The ‘Great’ Composer?

At the start of the twentieth century throughout much of the United States and Europe, fuelled by the enduring image of the ‘new woman’, femme nouvelle, and neue Frau, there were widespread media discussions about women’s roles in society and culture – what these roles were and what they should be. The debates took place as more and more women of all classes and nationalities, refusing any longer to accept subservient domestic positions, were moving into many different areas of public life with increasing confidence, independence, and determination.¹

In the British musical press, writers continued a particular debate that had been raging for several decades. Why were there no ‘great’ women composers? The February 1900 edition of The Musical Times, for example, contained a report on a paper, ‘Woman as a Musician’, given by Dr Henry Harding at the fifteenth annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians at Scarborough. Harding (1855–1930), organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s Church in Bedford, was a representative member of the British musical establishment, with qualifications from the Royal College of Organists and Trinity College of Music as well as an Oxford University BMus and doctorate.²

Harding’s views on the position of women as composers were typical of the musical establishment. Many commentators, like Harding, recognised that women had not previously had, and still did not have, equal access to musical education and professional opportunities, but felt that, given the broadening of women’s access to conservatoires and to the music profession, it would not be long before they were recognised as successful, mainstream, maybe even ‘great’, composers.⁴

There were, however, as Harding suggests, still commentators who held firmly to the belief that a woman had never been and could never be a ‘great’ composer. For example, A. L. S., in the Musical News of the same year, 1900, wrote emphatically:

What made a composer ‘great’ was almost never defined in these discussions, although an interesting warning note about the ‘great woman composer’ had been sounded by E. A. C., possibly the composer Elizabeth Amelia Chamberlayne (1869–1919), in a letter to The Musical World back in 1890:

E. A. C. seems to imply that a ‘great’ woman composer’s music would be so different from that of the ‘great’ male composers of the canon, that neither it nor its creator would or could be recognised as ‘great’. The debate about whether women’s music was in some way different from that of men was to be a part of the debate over women’s contributions as composers for many years.

Femininity in Music

Returning to Harding’s paper, what is perhaps most notable about his views, apart from the strangely precise assertion that there were 489 women composers in existence, is his ‘strong exception’ to the idea that the concept of femininity could be applied to music. While A. L. S. was happy to recognise femininity in male composers, for Harding, and increasingly for the generations that followed, femininity was becoming a problematic concept that had all too often been applied to music and its creators. There was a drive instead to promote British music in particular as manly and virile, something that can be seen in much of the reception and promotion of British composers such as Hubert Parry (1848–1918) or Edward Elgar (1857–1934).⁷

Commentators inevitably linked women to femininity, expecting that the music produced by women should and would reflect this essential aspect of their beings, and this would in some way account for its difference. When a woman’s music, expected to take the form of songs or shorter piano pieces, could be described as dainty, graceful, or charming it neatly fulfilled this expectation while at the same time predictably making it a lesser kind of music, never ‘great’. On the other hand, if a woman did produce bold, forthright, complex music, in larger forms such as sonatas or symphonies, she was somehow betraying her essential self in a troubling way. The reception of the music created by various women composers can be seen to reflect this problematic set of expectations from the late nineteenth century and throughout the first forty years of the twentieth century (and indeed beyond).

For example, in the early years of her career Ethel Smyth published and appeared in concert programmes using her initials rather than her full name. George Bernard Shaw’s review of the 1892 premiere of one of her works reveals the audience’s surprise that the ambiguously gendered composer of a powerful orchestral work could turn out to be a woman:

Over forty years later, critics were still unsettled by women composing music which did not reflect prevalent ideas of womanhood. Here are two critical reactions to a 1935 London concert at which avant-garde music by Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94), and Grace Williams (1906–77) was heard, providing an interesting example from the period shortly before the Second World War. William McNaught wrote in the Evening News that the concert was ‘an interesting study of the young female mind of today. This organ, when it takes up composition, works in mysterious ways. No lip-stick, silk stocking, or saucily tilted hat adorns the music evolved from its recesses’.⁹ And an advance notice of the concert in the Glasgow Herald claimed: ‘Musicians … are beginning to wonder when a woman composer is going to write some music reminiscent of the sex as it used to be’.¹⁰ As scholars such as Marcia J. Citron have pointed out, these views on women’s essential femininity are just a part of the complicated set of circumstances, including the lack of a thorough musical education for most women, as well as female role models, that served to exclude women from the canon of great composers.¹¹

New Century: Established Composers (Chaminade, White, Smyth, and Le Beau)

The media debates over women’s abilities as composers were doubtless directly prompted by the increasing numbers of women at the turn of the twentieth century who were regarded, by themselves and by others, as composers and who were leading successful and rewarding careers. At the start of the new century, throughout Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, women were publishing and achieving performances of their music in all genres, from symphonies and operas to chamber music and songs. Many of these women were of the same generation as Harding, well-established, middle-aged composers such as Ethel Smyth (1858–1934), Adela Maddison (1862–1929), and Maude Valérie White (1855–1937) from Britain; Louise Adolpha Le Beau (1850–1927) from Germany; Amy Beach (1862–1944) from the United States; or Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) from France.

In the early twentieth century, Chaminade and her well-crafted music, notably songs and piano pieces, were known and loved throughout Europe and the United States.¹² Chaminade’s varied reception during her lifetime provides more evidence of the conflicted concept of femininity as applied to women composers. She gave her name to an expensive perfume, created by the British company, Morny Frères, and which was advertised in the press as follows:

The association with a female composer must have seemed apt for a ‘light and dainty’ fragrance. Yet in his 1901 book Songs and Songwriters, American critic Henry T. Finck wrote that: ‘Mlle Chaminade’s face is said to have “a boyish look”, and there is no specific feminine tenderness in her songs – a trait which she shares with other female composers, who seem to lack both true femininity and the virile faculty of creating ideas.’¹⁴ A few years later the American writer Arthur Elsen, in his book Woman’s Work in Music, referred to Chaminade as an example of his belief that ‘women’s work in music will always show more of delicate grace and refinement than man’s, and will be to some extent lacking in the broader effects of strong feeling’, claiming that her songs ‘are among the most delightful in the world to-day, yet they charm by delicacy rather than strength’.¹⁵

After 1890, Chaminade, who had produced orchestral and stage works in the 1880s, concentrated on composing and publishing songs and piano pieces.¹⁶ Women who needed to make a living from their musical endeavours were excluded from many of the lucrative music-related positions that their male contemporaries were able to fill, from teaching composition at conservatoires and universities to conducting mainstream symphony orchestras.¹⁷

There were many practical reasons why women working as composers in the early twentieth century would concentrate on smaller genres such as song, including the comparative ease with which they could be performed in a variety of settings, the fact that through publication, songwriting in particular was one of the few potentially financially profitable forms of composition, and the limited access of some women to a thorough training in counterpoint or orchestration. Women were also socialised to communicate feelings and develop their instincts and emotions in ways that many people would have regarded as entirely inappropriate for men. In song, women found a genre which was entirely suited to a direct and crystallised expression in music of feeling, ideas, and emotions.

Maude Valérie White, who had studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music, was primarily a songwriter and reached the height of her fame and critical acclaim in the 1890s.¹⁸ She was an inveterate traveller and set texts in a wide variety of languages, from English and German to French, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. At the start of the twentieth century, in the autumn of 1901, White decided to live in Sicily for the sake of her health and was never again to have a settled home in England. Her songs, such as her hauntingly sensual D’Annunzio setting ‘Isaotta Blanzemano’ (1904), became increasingly inventive and the concerts of her music that she organised continued to be well received and financially successful.¹⁹

Women often played central roles in musical salons throughout Europe, Britain, and the United States and a more nuanced consideration of exactly what is meant by the term ‘salon music’, a term often used in connection with the music created by women such as White or Chaminade, is long overdue.²⁰ At a time when women were just beginning to embrace public life, it is not surprising that many of them found a comfortable and welcoming place in the semi-public world of the salon, as composers, performers, hosts, and audience. The notable Parisian salon host Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac (1865–1943), was an important figure in the lives of many early twentieth-century composers, including Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983). The Princesse de Polignac commissioned a wide variety of music and, through the concerts at her salon, provided an invaluable performance space in which composers could gain a hearing for their latest works in all genres, from orchestral and choral works to piano pieces and songs.

Many of the women working at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Ethel Smyth or Louise Adolpha Le Beau, were eager to move beyond the world of song. Smyth studied in Leipzig, although privately, after a brief, unsatisfactory period at the conservatorium. She had fought in the late nineteenth century to gain a hearing for her orchestral work and then, nothing daunted, turned to creating one of the most complex and difficult to produce of all musical genres, opera. In 1902 her second opera Der Wald was premiered in Berlin, followed by The Wreckers at Leipzig in 1906,²¹ The Boatswain’s Mate in London in 1916, Fête galante in Birmingham in 1923, and Entente cordiale in London in 1925. The Wreckers, arguably her greatest achievement, is a gripping and poignant work, with a particularly intense and impassioned love duet between the two protagonists in the second act. Smyth was probably most widely performed and recognised in the 1920s, although by this time she was growing increasingly deaf and had turned to writing and broadcasting.²² She produced a remarkable series of memoirs and essays, in which she created a memorable image of herself as a feisty, indomitable woman, raging against the male ‘machine’ in order to find a hearing for her music.²³

As a composer, Le Beau was also known primarily for her large-scale orchestral and vocal works. As a writer, she produced much music criticism as well as an autobiography, Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin (Memoirs of a Composer),²⁴ in which, like Smyth, she detailed the problems and discrimination she had faced as a composer who was a woman. Like Smyth, Le Beau studied music privately. As she recounts in her memoirs, after deeming her Violin Sonata to be ‘manly and not sounding as if composed by a woman’, the composer Josef Rheinberger agreed to teach her, despite the fact that he did not usually accept women as students.²⁵ Also like Smyth, Le Beau found it hard to gain a hearing for her two operas Hadumoth (1888–91) and Der verzauberte Kalif (1901–3).

The Cosmopolitan Composer and Difficulties in Germany (Maddison and Poldowski)

The situation for women in Germany, particularly in the most conservative cities such as Berlin, does seem to have been particularly difficult for women who were trying to build careers as composers. Nevertheless, in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, studying in Germany, either privately or at a German conservatoire, was regarded as the best career choice for musicians from elsewhere in Europe and the United States, reflecting the high regard in which the Germanic canon was still held. Women from elsewhere followed their male contemporaries to go and study in various German cities, despite the fact that they were not always welcoming to women musicians. As a young woman, Smyth fought with her father to be allowed to study in Leipzig, although she only studied at the conservatorium there for a brief period. In 1902, the American composer Mabel Daniels (1878–1971)²⁶ described the Munich Conservatory, where she was studying, in a letter home:

The British composer Adela Maddison moved from London to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, arguably to further her compositional career. In Paris she was acquainted with the Princesse de Polignac and found a supportive atmosphere for her music.²⁸ But in 1906, for unknown reasons, she moved to live and work in Germany, from where she wrote to her friend Delius that she could ‘find no sympathetic soul in Berlin – they all have a contempt for anything done by a woman in the composition line!’²⁹

The cosmopolitanism of composers in the first decade of the twentieth century is perhaps particularly striking as far as women are concerned. A good example is the composer Poldowski (1879–1932), pen name of Irene Wieniawska (or after her marriage, Lady Dean Paul). She was born in Belgium, daughter of the famous Polish violinist Henri Wieniawski, studied in Paris, and lived most of her life in London. She was best known, and highly critically admired, for her songs, in turn dissonant, humorous, and languorous, most of which were settings of French texts.

In a fascinating article in the progressive music journal The Sackbut in 1924, journalist Yvonne Pert grappled with ideas of femininity as applied to women composers. She dismissed Smyth as a composer whose work was ‘conceived according to masculine models’ but did discuss specific contemporary composers, including the Welsh composer Morfydd Owen (1891–1918),³⁰ whom she felt were reflecting an undefined femininity in their music. Pert focused on Poldowski, describing her as

For many of these women, the First World War ruptured the ease with which they travelled and worked in different European countries as well as thwarting other aspects of their careers. German productions of Smyth’s operas were cancelled at the outbreak of war, while Maddison was forced to return to England when her German companion and probably lover, Marta Mundt, was dismissed by her employer, the Princesse de Polignac.

The Disruption of the First World War, Conservatoires, and Prizes (Canal, Leleu, Maconchy, and Williams)

The war also curtailed the movements of those composers who additionally worked as performers. Promoting their own music through performance was often a way that women worked around the establishment assumption that their music was not worth hearing. Le Beau, like Chaminade and Beach,³² was a professional pianist, as well as a composer. Many younger women such as the British viola player Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) or the French pianists Marguerite Canal (1890–1978) and Jeanne Leleu (1898–1979), who began to be known as composers in the years after the First World War, were also in demand as performers and frequently took the opportunity to promote their own work. Both Canal and Leleu were winners of the prestigious French Prix de Rome, in 1920 and 1923 respectively.³³ This prize rewarded the winner with a period working at the Villa Médicis in Rome as well as guaranteed media coverage, both leading to invaluable performance opportunities. The only previous woman to win this prize, in 1913, had been Lili Boulanger (1893–1918),³⁴ a composer who, like Owen, died in her twenties but who nevertheless left a formidable legacy of distinctive and imaginative music in a powerfully individual musical voice.

As the twentieth century progressed, it became more common for women to study composition at conservatoires, and to benefit from the opportunities these institutions provided, from performances to networking. Winning prizes was not always so easy though. As a student at London’s Royal College of Music in the late 1920s, Maconchy was told that the judges had decided not to award her the Mendelssohn Scholarship for composition since she would only get married and never write another note of music.³⁵ Interestingly, White had won the Mendelssohn Scholarship back in 1879 and Maconchy’s daughter Nicola LeFanu (b.1947) was to win it in 1972. The Mendelssohn Scholarship provided money for the holder to travel and study abroad. Maconchy and her close friend, the Welsh composer Williams, were both awarded somewhat less prestigious Octavia Travelling Scholarships by the Royal College of Music and did spend valuable time in Europe – Maconchy in Prague and Williams in Vienna.³⁶

Class Conflict and Struggles with Men (Crawford Seeger, Barraine, Tailleferre, and Mahler)

The radical American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–53) studied at Chicago’s American Conservatory and then privately with Charles Seeger who, in an echo of Le Beau’s experience with her teacher Rheinberger, was initially reluctant to teach a woman. Teacher and pupil were later to be married. Crawford Seeger won a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1930 travelled to Europe, where she spent most of her time in Berlin, a not-altogether-satisfactory experience, despite the opportunity to meet numerous musicians and composers. On her return to the United States Crawford Seeger became increasingly involved in left-wing politics, regarding music as an important part of the class struggle. She was to devote much of the rest of her life to working with American folk song.³⁷ A similar devotion to left-wing politics can be seen in the life and career of Elsa Barraine (1910–99) while Maconchy was active in the Worker’s Musical Association, founded in 1936.

Not all composers travelled beyond their home country. The British composer Dorothy Howell (1898–1982) studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music. She went on to have several works in a somewhat unadventurous late-Romantic idiom performed at the celebrated Promenade Concerts in the 1920s, such as her tone poem Lamia (1919), based on Keats’s poem of the same name.³⁸ The African American composer Florence Price (1887–1953) studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory and eventually settled in Chicago in the late 1920s. In 1932 she won first prize in the prestigious Wanamaker competition for her Symphony and Piano Sonata, both in E minor. In both works, Price deftly introduces melodic and rhythmic elements of African American vernacular music.³⁹

Charles Seeger’s attitude was not one taken by composition teachers elsewhere. At the Royal College of Music, Maconchy and Williams, together with fellow students such as Dorothy Gow (1893–1982), found an endlessly supportive teacher and mentor in Ralph Vaughan Williams.⁴⁰ Paul Dukas, at the Paris Conservatoire, was similarly supportive of his female composition students, such as Barraine, Claude Arrieu (1903–90), and Yvonne Desportes (1907–93).

The careers of many of the women who worked as composers in the first forty years of the twentieth century were affected by the attitudes of the men – fathers and husbands – in their lives. Several decades after Smyth or Chaminade had faced implacable fathers, numerous men still made it difficult for their daughters to study music at a conservatory, including those of Clarke and Tailleferre. While some women, such as Maconchy, had understanding husbands who encouraged and nurtured their careers, others faced considerable resentment or even prohibition. The best-known example from this time is probably Alma Mahler (1879–1964). The young Alma Schindler had thrown herself into composition. But her first husband, Gustav Mahler, famously wrote to her in 1901 before they were married to say ‘The role of “composer”, the “bread-winner”, is mine; yours is that of a loving partner, the sympathetic comrade’.⁴¹ Despite having previously written to a friend ‘He thinks nothing of my art and much of his own. And I think nothing of his art and much of my own’, Alma Mahler capitulated and stopped composing.

