Orchestrating Chaminade's Piano Suite, Poème provençal, op. 127

Cécile Chaminade is an excellent Romantic-era composer who lived in France in the late 1800s through early 1900s, wrote over 400 works during her lifetime, and was admired by her male contemporaries as well as concert audiences in Europe and the United States. The overwhelming majority of her music was written for piano solo or voice and piano, the genres in which she found her niche, but she also wrote a handful of compositions for orchestra. According to a report from the Institute for Composer Diversity looking at 212 U.S. orchestras, Chaminade’s music was performed only once across the three seasons spanning from 2021 to 2024. Part of the reason is because many of her orchestral scores are not available to the public. Because her music is underrepresented in the classical orchestral canon, I have orchestrated her op. 127 piano pieces, Poème provençal, to highlight her visibility, add her voice to the repertoire, and introduce audiences to more of her music.