more conductors,” she says proudly. “Jessica Cottis conducted the whole album, and she was incredible. She has the longest, most amazing hair, and it’s just incredible.”
Flower reflects on her career, trying to recall the first time she played music written by women during her conservatory years, when she began playing the piano at the age of two. She pauses for a moment to think.
“In all of the years that I studied music, I had never learned or played a piece written by a woman in 20 years while I was in conservatory,” she says, shockingly. “It wasn’t even on my radar. Part of the reason I’m doing this album is to really hammer down that female composers and the history of female composers are important. We have to talk about the discrimination, sexism, and racism. The Black women who are on my album had to overcome not only being a woman, but being a Black woman in America in the 1930s. All of that is really important.”
As a Korean American woman in the industry, where only 1.8 percent of music programmed by major U.S. orchestras was written by women, she feels an obligation to shine a light on women composers and hopes to inspire the next generation.
“Part of the reason I called this album, She Composed:, with a colon that says The Holidays is because this is going to be a series to me,” she reveals. “The next few albums are going to be She Composed. I want to highlight Asian composers. I want to highlight the living and non-living. I want to do She Composed: American Composers. Even Holiday pop songs!”
The Holidays album focused on the core classical composers and Christmas works. She plans for many She Composed projects, including those for Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and other underrepresented groups. She recalls looking up composers on the Boulanger Initiative database and found a Chinese woman from 400 BC as one of the oldest known female composers. Sadly, her work was never saved.
“We don’t have her existing work,” Flower sighs. “I would love to delve into that. We’re constantly discovering new things. It was probably written in stone. So we do know that there is something there. Asia did have female composers who may not have been allowed to publish [or showcase their work] in 300 BC, but they existed. I’m really excited about that.”
She also plans to include more women collaborators for her future projects, including Brazilian-American composer and pianist Clarice Assad and Cuban-American composer Tania León. Her face lights up talking about all the women composers she’s worked with and would like to work with, mentioning a young teen from the Manhattan School of Music, Flower’s alma mater, who wrote a solo piano piece for Flower. She smiles, “Hopefully, She Composed #8 will be of this other generation of young composers.”
For now, Flower hopes audiences will take in the music of these brilliant women, as well as their incredible life stories.
“Their story is as empowering as the music,” she says. “That’s why it was important to me to pick these certain women because I loved their story. There are so many that I didn’t include, but I will on the next one – so we’ll talk again!”
Chloe Flower’s She Composed: The Holidays is available on all streaming platforms.
*Special Thanks to Michael Lee