Women Organising Together and Embracing New Technologies

Another composer who survived notoriously difficult marriages to two husbands who both tried to stop her composing was Tailleferre.⁴² Tailleferre, however, continued to compose throughout her long life. She had first come to attention as a member of the group of young French composers know as Les Six and was supported and encouraged by both Erik Satie and the Princesse de Polignac. The importance of support networks was invaluable for many of the women working as composers in the period before the Second World War. Some groups were established by women specifically to support women musicians, such as the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique (Union of Women Composers and Music Teachers), founded in 1906 in France,⁴³ and the Society of Women Musicians, founded in 1911 in Britain.⁴⁴

Also notable at a slightly later date in Britain were the Macnaghten–Lemare concerts, an initiative set up by three women (violinist Anne Macnaghten, conductor Iris Lemare, and composer Lutyens) who denied having overt feminist ideals but who nevertheless provided vital performance opportunities for themselves and for their friends, such as Maconchy and Williams.⁴⁵ As scholars such as Martha Vicinus have shown, women have frequently found that by organising together, they have been able to overcome chauvinism and discrimination.⁴⁶

Like so many women of their generation, Maconchy and Williams keenly embraced the opportunities offered by the relatively new technologies of broadcasting and recording. Throughout the 1930s, a decade of growing economic depression and political unrest, they both had numerous works played on the various radio stations of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and began to see their music reproduced as ‘records’, although it was to be many years before either owned a record player.⁴⁷ In the 1930s, Crawford began to work extensively with field recordings of American folk song.⁴⁸

Back in 1900, a report in the Lady’s Pictorial on Henry Harding’s paper noted that he had claimed that ‘there was every hope … that a pioneer woman, a courageous, pure and noble artist, would arise, and compel us to regard her as a composer as well as a musician’.⁴⁹ Nearly forty years later, by the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain, Europe, and the United States had seen many courageous and noble women who had refused to let the prejudices they faced prevent them from working as composers. Often creating their own networks and opportunities, they built on very different educational opportunities and life experiences to compel recognition for their striking and varied musical voices.

A Lunar Landing and a Symphony

Post-war musical developments were certainly in the mind of Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906–77) when she wrote in 1973 about how listening to a ‘way-out’ electronic piece (after a Mahler Symphony) made her feel that she had ‘left the earth and landed on the moon’. Warming to her space-age association, Williams argued that

Such comments seem eminently reasonable but also reveal Williams’s feelings of being outpaced and outmoded in the post-war musical race. She had been stung by a critic who had described her music as being ‘eons removed from the world of the avant-garde’, and frequently confessed to feelings of isolation.³ As she stated:

(For a discussion of Williams’s pre-war career, see Chapter 1, ‘Women in Composition before the Second World War’.)

Revolution had been in the air after the war. Intense tussles broke out between cohorts about the very nature of musical style and language, and questions about what form the ‘music of the future’ should take lingered on until the end of the twentieth century. The biggest explosion had been formed by a perceived crisis in the major–minor key system in Vienna in the century’s early decades, and Schoenberg’s replacement of that system with the twelve-note/serial method. Many of post-war Europe’s most influential musicians, including René Leibowitz and Theodor W. Adorno, believed that this (Second) Viennese solution to an apparently exhausted tonality should now be applied to music as a whole, creating an international lingua franca for a new post-war age. Such a notion was debated and radicalised into variants (such as total serialism), principally by Pierre Boulez in France and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany, and was given credence by Stravinsky’s own ‘capitulation’ to serialism in the early 1950s.

International music discourse was dominated for several decades by this intense preoccupation with the nature, shape, and form of musical language. Triggered by Boulez’s inflammatory pronouncement in 1952 that ‘every composer outside the serial experiments has been useless’, the resulting Cold War in music created a peculiar situation for a time, in which new works were appraised (or measured) by the extent to which their music conformed to this new orthodoxy.⁵ The advent of electronic music, spectral music, minimalism, and other styles would prove that there was more than one stylistic choice available for composers to make, but Williams’s fears about being left behind in this strange new world were well founded. Music written in a broadly tonal idiom – in the 1950s and ’60s, certainly – risked being dismissed as irrelevant or unoriginal by progressives advocating a complete break with the musical past in favour of new terrain. Most composers who were serious about their craft, whether traditionalist or progressive, felt compelled to justify their compositional choices.

Williams shared her anxieties with her friend, the Austrian composer Egon Wellesz (1885–1974), with whom she had studied for a year in Vienna after graduating from the Royal College of Music in the late 1920s. Wellesz had been a pupil of Schoenberg’s, alongside Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and had a rare insight into, and admiration for, the radical musical innovations of his Second Viennese friends. He was not, however, an admirer of the post-war avant-garde. ‘The noise-makers have the upper hand’, he told Williams in August 1962, ‘it is still a post-war neurosis and “angry young men” attitude which one must ignore.’⁶

Few could ignore the angry-young-men attitude at this time, but Williams discreetly focused instead on writing works which heralded a new dawn for Welsh music. Her quiet revolution began in the interwar period, when she first gained a public profile with a series of expertly crafted orchestral works, including the popular Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1939/40). A woman making musical use of nursery tunes may have played into status quo stereotypes about women at this time, but Williams broke that particular mould in 1943 when she became the first Welsh composer to write a symphony (‘Symphonic Impressions’). In the years immediately following the war Williams underwent a significant period of creative renewal, the original, declamatory style of Penillion for orchestra (1955) and the Second Symphony (1956) partly defined by her evocation of the sounds and cadences of the Welsh language in purely instrumental terms. She did use a twelve-note row as a passacaglia theme in the second movement of her Trumpet Concerto (1963), but cast it within a tonal framework. As she explained:

Music on the Right and Left – Plupart du Temps (Most of the Time)

Although aeons removed from Williams in terms of musical idiom and style, a concern with melody and vocal and instrumental equivalents have also been fundamental to the music of the French composer Betsy Jolas (b.1926). Born in Paris, Jolas spent the war years in the United States and, after graduating in music from Bennington College, Vermont, returned with her family to France in 1946. She continued her studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Simone Plé-Caussade, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen at a time when distinctions between music of the past (tonal) and the future (serial) were starting to be fiercely debated. Recalling the particular atmosphere in Paris after the war, Jolas has stated that

By Jolas’s own admission, it took her ‘a long time to know the kind of music I wanted to write’.⁹ The lyrical music of Webern became a guiding light for her at this time, and she admired and acquainted herself with the radical experimentalism of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio, while attending events at Donaueschingen and Darmstadt in (West) Germany, and Domaine Musical concerts (in Paris). She did not share the enthusiasm of her peers for all the emerging avant-garde techniques (musical pointillism, for instance), however, and was never a disciple of serialism. She focused on forging a musical series of her own in these formative years, her compositional approach shaped as much by her (forbidden) love of tonal music – in particular, the Renaissance choral works of Perotin, Lassus, and Josquin she gained knowledge of during her early studies in the States – as by avant-garde techniques.

Jolas’s fascination with the relationship between words and music, and the expressive potential of the voice, is revealed in pieces such as the Reverdy song cycle, Plupart du temps for mezzo-soprano and piano (1949) and in her Mots for vocal quintet and ensemble (1963). In Quatour II for soprano and string trio (1964), the singer is balanced as an equal with the instruments, and articulates ‘a flexible art of phonemes representing the vocal equivalent of bowings and tonguings’.¹⁰ The quartet was commissioned by and premiered at one of Boulez’s prestigious Domaine Musical concerts in 1966, and Jolas continued to explore new modes of vocal and instrumental equivalents in her D’un opéra de voyage for twenty-two instruments (1967), a piece also premiered by Domaine Musical performers. The essence of the melodic line, the accents and inflexions of language, and the spirit of experimentalism have remained central to Jolas’s oeuvre, animating works such as the vocal Sonate à 12 (1970) and the 11 Lieder for trumpet and orchestra (1977) as well as her operas, Le pavillon au bord de la rivière (1975) and Schliemann (1990). A highly esteemed figure on the French musical scene, Jolas succeeded her teacher Messiaen as Professor of Analysis and Composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1975, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983.

An Angry Young Woman – And Suddenly It’s Evening

Virgil Thomson once observed that France, the United States, and England tended to neglect their women composers, before going on to identify Jolas and Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83) as two of the best.¹¹ Continental avant-garde ideas were not always clearly received across the Channel, and the English music establishment’s hostility towards serialism in the immediate post-war years meant that recognition for Lutyens came late. Inspired, like Jolas, by hearing a performance of Webern’s music, Lutyens had decided to start with twelve-note music in the late 1930s, and her Chamber Concerto No. 1 for nine instruments (1939–40) – the first piece by an English composer to use serial techniques – marked an important milestone. Wartime England was not in the mood, however, for a musical revolution associated with an Austrian (Schoenberg) and an angry young woman. Mocked and criticised for writing unladylike music and for adopting an ‘un-English’ musical method, Lutyens later confessed to being made to feel at this time ‘like a Communist before the Committee for Un-American Activities’.¹² Significantly, her icy reception at home was in stark contrast to the warm welcome she received from young composers (including Boulez) in Paris, where, by 1947, ‘twelve-tone music was … completely accepted so that I lost the sense of utter isolation I had felt in England’.¹³

Lutyens continued, in her isolated position, to explore advanced musical terrain in her sensuous Rimbaud cantata, O Saisons, O chateaux (1946) and String Quartet No. 6 (1952). She took a sui generis approach to serial composition in these works, and made the decision to reject the pointillistic techniques and total serialism ‘cul-de-sac’ embraced by younger, avant-garde composers in the 1950s.¹⁴ Her luminous Motet for unaccompanied chorus (1953), a setting of extracts from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, revealed her to be one of the finest polyphonists of the mid-century, and was responsible for igniting wider, serious interest in her music in Britain. The Motet was one of several of Lutyens’s pieces that were commissioned by William Glock for his Dartington Summer School of Music. Glock was a seasoned champion of contemporary music, and many leading musicians (including Stravinksy, Boulanger, and Boulez) regularly visited Dartington, a safe retreat for contemporary music after the war. Glock was highly influential in raising the overall profile of contemporary music in Britain in the 1960s, and it was not a coincidence that many of Lutyens’s most critically acclaimed pieces, including And Suddenly It’s Evening for tenor and ensemble (1966) and Essence of Our Happinesses for tenor, chorus, and orchestra (1968), were commissioned by the BBC during his tenure there as Music Controller and Proms Director (1959–73).

Dramatic Space Play and La Boulangerie

The change in attitudes towards contemporary music in Britain came at the right time for Scottish composer Thea Musgrave (b.1928). Musgrave regularly attended Glock’s Dartington in the 1950s and also studied in Paris and the United States at this time. Attuned to the various new cross-currents in music, she explored aspects of both neoclassical and serial styles in her music, but remained independent of any particular ideology or school of composition. Following the completion of her second opera, The Decision (1964–65), she began to develop what she termed a ‘dramatic-abstract’ approach to instrumental writing, composing a series of pieces which explored the inherent dramatic potential of concertante form from different angles. Her Chamber Concerto No. 2 (1966), a piece premiered at Dartington, included notated ‘ad. lib’ passages for the instruments in different tempi, and disruptive (Ivesian) collisions between highly chromatic music and popular tunes such as ‘The Swanee River’. Musgrave expanded her concept to include different elements of physical theatre in her Clarinet Concerto (1968), Horn Concerto (1971), Viola Concerto (1973), and Space Play (1974). In Space Play, Musgrave specifies that the nine instrumentalists should all be physically separated on stage. In the Horn Concerto, the orchestra essentially assumes the traditional seating plan, but members of the orchestra’s horn section are positioned offstage and move around the concert hall during the performance. In the Viola Concerto, the orchestra’s viola section is placed where the 1st violins usually sit, and play standing up towards the end of the piece. The solo clarinet moves around different sections of the orchestra, meanwhile, in the Clarinet Concerto. The dramatic-musical aspects explored in these instrumental works went on to inform the series of operas she wrote after her move to the United States in 1972. Operas such as Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1984), Simon Bolivar (1992), and Pontalba (2003) have shown Musgrave to be one of the foremost opera composers of her generation.

Musgrave studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris from 1950 to 1954, and became the first woman composer to win the Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize in 1952. Boulanger, one of the most renowned composition teachers of the twentieth century, was an advocate of neoclassicism and an ardent champion of the music of Stravinsky. Female members of her ‘Boulangerie’ included the American composers Marion Bauer (1882–1955), Louise Talma (1906–96), and Julia Perry (1924–79); the South African-British composer Priaulx Rainier (1903–86); Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–69); and the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90). Most of these composers used neoclassical principles as their starting points, but embraced new musical possibilities in their music from the 1950s onwards. In the case of Glanville-Hicks, her rejection in the late 1940s of both neoclassicism (defined by the composer as the ‘[pushing] around of musical rubble from the nineteenth century’) and serialism (‘a camouflage for the ungifted’), led her to formulate her own ‘melody-rhythm’ approach to composition, informed by an exploration of world musics.¹⁵

American Toccatas

Boulanger’s influence on her many American students (including Aaron Copland) shaped the direction of contemporary music for a time in the United States. Like Copland, Louise Talma had studied with Boulanger at the Conservatoire Americain, Fontainebleau, and her neoclassic Toccata for Orchestra (1944) and jubilant Alleluia in the Form of a Toccata for piano (1945) were amongst the first pieces to bring her to public attention in America. Talma was the only female member of the so-called American ‘Stravinsky School’ in the early 1950s, along with Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Harold Shapero, and Alexei Haieff, a group of composers recognised by many as being at the forefront of American music.¹⁶ The ensuing battle for music which erupted on American soil in the mid-1950s, however, prompted a seismic shift in attitudes in favour of serialism.

Talma was acutely aware of Cold War rifts between progressives (serialists and ultra-modernists) and tonally oriented composers that were playing out in America at this time, but first became genuinely interested in serial possibilities when she heard her friend Irving Fine’s use of the method in his String Quartet (1952).¹⁷ Some of her earliest explorations in serial composition date from this time, and include her beautifully crafted Six Etudes for piano (1954), the Second Piano Sonata (1955), and her opera, The Alcestiad (1955–58), which combines both serial and tonal elements.¹⁸ Talma’s own categorisation of the three periods of her work as ‘neoclassical’ (1925–52), ‘serial’ (1952–67), and ‘non-serial atonal’ (1967–96), serves as a useful guide to her compositional development, while also revealing the way in which she responded to mid-century challenges.¹⁹ While a clear allegiance to extended tonality runs throughout her oeuvre, ‘late’ works such as the achingly poignant 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for tenor and instrumental ensemble (1979), and the evocative soundscapes of The Ambient Air for ensemble (1983), reveal that the different compositional methods Talma drew from enabled her to find a distinctive musical idiom which was both highly personal and of its time. She could have spoken for many composers when she stated in 1979 that

Awards and Condemned Playgrounds

Talma was the first American woman composer to be awarded two Guggenheim prizes (in 1946 and 1947). Previously, only Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–53), discussed in Chapter 1, one of the brightest lights on the interwar American modernist music scene, had been a Guggenheim recipient (1930), but in post-war years the names of more women composers began to appear more regularly in America’s award lists. This was an important breakthrough and revealed that women of outstanding ability, particularly those who had benefitted from the right type of formal training in composition, were beginning to gain recognition from musical establishments. The African American composer Julia Perry is a case in point. While still in her twenties, Perry had, unusually, already gained an international profile for her radiant Stabat Mater (1951), widely performed in both America and Europe, and the two Guggenheim prizes she received (in 1954 and 1956) followed periods of study with Dallapiccola in Florence (from 1951) and Boulanger in Fontainebleau (1952).²¹

Two of Perry’s pieces, both composed in 1952, particularly stand out: her beautiful spiritual ‘I’m a Poor Li’l Orphan in This Worl’ for voice and piano, and the astringently neoclassical Short Piece for Orchestra, a work of vivid colours skilfully deployed in ensemble and tutti episodes. Contrasts of instrumental timbre was further developed in her Homunculus, C. F. for ten percussionists (1960), a magical rumination on the transformative possibilities of the chord of the fifteenth (the ‘C. F.’ of the title). J. Michele Edwards has suggested that Perry’s later works, including twelve symphonies (1961–73) composed in the heat of the Civil Rights struggle, may have drawn the many musical strands in this fascinating composer’s world together.²²

Perry was the recipient of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964, and a decade later Talma became the first woman composer to be elected as an Academy member. She was followed into the Academy a year later by her friend, Miriam Gideon (1906–96). Gideon had not been a pupil of Boulanger, but had studied in New York with Roger Sessions (from 1935 to 1943), where she had worked alongside fellow students Milton Babbitt, Vivian Fine, and Hugo Weisgall. Although interested in serial techniques, Gideon preferred the freedom of composing without systematic scaffolding, and focused instead on devising her own personal musical language, built from motivic cells.²³

Gideon’s acute sensitivity to the word, and flair for sophisticated word-setting, is immediately evident in her early The Hound of Heaven for voice, oboe, and string trio (1945); and in the later cycle The Condemned Playground for soprano, tenor, and mixed ensemble (1963), she seamlessly combines texts in English with Latin (i. ‘Pyrrha’), Japanese (ii. ‘Hiroshima’) and French (iii. ‘The Litanies of Satan’) to vivid effect. Gideon was the first woman composer to be commissioned to write music for the synagogue, and her Sacred Service for Sabbath Morning (1970) and Shirat Miriam L’shabbat (1974) are amongst her finest pieces. Composed for use in services, the music in these large-scale solo, choral, and instrumental works possesses a monumental quality which both reflects and transcends its time.

