Female composers and International Women's Day

2011 is here! Here’s hoping for another year of glorious and diverse music from the Oriana Choir. And we’ve certainly got an eclectic mix coming up in the first half, until we break for the summer. We’ll be rounding off the 2010/11 season with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Barbican, which is very exciting, and before that we’ll be performing a concert in Greenwich with the exciting working title “Bruckner, Brass and Boats”. I’ll look forward to seeing what makes the programme there. But our first concert this year, to mark International Women’s Day on the 8th March, is a celebration of female composers.

David-the-Conductor spent about 20 minutes at the beginning of last week’s rehearsal arguing simultaneously that women both are and are not prejudiced against in classical music. It was a bit confusing, but that seems about right. Women have been active in music throughout history, but in terms of performance, the works written by women that are regularly heard are a tiny drop in an ocean of standard repertoire by men. Music has been dominated by men through the whole of our living memory.

It seems to me that the prejudice is largely structural rather than individual. Fanny Mendelssohn’s parents educated her in music, but her father famously told her "Perhaps for Felix music will become a profession, while for you it will always remain but an ornament; never can and should it become the foundation of your existence." Says it all really. And success in the musical world comes down to performers being interested in performing your music. No-one will ever hear it otherwise, and how can you develop your craft without feedback? So certainly historically, and perhaps to an extent today, women have been unsuccessful because of a resistance to performing their music and fewer opportunities to persuade people to do so.

And even if you do get it performed, what if people don’t like it? We watched Sian Massey put not a foot wrong in her line-judging of the Liverpool-Wolves match this week, making the Sky Sports commentators look ridiculous in their out-moded comments about women’s understanding of the offside rule. But if she’d slipped up and made a mistake on that close-to-call Liverpool goal, as even the best referees and line judges do occasionally, how many frustrated Liverpool fans might have said something similar in the heat of the moment? To succeed in male-dominated professions women have to work that bit harder. So does this mean that music by women has to be mind-blowing from the start in order for that composer to be listened to again?

Perhaps the most annoying thing is that women still seem to be seen not just as composers, but as female composers, which in itself is a prejudice that’s unworthy of the diversity of music they produce. Diana Ambache, formerly musical director of the Ambache Chamber Orchestra says “In 1995-7 we did a concert series in London featuring music by women composers, presenting several premières of music by women of the last 250 years. BBC Radio 3 producers were invited to every one of the nine concerts, but didn't come to any - in other words they were not willing to listen to any of this music. This looks like prejudice.”

I am determined to stand out from the crowd and judge female composers on their own merits, not letting my feminist tendencies get in the way of my musical opinions. So here we go: I can’t stand Lutyens. There. She’s credited with bringing Schoenberg’s serialism to the UK, which in itself is enough to put me off. I blame YOU for that hideous A’level experience of trying to compose with a tone row, Lutyens! We’re singing her “Verses of Love” at the concert, for our sins, and by the end of rehearsing it last week I was tempted to kick myself in the head to distract myself from the horror. Maybe it will grow on me.
We also ran through a couple of pieces by Boulanger, which were very French and quite lush with gorgeous thick harmonic texture. Difficult, but once we’ve got them nailed I’m sure they’ll sound fab. And we finished with a look at a piece by Rehnkvist, of which my overwhelming impression was that it’s a bit hard. So I’m quaking in my boots a little for this concert. That’s 18 new pieces to learn and so far they’ve all been technically challenging. Gulp. Let’s hope the rest are all about Three Blind Mice level (which is actually what my tone row composition most sounded like. I may not have fully grasped the technique of serialism).