Does sex matter?
Let’s start with a game. No musical knowledge or expertise is required – just an open mind, open ears. Please listen to the following seven extracts of music. Can you guess the sex of each composer?
It’s not obvious, is it? And I can guarantee that you did not correctly identify which pieces were written by women, which by men. Because the fact is that it is impossible to tell the sex of a composer, simply by listening to their music.
Does that mean the sex of a composer doesn’t matter? Hell no. Because what we believe about men, women and creativity is what matters – and has determined, for too long, who is allowed to compose music, what they are allowed to create, and whether their work is performed and remembered.
This is frustrating for many a composer. For millenia, women have tried to take their sex out of the cultural equation, all the while dreaming of a world in which people forget about your gender and simply commission, perform and hear your music because it’s good. Consider Elizabeth Maconchy, who has been described as Britain’s ‘finest lost composer’. Her luscious work, The Land, was performed at the 1930 Proms to international acclaim (‘Girl Composer Triumphs’ screamed the headlines – she was 23) and she would compose a series of string quartets that have been compared to those of Dmitri Shostakovich. All Maconchy wanted was to be called a composer. All she wanted was for the category of ‘woman composer’ to be rendered absurd, redundant. Throughout her long career, she worked tirelessly to achieve everything that her American predecessor, Amy Beach, suggested needed to be done to create a world in which the public would ‘regard writers of music’ and estimate ‘the actual value of their works without reference to their nativity, their colour, or their sex.’ Get your work out there, advised Beach: compose ‘solid practical work that can be printed, played, or sung.’
The harsh reality, however, is that for every performance of any one of Maconchy’s thirteen string quartets there are hundreds of performances of Shostakovich. As for recordings, the imbalance is even more striking. We are still not in Amy Beach’s brave new world.
Why not?
For centuries, commentators have been quite sure that women ‘betray’ themselves in their music. They could, for example, hear the chromosomes in the compositions of Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn’s big sister. They were kind enough to say that a small collection of her songs offered an ‘artistic study of masculine seriousness’ but, sadly, a woman could only go so far: all but one lacked ‘a commanding individual idea’. Commanding individual ideas are clearly only possible to produce if you are born male. Another critic admired ‘all the outward aspect; yet we are not gripped by the inner aspect, for we miss that feeling which originates in the depths of the soul and which, when sincere, penetrates the listener’s mind and becomes a conviction.’ Yet another felt a lack of ‘powerful feeling drawn from deep conviction’.
Other ideas about women and music are equally pervasive, equally toxic – although every generation finds its own way of making it hard for a woman to be a creator. It’s always interesting to look back and see where the barriers were. In the mid-Victorian era, the sight of a woman playing the violin was deemed disgusting. As one writer (in The Girls’ Own Indoor Book, attempting to reassure teenage girls in the 1880s) says ‘I have also in former days known girls of whom it was darkly hinted that they played the violin, as it might be said that they smoked big cigars, or enjoyed the sport of rat-catching.’ By the end of the nineteenth century, those days appeared long gone, and violin-playing was deemed ‘lady-like’, if not a suitable job for a woman. When Henry Wood, the visionary director of Queen’s Hall Orchestra and the man behind the Proms, hired six female string players in 1913 he was right to take great pride in his action, but, sadly, other orchestras did not follow suit. Putting aside for a moment the familiar music industry pattern of ‘one step forward, two steps back’ evident in Wood’s hiring policy, let’s consider just why the violin-playing woman created such anxiety. At first, it was because to play the violin was to distort the proper (aka ‘natural’) posture of a woman’s body. To play the violin the woman had to bend her head, use rapid arm movements, both of which were not deemed appropriate to her sex. Gradually those views changed: so long as the woman remained properly feminine, then she could, and did, play the violin. Female composers made the same trade-off, generation after generation. So long as they behaved in ‘properly feminine’ ways, wrote in ‘properly feminine’ genres, for ‘properly feminine’ forces, they might be allowed to write music.