It would be interesting to know what the Senate Committee for Un-American Activities made of Gideon’s music. Her third husband, the English scholar Frederic Ewen, became a victim of McCarthyism in 1952 when he was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to account for his alleged communist sympathies. Although nothing was proven, as a result both he and Gideon – simply by association – lost their teaching posts at Brooklyn College, New York.²⁴ Reflecting simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War witnessed a reignition of fears in America about the spread of communism, and the need for exposure of alleged supporters of that ideology at home reached panic levels under Senator Joseph McCarthy’s direction in 1950–54. Many innocent Americans became victims, at a time when simply reading a copy of a left-wing magazine was enough to arouse suspicions. Gideon’s teaching career was curtailed during these years of paranoia, but she continued to compose and to be supported by friends, and was reinstated as a music teacher at Brooklyn College in the 1970s. Research has revealed that the FBI kept the couple under surveillance – and that Gideon’s file was still open in the early 1980s.²⁵

A Lament for Prague

Cold War events also affected Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94) in August 1968, when the hopes of the Prague Spring were abruptly quashed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.²⁶ Maconchy (also discussed in Chapter 1) had studied in Prague with Karel Jirák (1891–1972) in 1929 after graduating from the Royal College of Music, and had remained in touch with Czech friends since that time. Her Piano Concertino (1928) was premiered in Prague and was one of several early works, including her orchestral suite, The Land (1930), and first string quartets (nos. 1 and 2, 1933 and 1936), to mark her out, in the eyes of many, as the frontrunner in British music in the 1930s; with Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, and Lutyens as laudable runners-up. Czechoslovakia, its music, its people, and the part it had played in launching her career remained precious to Maconchy ever afterwards. The brutality and violence of the Soviet occupation in August 1968 so dismayed her that the slow movement of the Ninth String Quartet she was writing became a ‘threnody or lament’ for Prague.²⁷

Maconchy’s thirteen string quartets comprise one of the most significant quartet series by a twentieth-century composer. She was drawn, like Musgrave, to the form’s inherent dramatic potential; each quartet fulfils her belief that music should be an ‘impassioned argument’,²⁸ and her series reflects its time by revealing a gradual move away from tonality towards freer, more dissonant pastures. After completing seven quartets, she took a break from string writing in 1956 to focus on writing a trilogy of chamber operas, The Sofa (1957), The Departure (1958), and The Three Strangers (1961), as well as a Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra (1962), and a Nocturnal for a cappella chorus (1965).

Maconchy’s apparent failure to step in line with Webern, Boulez, and Stockhausen caused many to believe that she had become outpaced in the 1950s, but this was a misunderstanding of her position. She had, in fact, shown an awareness of twelve-note music as early as 1942 in her Quartet No. 4, but had rejected a strict use of the method because it ‘seemed thematically to be an inhibiting rather than a liberating technique’.²⁹ Clear in her choices, Maconchy returned to the quartet medium in 1967, and her ‘late’ quartets (nos. 8–13, 1967–84) feature advanced (non-serial) harmonic language, formidably sharp contrasts of textures and sonorities and unsynchronised, senza misura passages for the instruments. Her position as a highly regarded leader in British music was endorsed when she became the first woman to be elected as Chairman of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain in 1959. She succeeded Britten as President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music in 1976, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.

Women and the Cold War in Music

Maconchy’s independence, determination to pursue her own course, and ability to weather musical storms and fashions are personal qualities that are shared, in some shape or form, by all of the composers discussed in this chapter. Composition is a lonely, time-consuming, and demanding craft, and the right and left disputes of the Cold War in music presented stimulating and often taxing challenges for all composers, both male and female. There was, however, a stealthier, mid-century musical battle that was exclusively designed for women only. A lack of familiar, historic role models, together with a tradition of criticism pointing to women’s inherent creative inferiority in music, meant that the ‘Why No Great Women Composers?’ debate (also discussed in Chapter 1) was still raging for composers working in the 1950s.³⁰ Noting the novel appearance of music by five women composers (including Maconchy and Lutyens) in BBC radio programmes in April 1950, for instance, critic Harold Rutland commented that although women composers were ‘now making their presence felt’, the rarity of women composers was surely because

Electroacoustic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) connected historic women composers’ exclusion from the canon to the fact that ‘being female was a unique qualification for domestic work’. But even in 1970, she argued, stereotypical perceptions of gender in society meant that a woman could not ‘escape being squashed in her efforts – if not directly, then by subtle and insidious exclusion by her male counterparts’.³² (For an in-depth discussion of Oliveros, see Chapter 13, ‘Case Studies of Women in Electronic Music: The Early Pioneers’.) Pondering this issue further, Musgrave turned the spotlight on her generation’s dilemma when she stated that

Jolas confessed to frequently asking herself if she was ‘really a composer?’ adding with a smile that ‘only a woman would ask that question – not a man’.³⁴

As discussed in the preface, since the 1980s there has been a concerted effort to include women composers. Pioneering research by scholars, together with a belated awareness within the academy of excluded herstories, has resulted in more women composers (both historic and contemporary) gaining their rightful places in music textbooks, lecture rooms, conferences, and concert halls. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b.1939) became the first woman composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (established in 1943) with her First Symphony in 1983, and Joan Tower (b.1938) became the first female recipient of the Grawemeyer Music Award in 1990 for Silver Ladders. Tower’s inspired Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman (nos. 1–6, 1986–2017) are dedicated to ‘women who take risks’.³⁵

Is the Cold War for women composers finally over? Today, composers from the generation born mid-century – the long list includes Rhian Samuel (b.1944), Nicola LeFanu (b.1947), Kaija Saariaho (b.1952), Chen Yi (b.1953), Judith Weir (b.1954), Elena Kats-Chernin (b.1957), and Chaya Czernowin (b.1957) – are writing music in the knowledge that, although music by women remains under-represented in concert halls,³⁶ they will get a fair hearing. After all, Oliveros was surely right in thinking that ‘the greatest problems of society will never be solved until an egalitarian atmosphere utilising the total creative energies exists among all men and women’.³⁷

Working as a Female Composer in the Soviet Bloc

One of the strongest manifestations of the societal progress promised by Marxist Leninist ideology was the advocation of gender equality by state-socialist regimes. Article 122 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution declared that ‘women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life’, and asserted that the possibility of exercising these rights should be ensured via ‘state protection of the interests of mother and child, prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens.’¹ This idealism was reflected in the changing demographics of the Soviet workforce in the 1930s. Women entered the workplace en masse to fulfil the demands of Stalin’s ambitious economic plans, often undertaking jobs involving heavy manual labour, which confounded traditional gender divisions. Indeed, such was the transformation of the position of women in the public sphere that images of the ‘new Soviet woman’ became synonymous, as Susan Reid has documented, with ‘the emancipation and rising living standards of the working people as a whole’.²

In the period after the Second World War, as Soviet-supported regimes consolidated power across Eastern Europe, the linking of gender equality with socialist progress continued apace. Women constituted 46 per cent of the workforce in the Soviet Union, for example, in 1956, and 49 per cent in 1964; in 1964 they also made up 53 per cent of students graduating from higher education.³ Epitomising this trend was Valentina Tereshkova’s successful bid to be the first woman in space in June 1963. As Nikita Khrushchev declared at the celebrations in Moscow’s Red Square to mark her triumphant return to earth, Tereshkova was evidence ‘that women raised under socialism walk alongside men in all the people’s concerns, both in self-sacrificing labour and in heroic feats which amaze the world’.⁴

The biographies of some female composers from the Soviet Bloc can be read in terms of this narrative of emancipation. The East German composer Ruth Zechlin (1926–2007) is a case in point. Zechlin graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory in 1949, and was appointed the following year to teach composition, musicianship, and harpsichord at the newly founded music conservatory in East Berlin. She later recalled that this position had come her way because the men had either ‘fallen in the war’, were imprisoned, or had been prevented by conscription from studying and were thus not suitably qualified.⁵ If she owed the launch of her career to the wartime decimation of East Germany’s working-age male population, her subsequent trajectory reflected the possibilities open to women under state socialism. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Zechlin established herself as one of the GDR’s foremost composers, and in interviews given later in her life was adamant that she had never experienced gender discrimination. As she remarked in 1992: ‘My musical education was identical to that of a man. I did not have to accept any restrictions as a result of my gender. The living and working conditions for me as professor and composer were also completely similar to those of men.’⁶ Zechlin was awarded the Kunstpreis der DDR (Art prize of the GDR) in 1965 and the prestigious Hanns-Eisler-Preis for her composition Gedanken über ein Klavierstück von Prokofjew (Reflections on a piano piece by Prokofiev, 1967) in 1968, and in 1969 she was promoted to a professorship at the conservatory, an appointment of which, as West German composer Erna Woll noted, ‘female composers in the Federal Republic of Germany could only dream’.⁷ Zechlin’s place in the GDR’s cultural pantheon was assured in 1970, when she was made a member of the East German Academy of the Arts and director of a masterclass of composition there.

Other female composers enjoyed similar successes within the socialist system. Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–69) deftly navigated the imposition of socialist realism in post-war Poland and was a central figure in the vibrant new music scene that emerged there during the 1950s, while Aleksandra Pakhmutova (b.1929) took a different route; after graduating from Vissarion Shebalin’s masterclass in composition at the Moscow Conservatory, she embraced the role of state artist and emerged to prominence – she was purportedly Leonid Brezhnev’s favourite composer – by writing official music to celebrate every conceivable achievement of the Soviet state. Yet if paths to a career in composition were more accessible to women in the Soviet Bloc than to their Western counterparts, such paths were by no means free of obstacles. The narratives of equality so central to socialist discourse often belied the perpetuation of more traditional constructs of gender difference.

The acceptance of women into the labour force did not, notably, lead to any significant feminisation of the public sphere. The new socialist personality was implicitly masculine; the images of women driving tractors and working in mines that proliferated in the 1930s were not accompanied by counter-images of men engaging in domestic labour. Moreover, in the workplace women continued, by and large, to be perceived as second-class citizens, with figures such as Tereshkova the exception rather than the rule. Women, as Donald Filtzer notes, ‘formed the overwhelming majority of auxiliary workers doing heavy, manual and usually unskilled or semi-skilled labour’.⁸ They were excluded from the upper echelons of power and decision making in politics, and were predominantly confined to lower and mid-range roles in professional occupations. Fundamentally, the ideal of the politician, the university professor, and the scientist continued to be conceived in the image of man. This trend was conspicuous where art was concerned; the romantic construct of the genius artist devoting himself exclusively to the production of great artworks was an enduring one.

Female composers were regularly confronted with, and also sometimes internalised these norms. The Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006) recalled how she was permitted to enter Shostakovich’s masterclass at the Leningrad conservatory in 1940 ‘despite the rumour that Shostakovich usually does not accept young women in his class as he does not believe in their creative abilities’.⁹ Ustvolskaya, in turn, appears to have replicated this conviction, purportedly preferring to teach male students in her own composition classes.¹⁰ Zechlin welcomed both male and female students in her masterclasses; in an interview published in 1979, however, she claimed that her female students, despite their musicality, ‘fail at a very particular point’. It becomes problematic, she claimed, ‘when they have to bring what they have learned into a musical statement of their own’.¹¹ The reasons for this, she argued, were ‘physiological’: composition demanded a form of masculine intelligence that was alien to most women.¹² Speaking of her own abilities, which she believed she had inherited from her father, Zechlin explained: ‘I consider this form of thinking, which I have not found so pronounced in any other woman, to be a masculine talent.’¹³

Compounding stereotypes of the male composer was the fact that socialist gender equality had not liberated women from the binds of domesticity. The failure of Soviet Bloc countries to account effectively for the labour of child-rearing and housework meant that many women found themselves performing two roles in society, the so-called double burden. The shortage of state-funded childcare was a continuous complaint, and the labour that women were expected to perform in the home impeded their advancement in the workplace. Moreover, the continued association of women with domesticity perpetuated the construct of a masculine public sphere within which women were cast in the role of other. Women composers had to work hard and often make significant personal sacrifices to succeed in this climate. Ustvolskaya had no children and shunned housework altogether; her husband Konstantin Bagrenin recalled that ‘she never cooked and had no interest in any form of domesticity’.¹⁴ Others managed in various ways to combine their creative lives with family. Bacewicz, who gave birth to a daughter in 1942, pondered how female composers might reconcile the labour of motherhood with creative work and concluded that she was fortunate in being in possession of ‘a small, invisible motor which allows me to do in ten minutes what takes others an hour to do’.¹⁵ ‘A woman with composing abilities’, she continued, ‘can be a serious composer, can marry, have children, travel, and have adventures, and so on, on the condition she is in possession of this little motor. If, on the other hand, she does not have one, she needn’t bother trying.’¹⁶ Bacewicz’s internal motor was notably assisted by her capacity to employ a housekeeper.¹⁷ Zechlin, who also had one daughter, did likewise. Sofia Gubaidulina (b.1931), in contrast, did not have such resources at her disposal when she gave birth to her daughter Nadia while a student at the Moscow Conservatory in 1959. She suspended her composition work for the first year of her daughter’s life and looked after her in a wooden house without running water in the Moscow outpost of Tomilino. At the end of the year, however, she returned to her dormitory in the conservatory while her parents brought Nadia up at their home in Kazan.

Decentring Socialist Aesthetics: Grażyna Bacewicz and Ruth Zechlin

The masculine orientation of the socialist public sphere was replicated in the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism, as Nina Noeske has detailed, retained the gendered norms of nineteenth-century romanticism and infused them with an additional layer of military rhetoric. Composers were encouraged to draw on the heritage of the revolutionary Beethoven rather than the feminine traditions of bourgeois domesticity, and to express their support for the socialist fight in large-scale ‘public’ forms depicting heroic struggle, or rousing mass songs.¹⁸ Female composers were more than capable of contributing to this civic effort, and many did. Ustvolskaya, for example, produced some textbook examples of socialist realism early in her career with works such as Son Stepana Razina (The Dream of Stepan Razin) for bass and orchestra, which was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1949, and her Poem No. 1 (‘The Hero’s Exploit’) for orchestra of 1959. Stepan Razin, which was written shortly after Zhdanov’s formalist decree of 1948, celebrates with rousing folk tunes and heroic lyrical melodies the exploits of the seventeenth-century Cossack folk hero Stepan (or Stenka) Razin, who led Cossack and Russian peasants in a revolt against the aristocracy. Yet, while figures such as Ustvolskaya could write very effective music in state-approved models, it is perhaps unsurprising that the female composers who emerged most prominently from the Soviet Bloc, Ustvolskaya included, largely eschewed socialist realism in favour of more idiosyncratic, individual modes of expression.

