For Victoria Bond, the renowned composer and conductor, “Music was the family business,” she said during a recent conversation at her East Hampton home. Her mother, Jane Courtland, was a well-known concert pianist who studied with Bela Bartok, her father, Philip Bond, was a vocalist with the New York City Opera, and her grandfather Samuel Epstein was a composer, conductor, and bass player.
Ms. Bond’s composition “Bridges,” originally commissioned by Nan Washburn and the Michigan Philharmonic, will be performed on Sept. 10 as part of this year’s Hamptons Festival of Music at LTV Studios in Wainscott. “I’m thrilled this is happening right here in my backyard,” said Ms. Bond, who has had a house here since 1995.
“Bridges,” which premiered in 2006, emerged from conversations with an old friend, John Yeh, a Chinese-American clarinetist. He had a chamber group called Dragon and Phoenix, which consisted of a clarinet and a bass clarinet and two Chinese instruments, an erhu and a pipa.
“We centered on the name ‘Bridges,’ as bridging two cultures. However, when I thought about it, I thought why not center it on actual bridges.” She said the erhu, if well played, sounds like a fiddle, and the pipa is like a banjo. “So I thought, why not write country and western for those instruments,” and the first movement was inspired in part by a railroad trestle bridge in Galax, Va., which bills itself as the “old-time music capital of the world.”
The subsequent movements are “Stone Bridge,” which is based on a Chinese folk song, “Golden Gate Bridge,” which recalls the folk music of the 1960s and ‘70s in California, and “Brooklyn Bridge,” which refers to the “bridge” section of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”
A fifth movement was added at the suggestion of the conductor of the Michigan Philharmonic, which commissioned the piece. That bridge is Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge, and the movement is based on the folk song “The River Is Wide.”
Another composition, which now, more than two decades after its first performance, has particular relevance, is “Mrs. President,” an opera based on Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States. In 1872. She was also the first woman to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and she and her sister founded their own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.
Woodhull’s is a complicated story. A few days before the election, her paper published a story revealing that Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned preacher of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church and a critic of Woodhull’s free-love philosophy, was having an affair with one of his parishioners.
Woodhull was arrested the same day, along with her sister and her second husband, Col. James Blood, for publishing an obscene newspaper. Stigmatized by the press, branded “Mrs. Satan” by Harper’s Weekly, she spent election night in jail.
Composed in 2001, “Mrs. President” had its first reading with an orchestra that year with the New York City Opera. Subsequent performances happened at Guild Hall in 2008, the Anchorage Opera in 2012, and the Rochester Lyric Opera in 2017 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.
Ms. Bond acknowledged the opera’s enduring relevance, including to her own challenges as a female conductor. With the nomination of Kamala Harris, “It’s been hotter than ever,” she said, adding that she hoped it would have its first full production in the near future.
Ms. Bond grew up between Los Angeles and New York City. While an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, she knew she wanted to be a composer.
But her parents told her it wasn’t enough to be just a composer; she had to have a performing instrument as well, so she decided on her voice. (As a measure of its quality, she was in the Children’s Chorus of the New York City Opera when she was 7.) While still at U.S.C., she performed contemporary music, including some original material.
During that period she drove with a classmate and his older brother to Aspen, Colo., to study voice. The brother said that if she planned to be a vocalist, she should know something about what a conductor does, and he suggested she study with him. The brother was Leonard Slatkin, an internationally acclaimed conductor, and study she did.
“I was so energized by the conducting I learned in Aspen that when I came home, my mother had a close friend who was the conductor of the Senior Citizens Orchestra of Los Angeles. They gave me my first opportunity to conduct a big orchestra.”
After graduating from U.S.C., Ms. Bond went to Juilliard, where she received a doctorate in orchestral conducting, the first ever awarded by that school to a woman. However, people told her that being a woman would be an obstacle to a career as a conductor.
Nonetheless, in 1978 she auditioned with the Pittsburgh Symphony for the Exxon/Arts Endowment Program, which groomed young conductors to be music directors. She was the only woman in a room full of men, “and they all looked like conductors. What chance did I have?”
A good chance, it turned out, as she was selected and served two years as Exxon conductor in Pittsburgh under Andre Previn, the symphony’s music director. “It was a fabulous experience, we did a ton of repertoire, and Exxon flew me all over the map.”
After Pittsburgh she took conducting jobs with the Albany Symphony, the Harrisburg Opera, and Opera Roanoke, and became music director of the Roanoke Symphony.
But there was one problem. “The one big question hanging over my head was, When will I have time to compose? There were all kinds of projects I wanted to do, but when you are successful as a conductor, you’re doing it 24/7, 12 months a year.”
“If you’re a musician, there’s music in your head all the time. When you’re a conductor it’s whatever you’re conducting. I had to vacuum that music out of my head to have space for my own thoughts.”
Having made the decision to spend the majority of her time as a composer, with conducting as secondary, she left the two positions in Virginia and bought the house in East Hampton with her husband, Stephan Peskin, an attorney. They spend summers and weekends here.
Asked where she gets her ideas for compositions, she said, “I get my best ideas when I take a walk in the morning, which I do every day.” She cited Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms as other composers to whom music came while they were walking. “Brahms said as he walked through the Black Forest he tripped over melodies all the time. I don’t know how ideas come, but I accept them when they do. Then it’s my job to make them work.”
Ms. Bond has composed eight operas, six ballets, two piano concertos, and orchestral, chamber, choral, and keyboard compositions. As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Houston and Shanghai Orchestras, the Cleveland and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestras, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the American Ballet Theater, among others.
James Joyce’s “Ulysses” has inspired four of her compositions, one of which is based on the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy. “One of the reasons I love his work so much is the musicality of his language,” she said.
Another source of ideas is visual art, especially that of Georgia O’Keeffe. Ms. Bond’s “Blue and Green Music,” which was inspired by O’Keeffe’s painting of the same name, will be performed at the Music Mountain Festival in Falls Village, Conn., on Sept. 15, and two days later will be part of a program at the Salmagundi Club in Greenwich Village.
The latter concert is being co-presented by Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival, which Ms. Bond founded in 1998, and the Village Trip Music Festival. Cutting Edge Concerts, which supports and promotes the work of living composers, stages four or five concerts a year at Symphony Space in Manhattan and has been called by Chamber Music America “a full-throttle commitment to contemporary music.”