But then it gets more complicated. A deeper taboo emerges when women become expert at the violin. The violin was itself (herself) understood as female, with its softly curving shape, its belly, back, waist and neck. The real-life woman gets to play the instrument-woman with a stick. A stick. Apparently – and I’m relying on the finest of musicological sources here – the modern bow, which emerged by the end of the eighteenth century in all its sleek concaveness, lessened the connection with archery, but increased its eroticism. No wonder then that the male violinist was often understood as a masterful lover of ‘his [sic] delicate, exquisitely responsive, and beloved instrument, a perception heightened by the soloist’s caressing arm movements and facial expressions, sometimes accompanied by closed eyes, suggestive of inward joy or ecstasy.’ The performer Sarasate, for one, ‘weds his violin each time he plays…’ with a ‘spirit of ardent love’. Yehudi Menuhin, himself one of the great, and fortunately for him, male, violinists of the twentieth century, said that the violin’s shape is ‘inspired by and symbolic of the most beautiful human object, the woman’s body’ and therefore must be played by a master. Menuhin (and he was not alone) was genuinely worried about what happens when a woman plays upon her own body. ‘Does the woman violinist consider the violin more as her own voice than the voice of one she loves? Is there an element of narcissism in the woman’s relation to the violin, and is she, in fact, in a curious way, better matched for the cello? The handling and playing of a violin is a process of caress and evocation, of drawing out a sound which awaits the hands of the master.’
It’s easy to laugh at this. Or to place it safely in the last century. But just because the sexualisation of the music-making woman takes different forms these days, doesn’t mean it has disappeared. We no longer (openly) subscribe to the view that women’s essential physical and intellectual weakness makes them unfit for purpose, whether conducting an orchestra or creating a large-scale composition, and yet the reality remains that very few women lead major orchestras, and very few large-scale works by women (living or dead) are programmed by our concert halls or radio stations.
Things are changing of course. The New York Philharmonic has Project 19, billed as ‘the largest women-only commissioning initiative in history’. BBC Radio 3 has moved on from bringing women composers out only on International Women’s Day; Classic FM has (delightfully) commissioned two Saturday night series showcasing female composers; Kings Place in London offered a whole year of balanced programming in Venus Unwrapped. Nevertheless, gender inequality is a fact of musical life, a fact of programming. Project 19 is great, but the reality is that, according to an analysis of the 2020 programming of 120 U.S. orchestras by the Institute for Composer Diversity, performances of works by Beethoven alone will exceed those by women composers. We have the data thanks to the tireless work of people like Vick Bain: read her report and weep.
For me, understanding the barriers to creativity in the past allows us to think about the barriers that exist now. It was one of the things that drove me when I was researching my book, Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music. Here’s a checklist of what it takes to be a great composer. First, a sustained education in composition. Usually, the great composer needed a professional position, whether court musician, conservatoire professor, or Kapellmeister, and the authority, income, and opportunities provided by that position. A great composer required access to the places where music is performed and circulated, whether cathedral, court, printing, or opera house. And most, if not all, had wives, mistresses and muses, to support, stimulate and inspire their great achievements, not to mention deal with the domestic stuff. Obviously, to be born male gave a person a huge head start.
And yet, women persisted. Despite working in cultures which systematically denied them access to advanced education in composition; despite not being able, by virtue of their sex, take up a professional position, control their own money, publish their own music, enter certain public spaces; and despite having their art reduced to simplistic formulas about male and female music – graceful girls, vigorous intellectual boys – female composers kept writing music. Each woman’s path to creativity was different, but each composer made her choice, and took her chance, whether in the private, female sphere, or – more rarely – in the public, male world. Barbara Strozzi, denied access to Venetian opera (let alone a job at St Mark’s) because of her sex, made sure that she got her work out there through the new media, print. Fanny Hensel, denied the professional, international opportunities seized by her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, created a very special musical salon in Berlin. Lili Boulanger watched and learned from the failure of her older sister, Nadia, to break through the Parisian glass ceiling on talent alone. Lili smashed through it herself by presenting herself in public at least as a fragile child-woman. What is even more inspiring is that many of those women kept writing music despite subscribing to their society’s beliefs as to what they were capable of as a woman, how they should live as a woman, and, crucially, what they could (and could not) compose as a woman.
The point that I will never tire of making is that so many women were successful in their own time, but they needed to live and work in communities that actively enabled them to make music. Those communities were sometimes half-hidden – private salons and convents – and women invariably remained excluded from the big cultural stages, but they existed and were vital to creativity. What is frustrating, looking back, is that even those composers who were successful, prolific, celebrated in their own time were – almost to a woman – at best forgotten, at worst dismissed after their death. Women simply did not have access to the institutions which manufacture posterity.
Composeher is a triumphant counter-blast to that great forgetting – creating not just a community, but a platform for music created by women, here and now, and for the future.