Bacewicz is an interesting example in this regard. The oldest of the composers under discussion here, she was in her thirties by the time Poland came under Soviet occupation and had already been exposed to a wide variety of musical influences, French neoclassicism in particular. She studied composition at the Warsaw Conservatory with Kazimierz Sikorski, who was a student of Nadia Boulanger, and in 1932 she travelled to Paris to take lessons with Boulanger herself. A prodigious violinist and pianist, Bacewicz also studied violin with André Touret and Carl Flesch while in Paris, and returned to Poland in 1936 to take up the role of principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Radio Orchestra. Over the course of the Second World War as performance opportunities became scarce, she focused increasingly on composition, and ceased performing in public altogether after suffering serious injuries in a car crash in 1954. By the time socialist realism was introduced to Poland in 1948, Bacewicz had already established herself as one of the country’s foremost composers alongside Witold Lutosławski and Andrzej Panufnik. The imposition of Zhdanovian aesthetics from the Soviet Union did little to quash this trajectory. Indeed, the years between 1948 and 1955, when socialist realism was at its height in Poland, were the most productive of Bacewicz’s career. Her Symphonies nos. 2–4, Concerto for String Orchestra, Violin Concertos nos. 3–5, Piano Concerto, Cello Concerto no. 1, String Quartets nos. 4–5, Quartet for 4 Violins, Piano Quintet no. 1, Violin Sonatas nos. 4–5, and Piano Sonatas nos. 1–2 all date from this period.

In many ways, the musical language that Bacewicz had evolved in the 1930s and early 1940s lent itself to socialist-realist expression. Her predilection for traditional forms and neoclassical sound worlds mapped well onto Zhdanovian ideals, as did her penchant for deploying folk tunes and folk-inspired melodies and inflections. Yet, as Adrian Thomas observes, these traits, rather than miring her in a world of musical propaganda, enabled her to steer ‘an overtly non-programmatic path through the minefield of socialist realism’.¹⁹ Bacewicz inscribed to some extent in her symphonies the heroic tropes of struggle and overcoming so beloved of socialist regimes. In her chamber music, however, she explored intimate sound worlds that sat incongruously with the public rhetoric of the socialist collective.

A striking example of Bacewicz’s capacity to bring the private into the public sphere and write music that could speak simultaneously to different audiences is her fourth String Quartet. The work was commissioned by the Polish Composers’ Union for submission to the annual international string quartet competition in Liège in 1951; Bacewicz won first prize in the competition, and was subsequently awarded a Polish state prize for the quartet in 1953. That her quartet had resonances both for the Western jury and Polish officials is a testament to the extent to which she maintained an idiosyncratic musical language within the tightening confines of post-war socialist realism. The first movement of the quartet is a case in point. It unfolds in what is essentially a traditional sonata-form structure and draws on folk music for its thematic content; yet it repeatedly subverts the sonata-form characteristics that were idealised within socialist-realist aesthetics. Its first theme has, as Thomas observes, ‘all the appearance of a traditional second subject’.²⁰ Emerging out of an introspective andante introduction, it is a lyrical folk melody, which is presented in canon. This theme stands in stark contrast to the strident dissonant chordal passages that follow at various points in the movement. Bacewicz does not, however, reconcile these sound worlds, eschewing the expected dialectical resolution of sonata form.

Bacewicz’s prominence in the early Polish People’s Republic can be ascribed to a number of factors. Her status as a composer was undoubtedly augmented by her visibility as a performer; she was able to draw on a large network of colleagues to ensure her music was played, and she premiered many of her works herself. It was also arguably the case that her music represented an acceptable model for the output of a female composer. Her compositions are conservative for the 1950s, favouring traditional forms and structures; even her most dissonant works contain lyrical moments; and her compositional processes are generally free-form (instinctual) rather than rigorously controlled (rational). She followed her younger Polish colleagues in exploring serialism towards the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it was her experiments in timbre that resulted in the most distinctive music of her later years. Works such as Pensieri notturni (Night thoughts, 1961) employ unusual instrumental combinations and extended techniques to create shimmering textures not dissimilar to Bartók’s night music.

Standing in many ways at the opposite end of the spectrum to Bacewicz was Zechlin, who perceived the practical manifestation of her ‘masculine’ composition gifts in her ability to control rigorously the sounds she produced. Of her approach, Zechlin explained: ‘During the process of composing, I think predominantly linearly, although the harmonic intervals result by no means accidentally. They are planned and intended. This also applies to the orchestration … [the instruments are chosen for their] individually coloured sounds that do justice to my need for expression.’²¹ This preoccupation with parameters of control reflects Zechlin’s training as a harpsichordist and organist. She counted J. S. Bach amongst her foremost influences and frequently deployed polyphonic techniques, canons in particular, in her music. At the same time, her music was inherently experimental. Her compositions from the late 1960s onwards incorporate extreme dissonances, aleatory, and extended techniques. Moreover, her desire for control did not come at the expense of expression. On the contrary, the extent to which she controlled her material was paradoxically liberating, resulting in musical statements that could be profoundly lyrical, dramatic, and, occasionally, outright confrontational. Nowhere is the latter more evident than in her short organ piece, Wider den Schlaf der Vernunft (Against the sleep of reason), which she wrote to perform at an event in East Berlin’s Erlöserkirche in October 1989 that was organised by leading members of the GDR’s intelligentsia in support of the mass demonstrations that precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall a month later. (Zechlin notably never paid with party membership for her compositional success in the GDR.) The piece takes its title from the Goya painting The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and is characterised by a barrage of oppressive and insistent chord clusters. It is, as Zechlin herself explained, ‘a very aggressive piece’, intended ‘to shake up and remind [listeners] that one must be wide awake now so as to ensure that the whole thing doesn’t go in the wrong direction again’.²²

Liminal Spaces: Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina

The disciplined expression of Zechlin’s music finds certain parallels in the uncompromising mature aesthetic of Ustvolskaya. Ustvolskaya herself not only rejected any categorisations of her as a ‘female’ composer; she also confounded critics by positing a complete break – effectively a performance of patricide – between her and her male forefathers. She repeatedly renounced the influence of her own teacher Shostakovich and claimed to have evolved a musical language that was untouched by the legacy of earlier composers.²³ Certainly, her mature works, marked by pounding dissonances and incongruous instrumental combinations, owe little to socialist-realist traditions. Her music is loud, but it is the loudness of nihilism rather than heroism. Ustvolskaya’s final decades in the Soviet Union were spent in self-imposed isolation. She retired from her teaching post at the Professional School of Music as soon as she reached the pensionable age of fifty-five in 1977, and withdrew into a life of reclusivity that challenged not only Soviet norms but also the gendered expectations of her Western critics. Dealing with the outside world through a small circle of supporters, including her husband Bagrenin, the composer and editor Viktor Suslin, and the pianist Oleg Malov, she refused to give interviews, often shutting down requests abruptly, and maintained extraordinarily tight control over performances of her music and the construction of her image.

Like many composers in the late Soviet Bloc, Ustvolskaya conceived of her music in the 1970s and 1980s as a form of spiritual expression; all of her works from this period, apart from the Piano Sonatas nos. 5 and 6, bear religious inscriptions. Her spirituality was not a refuge; this music speaks neither of consolation nor redemption. Ustvolskaya’s god, with whom – eschewing the patriarchal conventions of organised religion – she claimed to commune directly, was clearly a wrathful god, standing in judgement rather than granting mercy. Characteristic is her Composition no. 2 ‘Dies irae’, which she wrote between 1972 and 1973 and scored for the unsettling combination of piano, eight double basses, and a custom-made wooden cube struck by a hammer. The work consists of ten short sections, which offer little in the way of contrast or change of pace. The listener is bombarded throughout by a relentless march of piano clusters, tutti double-bass attacks, and ominous shotgun-like strikes of the hammer on the wooden cube.

Ustvolskaya argued that her ensemble music should not be considered as ‘chamber music’ in the conventional sense.²⁴ Indeed, in works such as Composition no. 2, there is little sense of concerted playing. She juxtaposes starkly opposing instruments – Composition no. 1 ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (1970–1) is scored for piccolo, tuba, and piano, and Composition no. 3 ‘Benedictus, qui venit’ (1974–5) for four flutes, four bassoons, and piano – and is not interested in finding resonances between them. On the contrary, each instrument or instrument grouping ploughs its own path, seemingly oblivious to the other sounds being made around it. Her five symphonies equally defy the ideals of coming together synonymous with the genre. Symphony no. 2 ‘True and Eternal Bliss!’ (1979), for example, which is scored for choirs of six flutes (one doubling piccolo), six oboes, and six trumpets, is similar to Composition no. 2 both in its scoring of disparate instruments and in its treatment of these. Again the musical language is characterised by passages of rigidly paced pounding chords, clusters, and drum beats, which in this work alternate with a series of tense recitations. In the first three recitations the speaker releases guttural cries – a ‘scream into space’ as Ustvolskaya wrote on the autograph score of the work – and shouts the word ‘Gospodi’ (Lord). The fourth recitation starts similarly, but then the speaker begins to utter the words from Hermannus Contractus’s ‘De sanctissima Trinitate’ that give the symphony its title: ‘istinnaya i blagaya vechnost, vechnaya zhe i blagaya istina, istinnaya i vechnaya blagost’ (‘true and blissful eternity, eternal and blissful truth, true eternal bliss’). Against these words, the instruments finally begin to function as an ensemble, coming together to form long sustained chords with a timbral quality akin to that of an organ. The evocation of eternal bliss is transitory, however. The speaker returns at the end to his cries into the abyss for ‘Gospodi’. The only response is an echo, a gently wailing piccolo line, which along with solitary piano notes, brings the piece to a close.

Ustvolskaya drew again on Hermannus’s text in each of her subsequent symphonies, which she titled ‘Jesus, Messiah, Save Us!’ (Symphony no. 3, 1983), ‘Prayer’ (Symphony no. 4, 1985–7), and ‘Amen’ (Symphony no. 5, 1989–90) respectively. An eleventh-century monk, mathematician, and music theorist, Hermannus was paralysed and could speak only with difficulty, a state of existence that possibly resonated with Ustvolskaya’s own self-imposed isolation. The tortured soundscapes of her late works have been explained in various ways by music critics: they are the response of a ‘victim’ of Soviet oppression, a response to the collective trauma of Soviet history, or to the failed ideals of socialism.²⁵ Ustvolskaya herself had little to say about politics. She did, however, describe her works as ‘the fruit of my tormented life’,²⁶ a statement that has particular resonances in the context of the penultimate composition in her catalogue, her Piano Sonata no. 6 (1988). The sonata is a terse, one-movement work in which tightly controlled blocks of material, made up of carefully prescribed piano clusters, are subject to motoric permutations and repetitions. The rigid compositional processes driving the work are notably countered by the visceral somatic discomfort that the piece induces both in the listener and, in particular, the performer, who has to play the barrage of clusters at four and five forte markings throughout. Ustvolskaya, as Maria Cizmic insightfully observes, creates ‘a music space in which pain becomes visibly known’.²⁷

Gubaidulina’s compositions similarly combine the rational and the irrational, the cerebral and the somatic. Like that of Ustvolskaya, her music is profoundly spiritual; she was baptised in the Orthodox Church in 1970 and has frequently since composed works on religious themes. Her spirituality is not, however, as cataclysmic as Ustvolskaya’s; her music suggests the possibility of redemption and peace. Ustvolskaya and Gubaidulina are examples of the very different ways of being – on personal and musical levels – that were possible in the more individualised societies of the late Soviet Bloc. Neither composer was dissident; both, however, forged distinctive aesthetics that were opposed – in quite distinct ways – to the collective ideals of state socialism. Like many of her Soviet contemporaries, Gubaidulina began experimenting with serialism and other formal compositional processes in the 1960s, when the grip of socialist realism loosened its tenacious hold on the state. She did not, notably, associate systematic compositional processes with rational expression. Serialism, for Gubaidulina, represented freedom rather than constraint; as Peter Schmelz observes, serialism was synonymous for her with ‘the perfect, limitless order of the beyond’.²⁸ Gubaidulina adopted formalistic processes, which included operations involving rhythm and duration, not as an abstract means of control but as a way of evoking contrasts between sacrifice and redemption, between the worldly and otherworldly. Her concerto for violin and orchestra, Offertorium (1980), is a case in point. It opens with the theme of Bach’s Musical Offering, which is presented initially in D minor and distributed pointillistically across individual instruments of the orchestra. All but the final note of the theme are sounded in this first statement. A series of variations then follows in which the theme is ‘sacrificed’. A note is removed from the beginning and end of each statement until all that remains in the tenth variation is the E pitch from the centre of the theme. After an extended violin cadenza, the theme is gradually rebuilt in the third section of the piece, emerging redeemed in the process. It returns in full in the coda, notably stated now in retrograde and played in its entirety by the solo violin rather than being treated pointillistically.

Gubaidulina was particularly intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the Fibonacci sequence and the associated golden ratio. Discussing her use of it in an interview with Vera Lukomsky, she observed: ‘I like this system because it does not deprive me of my freedom, does not limit my fantasy’.²⁹ She also perceived it to have restorative effects. With regard to her 1993 composition Jetzt immer Schnee (Now always snow), she noted: ‘I experience the material [in this piece] as very aggressive substance … I call this an illness. The material requires the artist to find a solution for healing the pain.’ This solution, she claimed, could be found in the Fibonacci series; she could ‘heal the material’ by deploying it to resolve ‘dissonance to consonance with regard to time proportions’.³⁰ A good example of how she applied the sequence in practice can be observed in her symphonic work Stimmen … Verstummen … (Voices … fall silent …) of 1986. This twelve-movement composition juxtaposes two diametrically opposed sound worlds. The odd movements nos. 1, 3, 5, and 7, which depict the ‘eternal’ and are characterised by shimmering, ethereal soundscapes that centre initially on a D-major triad, are composed according to the Fibonacci sequence. The ‘earthly’, meanwhile, is evoked by the even movements nos. 2, 4, 6, and 8, which are freely composed and full of chromatic writing, dissonance, and often harsh timbres. Over the course of the work, the heavenly visions grow progressively shorter as each successive odd-numbered movement decreases in length in proportion with the Fibonacci sequence: movement 1 lasts 55 quavers; movement 3 lasts 34 quavers; movement 7 lasts 21 quavers, and movement 7 lasts 13 quavers leading to an extended silence (zero quavers) in the ninth movement.³¹ Conversely the earthly movements get successively longer, culminating in the ‘apocalypse’ of the eighth movement, which is replete with aleatoric passages and intrusive polytonal chords. The silence that follows in the ninth movement instigates a rebirth of the eternal. The conductor gesticulates throughout the silence, following a choreography of arm patterns that are determined, again, by the Fibonacci sequence and lead to a G-major triad on the organ, which evokes ‘eternal light’.³² The alternation of eternal and earthly returns in movements 10 to 12. Now, however, the even rather than odd movements are eternal, and the work closes with a return to the shimmering D-major chord of the opening.

Unlike that of Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina’s spirituality did not involve a rejection of the world around her. Her existence in the late Soviet Union was in many ways a liminal one; as was the case with her close colleagues Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, few of her works were performed in state-sanctioned venues. Yet, she was far from isolated, playing an active role in Moscow’s lively unofficial music scene. She was a founding member of the improvisation ensemble Astreya, together with Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov. She was also acutely attuned to the gendered norms of socialist politics and aesthetics. She saw advantages in her status as a female composer. As she explained to Gerald McBurney, she had more freedom to experiment than figures such as Schnittke: ‘Nobody took much notice of me. They could always dismiss what I did as simply female eccentricity. It was much harder for the men.’³³ Yet she also sought to confront the hegemony of masculine tropes in socialist realism and Western art music more generally. She viewed as anachronistic, for example, the traditional opposition in concertos of soloist and orchestra, with the soloist as hero leading the orchestra (the ‘crowd’ or ‘army’) to victory. In reality, she explained, ‘the hero is disappointed in everything, nobody knows what the truth is’.³⁴ Accordingly, in her own piano concerto, Introitus (1978), she wrote a solo part that ‘is purely meditative, completely deprived of virtuosity’.³⁵ She likewise exposed the Soviet fallacy of the collective or crowd as an inherently positive force. In Chas Dushi (Hour of the soul), which she composed for wind orchestra and mezzo soprano in 1974 and later revised for percussion, orchestra, and mezzo soprano, she invoked the suppression of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), who committed suicide after being ostracised by the Soviet state. Tsvetaeva’s soul is represented in the work by the solo percussion part, written for Mark Perkarsky, which dominates the first section of the piece. This is opposed midway by a polystylistic section, in which Gubaidulina quotes snippets of what she describes as ‘popular and patriotic songs, representing vulgarity and the aggressiveness of the common crowd as bred by the Soviet system’. ‘Vulgarity and aggressiveness’, she expounds, ‘are the murderers that killed the poet.’³⁶ Notably, Gubaidulina sees the percussion as depicting the ‘dominant masculine, side’ of Tsvetaeva’s personality.³⁷ The poet’s feminine side appears only at the end of the work, after her death via polystylism, when the mezzo soprano, who has been hiding in the orchestra until this point, emerges to sing Gubaidulina’s setting of the poem that gives the work its title. The expression of femininity was possible only when the socialist collective had been silenced, in this case via an extensive tom-tom solo.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the silencing of the socialist collective was not a prerequisite for the emergence of female composers in the Soviet Bloc. If the realities of female emancipation did not live up to the utopian ideals that were promised by state-socialist regimes, the opportunities that were created for women, and the expectations across the Soviet Bloc of what women could achieve, surpassed those in the West. Female composers were confronted continuously in the Soviet Bloc by an aesthetic discourse and sociopolitical values from which they were excluded by virtue of their gender. This confrontation was at times oppressive. Yet, as the women in this chapter demonstrate, it could also inspire profound creativity. Inadvertently, the hyper-masculine climate of socialist realism set the scene for a host of distinct female musical voices to emerge.

