Edith Borroff

viola, piano

Edith Borroff emerged as an expert American historical musicologist in the middle of the century. With a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and a selection of books and articles that includes the famous Three American Composers: Fischer, Finney, and Crumb - and a musical history that marks the first musicological entries of African- American composers into Western musical lines - Borroff embodied both the academic credentials and the outside perspectives that benefit more complete, and more nuanced, historical work.Despite this, Borroff considered herself first and foremost a composer, and produced some 68 commissioned works that ranged from chamber and choral pieces to full works for the stage. She faced difficulties in becoming a composer, and her doctorate in musicology from Michigan was obtained because she was not allowed a doctorate in composition there.When I went to Oberlin to study [in 1942] I asked to register as a composition major. And the dean said “Women don’t write music!” and I wasn’t allowed to study composition. And the fact that I had been writing music already for ten years - didn’t affect my value! The first ten years I was working [as a teacher], I just did my own composing and put on my own programs. Most of the schools at which I was teaching would not permit any of my works to be performed at the school. But they would permit me to study - a sort of contradiction in terms.As a whole, her output showcases a musical language that embodies common elements of academic American music of the late mid-century. These include a sense of unstable, inquisitory harmonic motion; rapid rhythmic variation within otherwise stable lines; particularly large intervallic jumps in melody; and unusual (or unexpectedly usual, in context) cadential choices. It is notable, then, that Borroff’s Sonatina Giocosa for viola and piano makes use of more traditional harmonic motion and thematic development; an animated, unusually playful (for viola) example of a sonatina form.The Sonatina Giocosa has been provided with a newly-engraved viola part for publication.Commission: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee