Artist Level
"Deborah Yardley Beers played her solo piano work "Variations on a Laundry Song" – this piece knocked me out. Every level of decision-making in this piece was so beautiful: the song and her harmonization; the tiny rhythmic surprises, like thorns making a rose's sweetness more awake and sophisticated; the use of register and texture as clear structural architecture... yeah, I liked it. I'll be buying the score presently! Time to dust off my piano chops a bit I guess…"
- Composer Lainie Fefferman: Plenary Speaker at "Women, Feminists, and Music: Transforming Tomorrow Today” the Joint Conference of IAWM and FT&M15 at Berklee College of Music in 2019. Lainie wrote these words after hearing Deborah’s performance at the conference.
"What a colourful and expressive work. The program notes are fascinating to read too. Such powerful inspiration!"
- Samantha Ege: Scholar, pianist, and educator.
The process of writing this piece changed me as a person because of the way I began to create it: absent-mindedly singing while I put away the laundry. As I set about expanding the theme and writing variations inspired by various laundry activities, I noticed I was identifying more and more with women of the past who did household chores for great white male leaders who are credited with building the culture I live in today. When I realized, though, that one of my musical heroes, Ludwig van Beethoven, wrote in a letter, apparently without remorse, that he had just thrown a number of books at the head of a female servant, I felt as if I had been punched in the gut. I moved on to pondering about laundry of other famous men, and found myself doing some soul searching about why I didn’t already know the ugly answer, but I had to look up, who did the laundry of another hero of mine, George Washington. (It was done at Mt. Vernon by slaves.)
The central variation of this piece, inspired by these disturbing stories about icons from the past, is called “Reflective Fantasy: Who did Beethoven’s Laundry? Meditation of Hope on a History of Conflict”. The hope is that, by acknowledging and understanding both the greatness and the ugliness of our history and how it affects us today, and by resolving the echoes of this conflict that last into the present, we can start to build a better future together.
Working on this piece has motivated me to revisit music already in my repertoire as a pianist, and to learn new music by black women composers with whom I first became acquainted through Helen Walker-Hill’s book, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and their Music. I hope Variations on a Laundry Song will motivate other music lovers to explore this repertoire as well. I am still learning how to program Variations on a Laundry Song in a way that is respectful to the message it promotes. My best suggestion now for people who wish to perform it would be for Variations on a Laundry Song to appear on the same program with music composed by one or more women of color, and not on the same program with music composed by white men that imitates music of black people.
I imagine this piece in an endless loop, possibly with different performers playing different repetitions. To be practical, though, I have provided a conclusion for performance purposes so that the piece lasts about twelve minutes. This conclusion sounds as if it ends on the wrong note, though, because the laundry is never truly finished.
Copies of the score may be purchased for electronic download at MusicaNeo.