Socially Engaged Opera and Music Drama

Concerns for social and political issues come to the fore in a range of operas at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For British composer Judith Weir (b.1954), who wrote her first opera in her mid-twenties, music drama has provided fertile ground for experimentation since King Harald’s Saga (1979), a ten-minute, one-woman show involving eight acting roles, including St. Olaf, an Icelandic sage, and the Norwegian army. Her catalogue includes a range of instrumental and vocal works in which the composer combines musical ‘storytelling’ with the subtle utilisation of folk music, drawing on her Scottish heritage, such as bagpipe practices of the Scottish Highlands, and, in the opera The Vanishing Bridegroom (1990), Gaelic songs. She has brought in elements of Chinese opera and placed material from older Western art music in new settings. Weir is a highly respected composer, and in 2015 she became the first woman to be appointed Master of the Queen’s Music, succeeding Peter Maxwell Davis (1934–2016) after a succession of twenty male musicians and composers. Her most recent opera Miss Fortune (2011) sets the story of a Sicilian folktale Sfortuna (Misfortune) in a modern context: the main character falls victim to the financial crisis and lives a miserable life, constrained to a sweatshop and surrounded by urban riots.⁴ This production, for which Weir wrote the libretto herself, seems to represent, as in the case of Saariaho, a recent move towards addressing current societal issues more explicitly.

Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (b.1968) has always used music drama as a vehicle for social critique. She started working with author, playwright, and 2004 Nobel Literature Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek (b.1946) in her twenties, and the collaboration has stirred up both enthusiasm and controversy. Neuwirth has set to music the topics that Jelinek has dealt with throughout her career: totalitarianism, fascism, and dysfunctional families in bourgeoisie cultures, some of which are exposed in the renowned novel The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983, which was adapted into the French-language film La Pianiste by Michael Haneke in 2001).

Neuwirth and Jelinek’s opera Bählamms Fest, which premiered at the Wiener Festwochen in 1999, was recognised as an imaginative take on a ‘perverted family dynasty’, based on a surrealistic drama by Leonora Carrington.⁵ The two also collaborated on an opera based on the TV and film director David Lynch’s Lost Highway (2003), which includes pre-recorded material in which images, film, and electronic soundtracks play important roles. A third opera was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and Paris National Opera for the Mozart Anniversary in 2006, but Der Fall Hans W. – which in its first version was set in a Second World War euthanasia clinic for children, but later took as its subject a recently convicted murderer and child molester – was first postponed, and eventually rejected. The commissioners argued that the quality of the libretto was inferior and the topic of paedophilia already exhausted. The incident led Jelinek to declare that she would never write an opera libretto again.⁶

Neuwirth, meanwhile, has kept on writing for stage as well as instrumental music. Her compositional palette is inspired by continental modernists such as Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, and Adriana Hölzsky, and she often designs lively patchworks of quotes, samples, and references from a range of sources. The trumpet concerto … miramondo multiplo … (2006) references, amongst others, Gustav Mahler, Miles Davis, and Igor Stravinsky. The opera American Lulu (2012) is a jazzed-up version of Alban Berg’s work, set in the American South, and aims to interpret Lulu’s story from a female perspective. The Outcasts (2009–11), a tribute to Moby Dick’s creator Herman Melville, holds a different take on gender issues: here Ishmael is depicted as a woman. Orlando (2019), based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, portrays a poet who changes sex from male to female. This was the first opera ever to be commissioned by the Vienna State Opera from a female composer. The lush score, with references ‘from Elizabethan vocal polyphony to post-punk assault’ impressed the critics,⁷ as did the adaptation of Woolf’s novel in Act One. But Act Two, which brought in issues from the Holocaust up to 2019 was deemed, by many, too ‘overcrowded’ with ideas.⁸

While a marginal, if increasing, number of operas by contemporary women composers are being mounted on the main stages of the grand opera houses, new music often finds its way to alternative venues. For instance, Tansy Davies’ (b.1973) Between Worlds (2014) – which commemorates the events of 9/11 – was commissioned by the English National Opera, but produced at a smaller, more flexible stage at the Barbican Centre. Davies’ and writer Nick Drake’s second opera Cave (2018) was staged by the Royal Opera in an abandoned industrial warehouse. The drama, set in a cave where a man searches for his daughter after an environmental disaster, comprised only two singers and a small ensemble, in addition to electronics.

Political issues appear in many chamber operas in the early 2000s. The last words of men sentenced to death make up the libretto of Dead Beat Escapement (2008) by the Norwegian Cecilie Ore (b.1954), and her Adam & Eve – a Divine Comedy (2015) depicts violence against women in the name of religion. Consequences of racism are highlighted in Jean-Joseph (2015) by Swedish composer Tebogo Monnakgotla (b.1972), which tells the story of the Madagascan poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo who committed suicide when rejected from attending the world exhibition in Paris in 1937, while Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski’s (b.1970) monodrama Lelele (2010–11) quotes documentary reports about trafficking and forced prostitution.

Apparently, many composers put gender issues on the agenda with increasing intensity after having gained a certain professional reputation. For Wennäkoski’s part it started with the more light-hearted Life and Love of a Woman (2002–03), in which new poetry on motherhood is set to music in dialogue with Robert Schumann’s famous cycle Frauenliebe und Leben (1841). In contrast to the idealised world of the nineteenth-century songs, Wennäkoski’s music – shifting between atonal phrases, sounds, and quotes from many genres – is set to poems about everyday exhaustion and mess, the ovum waiting for the moment in which it will drop, and animal-like maternal instincts.

Whether or not thematising parenthood is a feminist strategy or merely an exposure of human experience, several new works are set in the domestic sphere – which has traditionally been considered feminine. Amongst them are Emil (2001) for solo voice by Carola Bauckholt (b.1959), which imitates a baby’s babbling, and the subsequent Emil will nicht schlafen (Emil doesn’t want to sleep, 2010) for singer and ensemble, in which the German composer mixes theatrical elements and playful composing with sound in a characteristic manner. A personal account of the effects of motherhood on composing is also provided by electroacoustic composer Manuella Blackburn in ‘In Her Own Words 3’.

Women Composers in a Globalised World

A different conception of playfulness is staged in Alice in Wonderland by Berlin-based South Korean composer Unsuk Chin (b.1961), which premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007. The opera depicts a dream-like, partly grotesque, version of Lewis Carroll’s tale. Like Saariaho, Chin holds a special interest in the female voice and in the blending of electronic and acoustic sounds. Chin’s breakthrough work, the Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991/1993), is a vocally acrobatic piece for high soprano and ensemble that comprises seven scenes from fairy tales in which the words are used as much as tools for playing with sounds as to tell a story. Her output is carnivalesque in its rapid shifts between modernist soundscapes and references to jazz and other genres. The influence of Chin’s teacher György Ligeti is evident, as are the skills acquired in the electronic music studios in Berlin and Paris (IRCAM).

Chin, who moved from Seoul to Hamburg to study in the mid-1980s, has been a prominent figure on the contemporary music scenes of Europe. Her works, such as Double Bind (2007) for solo violin and electronics, have been performed by a range of renowned soloists and ensembles. Influences from her native East Asian region have been scarce, as she has feared that her music might be conceived as exotic; that is, considered to be attractive due to its colourfulness and strangeness in relation to dominant Western idioms. But she did eventually compose a concerto, Šu, in 2009, for Wu Wei, a virtuoso on the Chinese mouth organ, the sheng.⁹ However, the concerto does not cite traditional music from either China or Korea, and it is only one in a series including cello, clarinet, and piano concertos with Western symphony or chamber orchestras.

In an increasingly globalised world, elements from different native and national cultures find their way into contemporary music in a variety of styles and forms. While some composers, such as Chin, are sceptical of the threat of exoticism, others draw more willingly on the resources of musical multiculturalism. For Gabriela Lena Frank (b.1972) – born in California to Chinese-Peruvian and Lithuanian-Jewish parents – exploring her mixed ancestry has been crucial. She has conducted close-up studies of Andean music in particular, and her work titles display her South American influences: Leyendas (Legends, for string orchestra, 2001), La Llorona (The crying woman; tone poem for viola and ensemble, 2007), and an opera on the relationship between two iconic Mexican artists, El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The last dream of Frida [Kahlo] and Diego [Rivera]), commissioned for the Fort Worth Opera in 2021. Frank has also composed for indigenous instruments in Compadre Huashayo (2012).

Her practice, which also involves community work and running her own creative academy of music encouraging young female composers in particular, has been described as a kind of musical anthropology.¹⁰ Frank herself states that her approach is typically American: ‘We bring in a lot of cultures, eat it up and make it into something new’.¹¹ The composer nevertheless calls herself ‘old-fashioned’ in the sense that she primarily writes for acoustic instruments and traditional classical formats, and is inspired by earlier twentieth-century composers who mixed new music with old folkloristic elements, such as Béla Bartόk and Alberto Ginastera.

Eastern European traditions are also vital to Roxanna Panufnik, daughter of composer Andrzej Panufnik, who fled to Britain from Poland in the 1950s. But her spiritual interests imply utilising sources from a greater world, in works comprising elements from Byzantine and Western chant, Jewish shofar, Islamic calls to prayer, Spanish Sephardic music, and Greek bouzouki scales. Her Unending Love (2017), based on a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, is scored for double choir, Carnatic singer, and various Indian instruments.

Regardless of geographical points of connection, Panufnik’s and Frank’s tonal languages are fundamentally harmonic. Liza Lim (b.1966), who grew up in Brunei and Australia with Chinese parents, and who also integrates elements from various cultures in her works, resides on the more experimental side. Like Chin, she holds a strong position within the Western avant-garde. Lim is an advocate for transculturalism: the idea that certain phenomena – such as time, beauty, and nature – might transcend cultural differences by deep, ecological connections. In a programme note on her 2016 work How Forests Think for sheng and ensemble, she compares the forms with plants ‘growing toward light and water; like mycelial strands entwining with tree roots in a co-evolving internet of plant-life’.¹² Transcultural and ecological ideas, Lim states, ‘have enabled me to think about composition as a way of populating musical spaces with “creatures” rather than structural forms’.¹³ In her creating, she states, (human) musicians and (non-human) musical instruments join ‘fictional composites of plants, animals, elements, spirits and all kinds of cultural ideas’ in a speculative play, resulting in something that is hard to define in standard musicological terms.¹⁴ Lim is thus not merely an advocate for multi- or transculturalism. She also searches for new models by which one can understand forms and structures by looking away from traditional Western musicology and turning towards indigenous cultures, as well as ecosystems at work in nature.

New Ecosystems in Music

Nature, in details and vast landscapes, has been a source of inspiration for artists of all times. But at the start of the twenty-first century the threat of an environmental crisis has made it a particularly urgent topic. At the same time, new technologies have been driving forces in the development of contemporary soundscapes. British-Norwegian Natasha Barrett (b.1972), who grew up amongst her father’s vinyl albums of Claude Debussy’s music and the evolving synthesiser technology of the 1980s,¹⁵ was awarded the 2006 Nordic Council Music Prize for … fetters … (2002), which is inspired by microsystems in nature; the physical laws for the motions of molecules in a limited space whose energy eventually makes the space explode into a new space. Barrett, a leading composer and researcher within electronic music, has since developed advanced techniques for three-dimensional acousmatic soundscapes, with precise renderings of recorded sounds and artistic ideas alike.

Many composers utilise new technology to enhance our ability to listen to our environment, such as sound artist Jana Winderen (b.1965), who is fascinated by the interplay between human artefacts, technology, and nature. A recurring element in her works is recordings from the Arctic regions both above and below water, of whale song and what disturbs it: noise from cruise ships and seismic blasting. In the composition Classified (2017), commissioned by the Borealis Festival, such material was conveyed by way of multiple loudspeakers in a huge storage building for fishing equipment in Bergen.

Music from the Nordic region risks becoming trapped in its own brand of exoticism in the sense that listeners ‘hear’ cold or Arctic landscapes in it, whether intended or not on the part of the composer. Icelandic Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b.1977) often points to the wild and barren nature of her home country as a source of inspiration and her music is promoted as ‘an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other’ in continuous processes of growth and transformation.¹⁶ But, although she brings in ideas and material from nature, she emphasises their abstract and technical qualities in the compositional process. For instance, Thorvaldsdottir thematises time, texture, and motion in Aion and Dreaming for symphony orchestra, and in chamber works such as In the Light of Air (2013/2014) and Fields (2016), as well as in the chamber opera UR (2015). The inspiration from nature is not to be taken too literally. She has stated that: ‘when I am inspired by a particular element that I perceive in nature, it is because I perceive it as musically interesting’.¹⁷ Nature thus inspires sound worlds, from electroacoustic and site-specific compositions to meditative, orchestral landscapes, and, in the case of Japanese-American composer Karen Tanaka (b.1961), poetic, minimalist pieces with titles such as Water and Stone, Silent Ocean, Tales of Trees, and Crystalline, combining sophistication and simplicity in an accessible musical language.

Reaching Out for Broader Audiences

The different currents in the field of contemporary music reach different audiences, some larger than others. On the one hand, new works are presented at forums and festivals for cutting-edge experimental repertoire – such as in Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, and Huddersfield. On the other hand, composers collaborate with the established institutions and have their works performed in the concert halls of symphony orchestras as well as in chamber music series and at festivals all over the world. One of the most successful composers in the realms of traditionally oriented symphonic music is the American Jennifer Higdon (b.1962). Her Blue Cathedral has been performed hundreds of times since its premiere in 2000.

Higdon is an eager communicator both in her collaborations with performers and in relation to audiences. She often gives interviews and pre-concert talks, and she provides the listeners with programme notes that give an insight into the stories behind the music. Blue Cathedral, for instance, was written in memory of her late brother, and she imagined the cathedral as a place for ‘beginnings, endings, solitude, fellowship, contemplation, knowledge and growth’. Here she ‘saw the image of clouds and blueness permeating from the outside’ and imagined the listener entering ‘from the back of the sanctuary, floating along the corridor among giant crystal pillars’.¹⁸

Higdon’s music bears witness to inspiration from film and popular music, and her Violin Concerto has been described as a ‘showpiece’ in which ‘chromatic neo-Romanticism and inventive orchestration keep the piece lively and surprising’.¹⁹ The concerto, which was written for Hilary Hahn, was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize the year it premiered, with the prize committee calling it ‘a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity’.²⁰

Communication, musical craftswomanship, and emotional intensity are also at the heart of the works of Augusta Read Thomas (b.1964). A professor of composition at the University of Chicago and a sought-after, prolific composer, she draws on influences from Bach via Mahler, Stravinsky, and Debussy to jazz.²¹ Radiant Circles (2010) evolves around the colours of the different instrument groups in the symphony orchestra in one twelve-minute-long crescendo with particularly virtuosic parts for trumpet and timpani. Her 2019 opera Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun has a quite different temperament, featuring the artist Nicole Paris in a key role beatboxing.²²

The musical life of the USA apparently provides a fertile environment for emotionally intensive, tonally rooted works in traditional formats, as well as for the blending in of elements from popular music. Amongst the younger generation, Missy Mazzoli (b.1980) mixes groovy sections with lyrical melodic lines and soft harmonies in a personal brew of a minimalist language. Her opera Breaking the Waves, based on Lars von Trier’s film of the same name and premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2016, was described as supporting the dynamic of the tragic story ‘by wedding strong lyric invention to an unsettled, insidiously dissonant chamber-orchestra texture that evokes the jagged beauty both of [the Isle of] Skye and of Bess’s inner landscape’.²³

Symphony orchestras and opera houses can be uneasy partners for contemporary composers, given the history and the inherent expectations they carry with them. Sarah Kirkland Snider (b.1973) explains that when thinking about classical institutions and ‘their values, their history’,²⁴ it brings out something different than when she composes for musicians who are comfortable in both classical and popular music. Herself manoeuvring in what she calls ‘the cracks between’ these worlds, she stresses how individual performers are often crucial to the making of her music. Amongst them is Shara Worden, for whom she has composed the cycles Penelope and Unremembered for singer and orchestra.

Intimate collaborations between musicians and composers are, if not new in a historical perspective, characteristic for several contemporary music projects. At times the division between composer and performer is fully erased. Lera Auerbach (b.1973), who defected to the USA from the Soviet Union in 1991, has collaborated intimately with high-profile musicians such as the violinists Gideon Kremer and Leonidas Kavakos. But she also conducts and plays her own music on the piano. Her output is voluminous, passionate, often meditative, inspired by dreams and visions, and draws on input from classical sources from Beethoven to Shostakovich and Schoenberg. She is an outspoken advocate for tonality and writes mostly in traditional chamber, orchestral, and operatic formats, including her 2012 Requiem (Dresden. An Ode to Peace). She is also a poet, painter, and sculptor.

Various forms of artistic multitasking are practised by many, including the younger composer-conductor Sara Caneva (b.1991). However, blurring the distinctions between composing and performing can involve more than just mastering different disciplines. It can also be considered an act of intervention in the norms inherent in the Western tradition since the romantic era, in particular in the tendency to give the composer’s ‘abstract’ ideas and the authoritative score prominence over the physical practice of performance.

Challenging the Composer–Performer Division

In 2016, Jennifer Walshe (b.1974) presented a manifesto for a new school which she names The New Discipline.²⁵ Referring to historical avant-garde movements such as Dada and Fluxus, as well as contemporary colleagues, the Irish composer and singer promotes a practice in which she not only provides scores and instructions, but also takes part in the directing, choreographing, and performing of her works. The New Discipline appreciates ‘composers being interested and willing to perform, to get their hands dirty, to do it themselves, do it immediately’.²⁶ Walshe’s manifesto might be seen as a response to the critique musical modernism has encountered throughout the last century; of being too cerebral, too detached from sensuous pleasure and pain – that is, the body – and thus, perhaps, all the harder for women to relate to.²⁷

An outspoken feminist, Walshe has toured European contemporary music scenes with the chamber opera XXX Live Nude Girls (2003).²⁸ Performed by two female singers, an instrumental ensemble, and two puppeteers, it is set in a doll’s house inhabited by Barbie characters – projected on video screens – who experiment with sex in their otherwise rather miserable lives. For the 2019 project Time Time Walshe joined forces with philosopher Timothy Morton in exploring time in an ecological, astronomical, and bodily sense (such as ageing). ‘We call it an opera, but it’s not an opera in the conventional sense’, Walshe stresses.²⁹ It deals with time as a phenomenon, but as much as that, it explores what might happen between a composer, free improvising musicians, and audiovisual elements in the moment, on stage.

Maja Ratkje (b.1973) also draws upon her resources as an improvising singer and noise musician, blending acoustically and electronically produced sound. The Norwegian composer launched her solo album Voice (2003) shortly after having collected prizes for the instrumental ensemble works Waves I and Waves II (both 1997). Crepuscular Hour (2010) was co-commissioned by the Huddersfield and Oslo Contemporary Music Festivals, and is scored for no fewer than six noise musicians, three choirs, and church organ. Ratkje also raises her voice about political issues and the environmental crisis in particular. She declines sponsorships from companies within the petroleum industry, and the orchestral work § 112 (2014) thematises a constitutional clause about the state’s responsibility for the environment and the health of its citizens.

Societal issues are also brought to the fore by Chinese composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performance artist Du Yun (b.1977). When awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, her opera Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek) was reviewed as a work ‘that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world’.³⁰ In the 2019 concert project Where We Lost Our Shadows, Du collaborated with film-maker Khaled Jarrar in depicting the challenges of migration and the refugee crisis. The work zooms in on individual faces on screen and individual musicians on stage; vocalists using extended techniques, soloists in music from East Asia and the Middle East, and musicians in a European contemporary music ensemble. Crossover is characteristic for Du Yun, who is likely to offer a concert with her pop art band Ok Miss on the same night as works such as Where We Lost Our Shadows.

Walshe, Ratkje, and Du Yun are all composers who ‘get their hands dirty’ by performing and improvising and by loosening their artistic control through letting others experiment with their material, often in collaborative practices. They also operate, alongside artists such as Juliana Hodkinson (b.1973) and Mirela Ivičević (b.1980), in environments where utilising and developing new technology is customary, and where the distinctions between opera, music drama, performance, sound art, composition, and improvisation are continuously challenged. Such creative spaces seem to hold a potential for composers with ambivalent feelings towards the established musical institutions, and their inherent conventions and traditions, in which the somewhat distant male composer of scores is still the norm. However, this does not imply that avant-garde and new music arenas are exemplary in terms of gender balance.

Avant-Garde Activism and Optimism

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, several measures were taken to promote women composers of the past and present, such as the PRS Foundation’s 50:50 Keychange campaign, as discussed in Chapter 16, ‘Women in the Music Industries: The Art of Juggling’. In contemporary music one important initiative emerged at the Darmstadt summer course and festival in 2016. The American composer Ashley Fure (b.1982) presented statistics showing a significant gender imbalance at the festival, which alongside the one in Donaueschingen has been a defining force in continental modernism since the later 1940s. Subsequent discussions concluded that more action was required and led to the founding of the Gender Relations network in Darmstadt (GRiD), which soon expanded its scope to Gender Relations in New Music (GRiNM).³¹

The statistics revealed that the average percentage of female composers in Darmstadt in the years 1946 to 2014 was only seven, rising to around eighteen when counting from 1990 to 2014. Moreover, the most frequently performed male composers had their works programmed about four times as often as the top ten female composers.³² Amongst the most performed women composers were Olga Neuwirth, Kaija Saariaho, Jennifer Walshe, and Liza Lim. Also on the list are prominent names such as Youngi Pagh-Paan (b.1945), Chaya Czernowin (b.1957), Isabel Mundry (b.1963), and Misato Mochizuki (b.1969). The youngest is Swedish Malin Bång (b.1974), whose music often involves acoustical objects in addition to traditional instruments, bearing witness to an affinity for intimate sounds and noises, at times very quiet, although laid out in contrast to more dramatic, abrupt gestures. Bång can be said to be developing and refining continental post-Second-World-War Modernist aesthetics, as defined by composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, and subsequently Rebecca Saunders (b.1967).

Saunders – British-born, but based in Berlin, and also on the Darmstadt top ten list– typically composes with the ‘shadows’ and noises of the sounds of instruments, as much as with the sonorous timbres idealised in the romantic era. The Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to her in 2019 for ‘an oeuvre which leaves its visible and meaningful mark on contemporary music history through its astonishingly nuanced attention to timbre, and her distinctive and intensely striking sonic language’.³³ On this occasion, Saunders was the first woman to be awarded the main prize for composition. Only a few other women had won the lesser composers’ prize, and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter the main prize, in 2008, for her musicianship. Saunders, whose music had been performed regularly at the most prestigious contemporary music festivals in Europe, called it ‘tragic’ that her gender thus made headlines in 2019. But she also found it ‘understandable’ considering the many women in her generation who had not pursued their careers as composers. She did, however, also observe a ‘wealth of very talented, strong, confident female composers who are at last being publicly recognised and becoming increasingly visible’.³⁴

Two decades into the twenty-first century, women composers are still exceptional, to an extent that spurs timely activism. But there is also a sense of optimism in the field. Although not representative in numbers, the female ‘half of humanity’ – to quote Saariaho again – demonstrates that it has ‘something to say’ by being ‘all over the place’ with artistic outputs in a wide variety of styles, genres, forms, and formats. The composers discussed in this chapter relate to the issue of being female in a male-dominated profession in very different ways, some uttering fierce critique of suppressive systems, others claiming that they do not have to address the issue at all. But whether they thematise it or not, they all contribute to change by being heard and seen; at concerts and festivals, in clubs, opera houses, and orchestral venues, and not least, streamed through an infinite number of digital channels.

Introduction

Orchestral conducting is one of the most male-dominated musical areas. A number of high-profile gaffes from prominent male conductors in recent years – in 2013 Vasily Petrenko claimed that orchestras ‘react better when they have a man in front of them’ and that ‘a cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things’,¹ while in 2017 Mariss Jansons quipped that women conductors were not his ‘cup of tea’² – suggest that cultural perceptions that conducting just isn’t natural for women remain. Against this, however, women have also made significant inroads onto the conductor’s podium. Just a few days after Petrenko’s comments, Marin Alsop became the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the BBC’s Proms (7 September 2013). Today, a whole raft of women, including Alsop, JoAnn Falletta, Simone Young, Alice Farnham, Xian Zhang, Jessica Cottis, and Ariane Matiakh, to name but a few, number amongst the most celebrated in the profession. Alongside this, a significant number of historical female conductors, such as Nadia Boulanger, Ethel Leginska, Veronika Dudarowa, Antonia Brico, and Frédérique Petrides, featured prominently on the podium earlier in the twentieth century. This chapter discusses the situation of women conductors and women’s orchestras in the first half of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the career of Leginska as an instructive case study. It also discusses the re-emergence of women at the heads of orchestras in more recent decades, focusing upon the career of Alsop. The chapter concludes with a look at the current situation of women conductors, and the various mentoring and training schemes that have developed to support them.

A Golden Age of Women’s Orchestras and Conductors

Many of the most successful women conductors of the first half of the twentieth century forged their careers working with women’s orchestras. The music conservatoires which were founded throughout the nineteenth century admitted large number of female instrumentalists and trained them to a professional level. Most contemporary orchestras, however, refused to admit women. The first women’s orchestras were formed in direct reaction to this. The earliest women’s orchestra, the Wiener Damenorchester, was founded by Josephine Amann-Weinlich in Vienna in 1868; the Los Angeles Woman’s Orchestra, the first American women’s orchestra, was established in 1893. Many similar ensembles were created across Europe and North America throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century and early ones of the twentieth. Before the mid-twentieth century, women were strongly discouraged from learning wind or brass instruments, as the physical effort required to play these was considered unsightly. Similarly, the double bass and percussion were also considered unfeminine. Thus, women’s orchestras often struggled to find women to fill all the parts. Some women’s orchestras, such as the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra (founded in London in 1922), overcame this by hiring male players.

As Carol Neuls-Bates has discussed, women’s orchestras were a particularly marked feature of American concert life during the interwar period.³ The cultural expansion which accompanied the post-First-World-War economic boom led to a marked development in orchestral life: more concert halls were built, the concert season was lengthened, and new symphony orchestras were established throughout the country. At the time, however, most American symphony orchestras were largely staffed by European-born men. Both women and men born and trained in America faced discrimination. Female instrumentalists faced a double layer of discrimination, however, as, except for harpists, the major American orchestras refused to hire them. Thus, around thirty American women’s orchestras – many with a full complement of at least eighty players – were founded.⁴ The first of these were established in the largest cities, including Philadelphia (the Philadelphia Women’s Symphony Orchestra, 1921), Chicago (the Chicago Women’s Symphony Orchestra and Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago, both 1924), and New York (the American Women’s Symphony Orchestra, 1924). As American women were more inclined to learn a wider variety of orchestral instruments than Europeans, their women’s orchestras were less reliant upon male players. The Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago, which was strongly committed to raising the profile of women as orchestral musicians, managed to eliminate the reliance upon male players altogether within just a few years. They offered scholarships to female pianists and violinists in return for them re-training on the oboe, French horn or trombone (the only instruments which they had initially hired men to play) and to female high school students studying winds and brass. They also particularly promoted the music of American female composers.⁵

Pioneer on the Podium: Ethel Leginska

Ethel Leginska (born Liggins, 1886–1970) was one of the most successful and pioneering women conductors of the first half of the twentieth century. British by birth, Leginska made the USA her home from 1913, and it was there, despite numerous appearances as a guest conductor with major European orchestras, that her conducting career unfolded. Leginska had already established herself as an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, and achieved some success as a composer, before she turned her attention to conducting in the early 1920s, seeking instruction from Robert Heger and Gennaro Papi between 1920 and 1922.

Her reputation as a leading concert pianist enabled her to secure opportunities to appear as a guest conductor with a number of major European and American orchestras, usually through agreeing to perform a piano concerto as part of the programme. By appearing as a conductor-pianist, Leginska revived the tradition of directing from the keyboard, which had dropped out of fashion in the nineteenth century. Thus, she was a pioneer not only as a woman conductor, but also as a conductor-pianist.

In November 1924, Leginska appeared as a guest conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, and Munich Konzertverein. In January 1925 she became the first woman to conduct at Carnegie Hall, when she made her American conducting debut leading the New York Symphony Orchestra. This was followed in April 1925 by an appearance with the People’s Symphony Orchestra of Boston. In August 1925, she conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. Despite facing hostility from some male orchestral players and critics, these concerts were generally well received and Leginska sought a permanent position. Women conductors tended to be viewed as novelties in the early twentieth century, however. So, although her status as a leading concert pianist enabled her to secure guest appearances, it is highly unlikely that she would have been appointed as a principal conductor with a leading orchestra at the time.

Undeterred, Leginska formed her own orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1926. Except for herself, the harpist, and the pianist, all the members were men. With the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Leginska intended to open up classical music to all. Thus, standing admission to their concerts cost just 25 cents, with seats costing from 50 cents. Although the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra was an artistic success, it proved to be financially inviable, and disbanded after only one season of six concerts.⁶

Between 1927 and 1930, Leginska worked with women’s orchestras. In so doing, we can see her fitting within the wider trend of women conductors founding and directing their own women’s orchestras during the earlier twentieth century. Prominent examples of other contemporary women conductors who formed their own women’s orchestras include Jane Evrard, who formed her Orchestre féminin de Paris in 1930;⁷ Frédérique Petrides, who formed her Orchestrette Classique in New York in 1933; and Antonia Brico, who formed her Women’s Orchestra of New York in 1934. Leginska founded her Boston Women’s Symphony Orchestra in 1927. Forming her own women’s orchestra also enabled Leginska – who selected and trained each of the members herself – to champion women as orchestral players. The Boston Women’s Symphony Orchestra proved to be very successful. Over a three-year period, they gave over two hundred concerts, and undertook two tours. The orchestra was, despite some comments of a gendered and patronising nature, generally well received. A review which appeared in The Boston Herald in 1929 commented on the good job that Leginska had done in training the instrumentalists:

The difficult economic conditions caused by the Wall Street Crash (1929) forced the orchestra to disband in 1930.

The Boston Women’s Symphony Orchestra was not the only women’s orchestra that Leginska was associated with. Following a guest appearance, she was also appointed as conductor and director of the Women’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago in 1927, a post which she held, on a part-time basis, until 1930. She formed one final women’s orchestra, the National Women’s Symphony Orchestra, based in New York, in 1932. The continuing tough economic conditions of the Depression also prevented this from being financially feasible in the long term. It disbanded after just a few months. Leginska did not form any further orchestras. From 1933 she made only guest appearances as a conductor.

J. Michele Edwards has described Leginska as a ‘New Woman’, arguing that she ‘shared traits with others identified as “new women” during the 1910s and 1920s: bobbed hair, concert attire modelled on men’s formal wear, outspokenness about feminist issues, and a serious focus on work and career’.⁹ Leginska adopted her signature look of a dark suit (jacket and skirt) with white blouse, collar, and cuffs, and ‘bobbed’ hair for her appearances as a concert pianist as early as 1915. At a time when concert halls were often very cold, this ensemble kept her warm while also allowing her plenty of arm and shoulder movement. Leginska described this practical attire as ‘always the same and always comfortable, so that I can forget my appearance and concentrate on my art’.¹⁰ She retained this distinctive look for her work as a conductor in the interwar period (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Ethel Leginska, English pianist, conductor and composer, 1935.

Photo credit: Tully Potter/Bridgeman Images

Appearing on the podium in a suit consciously modelled on men’s formal wear allowed Leginska to underline the fact that, not only had she taken what was traditionally a man’s place upon the conductor’s podium, but that she had also taken his clothes in which to do it. Leginska was a trailblazing pioneer, not only as one of the most prominent women conductors of the later 1920s, but also through reviving the practice of the conductor-pianist, and via her work championing women orchestral players. With the arrival of the Second World War, opportunities for her to conduct dried up. Throughout the final decades of her life she maintained a large private studio of piano pupils in Los Angeles.

An Exceptional Career: Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) became arguably the most successful woman conductor to emerge during the 1930s. Between 1933, when the Parisian arts patroness the Princesse Edmond de Polignac launched Boulanger’s conducting career through a gala concert in her salon, and the end of the decade, she had become the first woman to conduct the Royal Philharmonic Society, the National Symphony, and the orchestras of Boston and Philadelphia. In addition, she had also directed dozens of orchestras in France, Belgium, the UK, and the USA. Boulanger’s career must be regarded as exceptional amongst those of women conductors of the first half of the twentieth century, however, because, unlike most others, she did not make her career through founding and working with her own women’s orchestra. In fact, as Jeanice Brooks has discussed, Boulanger went to get lengths to downplay her femininity upon the podium.¹¹ Boulanger claimed that her conducting was an extension of her teaching – a much more socially accepted musical role for women – rather than a result of ambition (although her earliest forays onto the podium actually date from 1912 to 1913). In rehearsals and in interviews she consistently constructed herself as serving the music’s higher purpose, rather than emphasising her own agency as the conductor. Always dressed plainly, she even chose to conduct without a baton, the outward symbol of a conductor’s authority, and, as Brooks has identified, a potential phallic symbol.¹² Thus, Boulanger was very careful not to present herself as a threat. While Boulanger’s performative strategy enabled her to succeed as a conductor, it did not, as Edwards has observed ‘open a door for subsequent generations of women conductors’.¹³

Mid-Century Retrenchments and the Exception of Veronika Dudarowa

The golden age of women’s orchestras that had flourished during the first half of the twentieth century was brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the Second World War. Although male military conscription opened up desks for women in the previously all-male orchestras, most women’s orchestras were so depleted that they were forced to disband. Very few survived the war, and even fewer reformed afterwards. Although it may initially appear curious – disloyal even – that so many women left the women’s orchestras to take up posts in male-dominated ensembles, there are a number of possible reasons for this. Firstly, most women’s orchestras had always suffered financial insecurities. Even during wartime, the top professional orchestras retained relative financial security. On a related point, members of the women’s orchestras tended to be paid significantly less than members of male or mixed ensembles. Secondly, the previously all-male orchestras were considerably more prestigious, so it is perhaps not surprising that women seized opportunities to join them.

Linda Dempf has commented that: ‘It was not that women were suddenly accepted into male-dominated orchestras, but that the women’s orchestras had served a purpose of giving women an opportunity to play and learn the orchestral repertoire … Thus the all-women orchestra provided a training ground and was an important step for women orchestra players.’¹⁴ New opportunities for female instrumentalists ironically also created decreased opportunities for female conductors, the majority of whom had worked with women’s ensembles. With these gone, opportunities for women conductors decreased rapidly in the period following the Second World War, and this situation did not begin to improve (for most women) until the final decades of the twentieth century.

Although the decades immediately following the Second World War afforded only very few professional conducting opportunities for women, the career of Veronika Dudarowa (1916–2009) in the USSR is an important exception. Dudarowa, who studied conducting at the Moscow Conservatory, became a junior conductor of the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 1947. She was promoted to principal conductor in 1960, becoming the first Russian woman to hold such a position. She retained this post until 1989. In 1991, following the fall of communism, she founded the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia. She led this orchestra until 2003 and remained as its artistic manager until her death. Although not well known outside Russia, Dudarowa was one of the most important Soviet and Russian conductors of the twentieth century. As Tim McDonald has commented: ‘in her own country, she was a giant’.¹⁵

Re-emergence

In the West, women conductors did not begin to re-emerge on the podium until the 1980s. In 1984, Sian Edwards won the first Leeds Conductors’ Competition, making her London debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985; also in 1984, Odaline de la Martinez became the first woman to conduct a BBC Proms Concert; and in the USA, JoAnn Falletta was appointed Musical Director of the Long Beach Symphony in 1989. Although male conductors still outnumber female, particularly at the top of the profession, there are now a significant number of high-profile women conductors active. Alongside Edwards, Martinez, and Falletta, Claire Gibault, Jane Glover, Simone Young, Xian Zhang, and Ariane Matiakh, to name but a few, have all carved out leading, international careers.

A striking feature of women’s participation in professional conducting is the number – such as Margaret Hillis, Sarah Caldwell, Judith Somogi, Glover, Edwards, Young, and Laurence Equilbey – who have excelled as opera and choral conductors. Although this is obviously positive, two gendered reasons for the relative success of women conductors in the world of opera and choral music suggest themselves. Firstly, in opera the conductor is hidden in the pit; so it is not immediately obvious to the audience that the music is being directed by a woman. J. Michele Edwards has gone so far as to speculate that because ‘the conductor works in the pit rather than in the spotlight … this may have been more acceptable to audiences, orchestras, and even conductors’.¹⁶ She quotes Glover revealing that ‘maybe that’s why I like it because I’m out of sight’.¹⁷ Secondly, many opera and choral conductors begin their careers as piano répétiteurs. The supportive nature of this could be seen as reinforcing nurturing roles for women. Fiona Maddocks has suggested that women conductors have made particular progress in choral music because it ‘requires the kind of collegiate powers at which women excel’.¹⁸

Pioneer, Leader, and Many Firsts: Marin Alsop

Marin Alsop (b.1956) has become one of the most successful and well-known conductors active anywhere in the world today. In a highly competitive field, she has carved out a remarkable international career, which has been distinguished by many firsts. She is the first woman to have become the principal conductor of a British orchestra (Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, 2002), music director of a major American orchestra (Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 2007), music director of a Brazilian orchestra (São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, 2012), and chief conductor of a Viennese Orchestra (Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, 2019). She became the first woman to conduct at the Teatro alla Scala in Italy (2011) and to conduct the Last Night of the BBC Proms (2013). Additionally, amongst many prestigious awards, she became the first conductor ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

Alsop is the only daughter of professional musicians. Her father, LaMar Alsop, was concertmaster of the New York City Ballet Orchestra; the orchestra in which her mother, Ruth Alsop, was a cellist. At the age of nine, her father took her to hear one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, and the experience motivated her to become a conductor herself. Displaying a precocious musical talent from a very young age, Alsop entered the Juilliard Pre-College at the age of seven. She enrolled at Yale University in 1972, but later transferred to the Juilliard School, where she graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in violin performance (1977 and 1978). During her early career, she worked as a freelance violinist in New York City. She began conducting studies with Carl Bamberger in 1979, later studying with Harold Farberman in 1985. Not unlike the pioneering women conductors of the early twentieth century, Alsop gained her first conducting experiences by founding her own ensembles. She founded the all-woman swing band String Fever in 1981 and established the Concordia Orchestra in 1984.

In 1989 Alsop became the first woman to win the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she became a conducting student of Bernstein, who would become her mentor, Gustav Meier, and Seiji Ozawa. From the late 1980s and throughout the ’90s, she moved through a succession of prestigious formative appointments. She was appointed associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony (Virginia) and music director of the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in 1989; Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 1992; music director of the Colorado Symphony (Denver) in 1993; creative conductor chair with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1994; and principal guest conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in 1999.

Alsop achieved a major appointment in 2002, when she became principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. In 2007, she became music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Under her leadership, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra became particularly known for its outreach activities with the local community. In 2008, she founded OrchKids, which provides music education, instruments, performance opportunities, academic instruction, healthy meals, and mentorship at no cost for underprivileged children and teenagers in Baltimore City. The project has been described as ‘an acknowledged leader in the El Sistema and social-change through music movement’.¹⁹ Alsop became principal conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in 2012. With her, the orchestra became the first Brazilian orchestra to appear at the BBC Proms in August 2012. In 2015, she succeeded her teacher Meier as director of graduate conducting at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University.²⁰ Alsop also has an extensive discography. Although she is particularly well known for her recordings of twentieth-century American music, especially Barber and Bernstein, she has recorded a very wide range of music, which also includes works by Brahms, Dvořák, Mahler, and Bartók. In 2010, her recording of Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Colin Currie won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Alsop is aware of the gender issues surrounding her position on the podium. She has opined that: ‘People aren’t comfortable with seeing women in these roles, because there aren’t any women in the roles … When you’re the only one, you’re always a target … Women have so few opportunities, comparatively speaking, that the pressure is enormous.’²¹ This translates into an acute awareness of how body language and gesture are interpreted through a gendered lens. As she has explained:

This awareness of body language and gesture also extends to how she comports herself during rehearsals: ‘Everything sends a message … If I sit down, the message is that either I’m tired, or that it’s casual, or it’s too much effort.’²³ Visually Alsop cuts a professional and authoritative figure on the podium. Not unlike Leginska, she also favours smart suits which allow plenty of shoulder room. Her signature look has become a black tailored suit, often accompanied with a red blouse (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 Marin Alsop.

Photo credit: Grant Leighton

Although proud to have been the first woman to achieve many things in the world of conducting, Alsop has frequently expressed her astonishment that this can still be the case in the early twenty-first century. In conversation with Michael Cooper, the classical music critic for The New York Times, she has commented that ‘I’ve been the first woman to do a lot of things, and I’m really proud, but I also think it’s absolutely pathetic.’²⁴ In a similar vein, Alsop used her speech at her Last Night of the BBC Proms concert to observe that:

Mentors, Role Models, and All-Women Training Schemes

Alsop has used her position as a leading female conductor to enable these ‘seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, hundredths’. As Maddocks has observed, ‘if she [Alsop] once resisted tiresome gender questions, now she accepts her duty as spokesperson’.²⁶ Alsop established her Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship specifically for women in 2002. Currently worth $7,500 for Fellows and $5,000 for Associate Fellows, the awards offer talented young women conductors two years of intensive coaching and mentoring from Alsop.²⁷ On her official website, she has described her motivation for establishing the fellowship thus:

Alsop’s pioneering mentoring and training scheme has since inspired similar projects elsewhere. In 2014, Alice Farnham also launched a training programme for aspiring women conductors aimed at addressing the lack of women on the podium, with Andrea Brown, at Morley College. Since 2016, Farnham’s Women Conductors programme has found a home at the Royal Philharmonic Society.²⁹ The programme provides dedicated workshops for emerging and student women conductors throughout the UK, and many leading senior female conductors have contributed to it. Reflecting on its importance, Farnham has commented in The Guardian that: ‘If we are to encourage more women to become conductors they need both hands-on experience and inspirational role models.’³⁰ Beyond enabling young women conductors to meet and be trained by senior, female role models, these training workshops are essential for creating safe places within which student women conductors can practise and refine their skills. As Farnham has further commented:

A number of similar training programmes have emerged in recent years. Prominent examples include the Sorrell Women’s Conducting Programme at the Royal Academy of Music (UK); the Female Conductor Programme at the National Concert Hall, Dublin (Republic of Ireland); Dirigent Musik i Väst (Sweden); and the Hart Institute for Women Conductors at the Dallas Opera (USA).

Conclusion

Although it is undeniable that women continue to be underrepresented on the conductor’s podium, particularly at the highest level of the profession, there are now leading women conductors active throughout the world. The women-only conducting training programmes which have sprung up in recent years offer particular grounds for hope, as they have already proved tremendously beneficial in terms of diversifying the world of conducting and increasing the number of women professionally active. Karina Canellakis, the 2013 Taki Concordia Fellow, became chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in 2019 and the first woman to conduct the First Night of the BBC Proms on 19 July 2019; Valentina Peleggi, the 2015 Taki Concordia Fellow, is principal conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Chorus; Lina Gonzalez-Granados, the 2017 Taki Concordia Fellow, is founder and artistic director of the Unitas Ensemble.³² In the UK, meanwhile, Tianyi Lu became Welsh National Opera’s first Female Conductor in Residence in August 2019. The scheme ‘aims to equip aspiring female conductors with the necessary training and experience to pursue conducting careers’.³³ As part of her award, Lu will be mentored for eighteen months by Farnham. It is very much to be hoped that these schemes will contribute to what Alsop referred to in her Last Night speech at the 2013 BBC Proms as ‘a natural progression towards more inclusion in classical music’.³⁴

A wave of appointments of women to positions as music directors or principal conductors of major European and American orchestras also appears to point in this direction. The year 2016 marked three women conductors taking up principal conductor posts with major American and European orchestras: Chinese-American conductor Xian Zhang became musical director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra; Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla was appointed music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki became chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra became music director of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in 2017, meanwhile. It is to be hoped that these appointments signal a profound change. Alsop concluded her 2013 Last Night of the Proms speech by appealing to young women to ‘believe in yourselves, follow your passion, and never give up, because you will create a future filled with possibility’.³⁵ It is greatly to be hoped that the growth in training and mentoring opportunities for aspiring women conductors, and the recent spate of appointments of women to high-profile conducting positions, hint that such a future is within grasp.

Evolving Opportunities and Strenuous Resistances

An increasing number of female classical music practitioners – both instrumentalists and singers – are now the face of recording labels and managing agencies. These advancements were made possible in the twentieth century thanks to a slow, yet progressive, assertion of women’s rights, which mirrored in music what was happening at a societal level. The post-1968 cultural revolution was followed by a surge of feminist ideology in music and music studies, and the female soloist began to acquire greater territory in the live concert and recording industry. Although this trend reveals an improvement in terms of opportunities, it is far from representing a radical revolution within the classical music industry as a whole. In fact, the increase of female performers starring as soloists in prestigious concert seasons is not matched by a concurrent growth in the numbers of female instrumentalists within European and American orchestras, where the number of women is still very limited, and the resistance they face during the recruitment process as orchestral players and as board members is still apparent.⁶ It should be noted, though, that instrumentalists and singers have always experienced quite different public statuses. The status of the star solo singer has been recognised since the development of monody in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the cultural burden born by singers is exemplified through the negative (and gendered) connotations associated with the very terms diva and primadonna.

As music criticism developed throughout the nineteenth century, accounts tended to focus upon female musicians’ private and public appearance, rather than their musicianship. Musical professionalism often related to a specific social standing, as an opportunity only reserved to lower middle-class women belonging to musical lineage.⁷ This was exacerbated by the essentially patriarchal culture of Romantic aesthetics, and its male-dominated bourgeois social structure, which often relegated female performers to the salon, where women – specifically wives – were admitted and ‘tolerated’, but annihilated in their aspirations to reach the public eye. An often-cited exception is Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896), one of the most accomplished and popular concert pianists of the nineteenth century. Lesser known names, such as the violinists Camilla Urso (1842–1902) and Wilma Norman-Neruda (1838–1911), were hired by orchestras to play as guest soloists, although their engagements often depended on their willingness to appear in very distinctive attires.⁸

In general, throughout the twentieth century, the societal changes demanded by women in everyday life and in the workplace determined a progressive shift in the way musical education and professionalism evolved. Not without resistance, female performers were able to access a wider range of instruments that were traditionally considered inappropriate for women to play (including woodwind, brass, percussion, and the larger strings). More women could enter music education up to conservatoire and university level, while the work of female composers and educators such as Nadia Boulanger in France, Ruth Crawford Seeger in the United States, and Elisabeth Lutyens in Britain left an indelible mark. The way soloists began to access greater work in British, German, and French music societies and orchestras also became a sign of the changing times. This was partly due to the opportunities created by all-female consorts and orchestras in the early twentieth century, often in response to gender discrimination.⁹ (See Chapter 5 ‘On the Podium: Women Conductors’ for a discussion of women’s orchestras in the earlier twentieth century.) Most importantly, and as time progressed, female instrumentalists became able to enter the professional market and compete with men on a more equal basis. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the shift in recognition of women musicians was the birth of academic studies related to the female presence in music history, which originated in the wake of women’s studies between the 1960s and 1970s, and critically developed in the 1980s and 1990s through the word of such scholars as Marcia J. Citron, Suzanne Cusick, Susan McClary, Judith Tick, and Jane Bowers (as discussed further in the Preface of the current volume).¹⁰ Although still predominantly dominated by women scholars, the field has impacted on the conventional historical narrative underpinning the canon and has significantly paved the way to introducing a gender discourse in music. Pursuing the feminist perspective, the field has recently branched out to performers and performance studies: it is from this newly forged critical angle that this study stems.

A Question of Identity

My observations of the performance image of female soloists commence from an overview of different understandings of a performer’s identity, drawing on a synthesis of some of the definitions attempted by musical performance and philosophy studies. I start with Philip Auslander’s assertion that ‘what musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae’.¹¹ To define the transitional ‘entity that mediates between musicians and the act of performance’, Auslander borrows the concept of personage from theatre studies.¹² According to this concept, musicians embody a version of themselves fashioned to the aim of performing in precise conditions, inscribed within the ‘frame’, that is the main structure, of a musical event.¹³ Performance as a ‘form of self-presentation’ entails that, while some presentations may reach the viewer as a direct prolongation of one’s personality, others may be more laborious or even the result of multi-agential constructions.¹⁴ This self-shaping act concurs with ‘the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during her performance’ to recreate the performer’s front.¹⁵ The front manifests the specifics of each performer – not only their techniques and artistry, but their own appearance and physicality – in ways that veer from the conventional conceptions of performance as the projection of a composer’s work. From this performer-centred standpoint, musical performances are de facto social interactions, apt to establish communication codes; not only amongst musical collaborators, but also between performers and receivers. For Cusick, the receiving act of the audience is as ‘performative’ as the musicians’ execution; therefore, ‘all performances are ensemble pieces’, entailing both the presence of audience and performers at a live event, but also their absence in the case of a remote performance experienced through recording.¹⁶ The performer’s identity, therefore, is a complex negotiation saturated with all the elements that concur to construct the ‘social realm’, where such identity is projected and where the spectator-consumer plays an active part as the receiver of this sophisticated communication act. Focusing particularly on the star status of pop performers, Jane Davidson similarly posits the identity of the performer as a multilayered entity, composed by multiple personae: the character of the person performing and asserting their iconic roles through their annexed stage etiquette. Finally, the more-or-less known subjective features of their off-stage personality, now, more than ever, widely spread through the interactivity allowed by social media, which allows an unprecedented proximity to one’s favourite star.¹⁷

Voyeurism and Gaze

The voyeuristic insight into the private life of stage personae allowed by current forms of communications inform the audience’s expectations to an even greater extent, even when the performer is not complicit in this mechanism through their online presence. These tensions are not limited to musicianship only; for instance, performers are, likewise, scrutinised for their looks, which is an issue for both female and male performers. However, women are generally more subjected to criticism related to their looks and private lives (especially when they also happen to be mothers and/or wives). On some occasions, even personal choices become targets for negative judgement. For instance, Erraught was not the only performer in the (now notorious) 2014 Glyndebourne production of Der Rosenkavalier who was attacked in the press. In addition to ridiculing Erraught’s physique, Christiansen was also scathing in his judgement of Kate Royal’s (b.1979) performance as Marschallin, describing her as ‘short of her best and stressed by motherhood’.¹⁸

The body-centred mechanisms of musical performance agree with the concept of ‘impersonation’, which underpins both the agency of the performer and of the consumer.¹⁹ John Rink centres the performer’s and listener’s corporeality as another foundational element of performance: ‘Performers and listeners humanise music – impersonate music – by projecting themselves onto it and imagining themselves in it. That is not only why we make “the music”: we are playing or listening to what we want it to be, but also why we have the potential to “become” the music as we interact with it.’²⁰ The desire mechanisms triggered by the immersive power of music as performed are channelled in an encompassing projection of the spectator’s self into the idolisation of the source of that experience, the performer’s body. As Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson have commented, ‘Voyeurism renders desire as a purely visual activity … [The voyeur’s] invisibility produces the visibility of the objects of his gaze.’²¹ In twenty-first-century classical music performance consumerism, the paradox is that the visual surpasses the aural. In film studies, Laura Mulvey dissects the reception act of mainstream film spectatorship through psychoanalytical lenses determining that the conventions conveying pleasure are the result of a sexual tension produced by the active male gaze.²² The ensuing power dynamics determine the objectification of women’s bodies, their dismembering or fetishism into sexual representations fashioned to satisfy the male spectator. This encompassing theory is applied to the wide range of representations of women in performance, where their image is seemingly shaped to satisfy the male receiver. At the same time, by virtue of the mechanisms leading to the reflexive mechanism of impersonation, ‘women become erotic objects for spectators within the auditorium, where they become objects of sexual interest and narcissistic pleasure for the spectator’s identification with other people’.²³ Mulvey’s reading fully applies to the subtle marketing conventions of the current classical music scenario, where female performers’ appearances are meticulously packaged to meet the cultural canon of beauty and youth as foundational factors of success.

This type of representation of women in the arts and media is certainly not new to the twenty-first century. The notion of female musicianship as a bodily expression has existed in Western culture since at least the Renaissance. The association of body-musicianship has mainly been conferred on vocalists, with the notion of the voice as a prolongation of the body; however, female instrumentalists were not exempted from this kind of scrutiny, as iconography produced since the Middle Ages records. Throughout the centuries, with the exception of the ‘paradox of the fat lady’ for opera singers, the expectation that women musicians should project both a desirable look and a desirable sound perpetrated itself consistently; starting from the mid-twentieth century, these demands also eventually impacted heavily on the operatic world.²⁴ These trends were exacerbated by the emergence of the rock-and-roll scene in the 1950s, and of the pop music video industry in the 1980s and 1990s, which normalised the predominance of the visual over the aural in the leading marketing strategies of female performers and girls bands. (See Part II, ‘Women in Popular Music’, for a discussion of women’s experiences in the popular music industry.) The images of women performers – often heavily sexualised both in song and appearance – were adapted to the expectations of younger audiences, who projected onto their favourite stars their own perspectives and desires. By the turn of the twenty-first century, art music was following the same trend, beginning to borrow marketing models from the competing pop industry, and thereby to promote the sexualised image of female performers. While, in most cases, their male counterparts were still portrayed in tuxedos and bow ties, marketing campaigns for women soloists, chamber music ensemble members, and opera stars began to buy into the advertising establishment that dictated that women should be garbed in revealing attire and adopt (sexually) provocative poses.

Contemporary Soloists in a Mediatised Culture

Over the past few decades, women have forged careers performing instruments which were deemed unsuitable for them until the mid-twentieth century. This is the case, for instance, of trumpeter Alison Balsom (b.1978), who has been awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) and two honorary doctorate degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Leicester. Balsom’s recollection of her beginnings as a brass player flags exactly the type of gender bias surrounding the choice of a musical instrument on behalf of children and parents.²⁵ She has been vocal in denouncing gendered ideas about brass instruments not being appropriate for women and girls: ‘I come from a family with no gender bias. I wanted to play the trumpet brilliantly and they encouraged me. It never occurred to me that other people found a female doing this surprising. So I’m aware of my novelty value: a blonde girl playing the trumpet. But a modern woman doesn’t have to conform.’²⁶ Balsom blasts gender inequality in the classical music industry; she divides her time between a top-rank performance career and her work as an advocate for the rights of women working in the arts.²⁷

Activism is a common trait of several leading women soloists, who are aware of being perceived as role models. This is also the case of percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie (b.1965, see Figure 6.1), who defines herself as ‘the first percussionist to pursue a career as virtuoso soloist’.²⁸ Her story is, in fact, unique, not only because of her capacity to build a career in a male-dominated environment, but also because she did so in spite of her profound deafness since the age of eight. Glennie experiences parameters such as pitch and frequency through vibration and an embodied cognition of tones and volumes. Drawing inspiration from her own life experiences, she pursues a busy schedule of activities, working as a speaker, consultant, performer, and composer aiming to teach the world ‘how to really listen’.²⁹ On this, she believes: ‘When we listen to music, we assume that it’s all been fed through here (points to ears). This is how we experience music. Of course, it’s not. We experience thunder, thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. Listen, listen, listen. Now, what can we do with thunder?’³⁰ She also strives to create new opportunities to access music for the hearing-impaired. As her online platform shows, the percussionist fully capitalises on her multitalented, yet accessible, persona to recruit and inspire her followers; from giving inspirational talks, to musical collaborations and performances, through selling her handmade jewellery, Glennie adapts swiftly to different modes of communication.

Figure 6.1 Dame Evelyn Glennie.

Photo credit: Caroline Purday, courtesy of Evelyn Glennie’s managing team

Two multifaceted talents of extremely different natures, Balsom and Glennie shape their personae as being very approachable and laid back. While Balsom cultivates the more classical appearance of a virtuosa recording artist for Warner House, Glennie maintains a more relaxed style consistent with her numerous collaborations, spanning classical, contemporary, pop, jazz, and rock repertoires. In both cases, their slick physical appearance, exuding elegance and rigour – although not likely to have been detrimental to their rise to success – is not a key factor in the marketing strategies that construct their personae. This is not the case for many other artists (and their managing teams) that bring physical appearance centre stage.

Within the capitalistic frame of the classical music industry, the survival of an emerging artist’s star depends on their capacity to enlarge their fan bases by appealing to the language of mass consumerism. Opera singers have always been on the front line in these strategies. Mainly because of their inherent reliance on embodiment, they are more susceptible to buying into the idea that they must look as desirable as their voices sound. In the twenty-first century, there are numerous singers who engineer their public personae in ways that bring the fashion and cinematic industry close to the operatic world. This, perhaps, is in line with the example set by an iconic star who reached the status of a timeless idol, Maria Callas (1923–77). The cultural impact of Callas’s persona is undoubtedly still alive in the twenty-first century, although her submitting to the burgeoning beauty canons of the contemporary fashion world by losing 5.7 stone (eighty pounds) between 1951 and 1953 inaugurated a trend amongst opera singers that subverted once and for all the caricatured stereotype of the fat soprano.³¹ Callas’s popularity relied on the alchemy of her voice and stage presence, which conferred on her a status of quasi-divinity. Nevertheless, she often paid a dear price in terms of privacy.

Nowadays the immediacy of social media facilitates an artist’s negotiation between their private and public persona through the sharing of official and less-official accounts of their daily experiences on their platforms. The ultimate aim is to sell a pretended affinity with the audience member, thus, expanding the immersive mechanism of ‘impersonation’ to the private sphere. If the reward for complying with this trend is for classical performers to reach out of the traditionally secluded walls of art music and dive into the mass-media scene, the cost is that of succumbing to a rhetoric that encompasses many other aspects of the performance persona. This is the case, for instance, of piano sensation Yuja Wang (b.1987), who cultivates a highly sexualised image, through meticulous attention to fashions that capitalise on her petite body through revealing outfits, which are always complemented by high heels. One of the current faces of the Decca label, she fully invests in the visual construction of her performance persona to the point of identifying her music with her own style. ‘If the music is beautiful and sensual, why not dress to fit? It’s about power and persuasion. Perhaps it’s a little sadomasochistic of me. But if I’m going to get naked with my music, I may as well be comfortable while I’m at it.’³² Wang’s metaphorical language is deliberately provocative and highly sexualised, perfectly tickling the consumerist mechanisms of desire. If music shows its seductive potential, so does the performer that embodies it without fearing to expose her corporeality. Her words could indeed be a clever factor of her marketing strategy; however, if this statement maintains some degree of authenticity, it would raise questions about the sense of self that the musician conveys by identifying her musical persona with her attire. By investing her sexualised image with an iconoclast attitude towards the stiff conventions of concert apparel, Wang entices a new generation of young classical performers to feel entitled to capitalise on their looks as well as on their artistry. Thanks to diligent use of the appropriate social-media platforms, where she promotes luxury brands and fashion firms, Wang reaches an idol status that takes her image well beyond the classical music scene; her looks are shared and promoted by the fashion firms she (or her marketing team) chooses for her recitals around the world.³³

Many crossover artists fully invest in pop music marketing models, which inform the fashioning of both their image and their musical projects. This is certainly the case with violin prodigy Vanessa Mae (b.1978) and singer Katherine Jenkins (b.1980), who, besides careers as classical concert soloists, promote musical collaborations with pop and rock recording artists, while maintaining their respective popular images though high-level public engagement. While Jenkins cultivates her girl-next-door allure, featuring in television shows and bringing centre stage details of her private life through a clever use of press and social media, Mae’s fierce display of her body promotes an over-the-top persona, while her multifarious talents and ability to switch smoothly from genre to genre throws critics into disarray. Engaged in a number of activities running parallel with their performance and recording careers – Jenkins is an Ambassador for Macmillan Cancer Society and well known for her performances for the British Forces Foundation; Mae is an Olympic skier and an actress – both artists have a large fan base, ranging from classical music aficionados to rock and pop listeners, and from television viewers to sports fans. Combining undisputed musical talent with their protean performance personae, their popularity matches their exposure to media to the point where even negative remarks further their popularity. In 2008, for instance, opera star Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (b.1944) attacked ‘popera’ stars. She diminished Jenkins and other artists’ works, prophesying their inevitable artistic demise. Jenkins replied to her criticism, defining herself as being from a ‘normal background’ and as an advocate for the accessibility of classical music, as opposed to a conservative elite preoccupied with their own survival. ‘I think that it’s just obvious now that people really like that kind of music [crossover]. I think that it’s become its own thing. It shows in the number of sales and I don’t think people can ignore that.’³⁴ In this dynamic, ‘sales’ and the appreciation of ‘the people’ seem to determine the value of a musical endeavour.

Interestingly enough, it is difficult to find reports of Mae’s work that do not make reference to her appearance. For instance, the criticism which her eclectic repertoire has attracted also addresses the way she uses her body in performance, almost as if her relaxed appearance necessarily equals a lack of musical identity. As Adam Sweeting has commented:

I would not be sure that a critic would refer to a man’s work with similar vocabulary, yet this is the rhetoric used to describe Mae, who, needless to say, perhaps embraces it as an aid to further her fame. Certainly, a notable difference from the past is the following: if, once, a negative review or an inopportune digging into personal lives could break a career, nowadays, in the multifarious world of digital communication, negative critiques not only produce major visibility, but also then with the passing of time, become negligible pieces of information, easily overtaken by the frightening amount of material that keeps building up from different sources and media. The rapidity with which this information is absorbed by the media and thrown to the general public highlights new ways to generate popular content and to steer the fan bases for many of these artists. Most importantly, these mechanisms also determine new ways to conceive of popularity as a whole, not only as the fruit of successful mediation between artistic achievements and communication skills, but as the patchy result of good and bad responses to the performer’s public personae, whereby negative remarks and personal attacks assume almost the same strategic importance as a positive reception. At any rate, the body of the performer remains the first and foremost element that is subjected to scrutiny, and torn apart on occasion.

In an ideal society that cherishes gender equality as an accomplished objective, the images of talented artists such as Wang, Jenkins, and Mae should be testimony to their empowerment and, even more so, to their freedom to fashion their image according to their personal taste; ultimately, the way they dress, move or age should be a negligible detail in the eyes of the general public and press. However, the harsh reality is that our society has failed to achieve equality and is currently even experiencing a regression in terms of civil rights. For this reason, the fear remains legitimate that the model represented by these artists might be absorbed into the consumeristic mechanisms of reification and mass-commercialisation of the female image that are so embedded in the current star system.

Conclusions

The number of women soloists with prominent roles in the classical music business has multiplied. From the 2000s on, leading female artists have become the faces of an increasing number of record labels; this has included historical brands such as Decca, Sony Classics, EMI, and Warner Classics, which have set an example for burgeoning independent labels. This is, perhaps, a consequence of the new marketing strategies adopted by classical labels, which, following the example of pop music labels, relinquished the paradigm of the white male master to begin to foster the work of younger women classical performers and attract minorities and younger audiences. This new generation of performers relies on the fashioning of their public image, communicated via a consistent online presence, through which they appeal to a large fan base. They often engage with parallel activities alongside their musical careers to voice their multiple talents and world views, and many espouse charitable causes.

These performers’ public personae are often packaged according to marketing conventions that capitalise not only on their musical abilities, orientations, and collaborations, but also on their appearance; in many cases, putting this, rather than their sound, under the spotlight. The issue of the performer’s identity is at stake here. Performance as the projection of a musician’s persona within a social realm entails the interaction of multiple agencies, not least that of the spectator-consumer, who impose their desires onto the performer and her body, triggering an ‘impersonating’ act. What we witness is the construction of the performer’s marketed identity through the active male gaze, which inscribes the work and life of these musicians within a patriarchal power dynamic. In short, if the twenty-first-century music industry sees women taking centre stage, its main structure and the rhetoric which derives from that structure still respond to an old-fashioned capitalistic scheme, which manufactures the performer’s images in ways that consolidate not only the male gaze but, especially, the male voice. This pervading filter often emerges through the sexist remarks of press and critics, or the statistics for the number of women hired in orchestras or present in the higher ranks of music establishments or within academia or the conservatoires. Ultimately, the male status quo remains unchallenged, despite an apparent acquiescence to female talent. In light of the luminous examples of some of the performers discussed in this chapter, if we still have to live with the presence of women soloists in the music industry as a concession, something is wrong with the classical music ‘social realm’ in ways that do not differ from many other work contexts.