Following the sacrifices of the Second World War, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed enormous social and cultural changes. This was the era of the Cold War (c.1947–89), a period defined by political, economic, and ideological tensions between the United States and its Western allies, and the Soviet Union and countries in the Eastern Soviet Bloc (USSR).1 Major steps forward for women in society were attained in this era, brought about by the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (second-wave feminism). These steps were taken at a time when ‘classical’ music was undergoing radical, unprecedented change, in an age of new communications, when radio, television, the cinema, and sound technologies greatly expanded the audience for music of all genres from all periods.
This chapter focuses on a number of women composers – all born within the first three decades of the twentieth century – who made vital contributions to the post-war international music scene. These composers worked in a profession that was male-dominated, and engaged with the tumultuous musical events of the mid-century. Their music is permeated with the spirit of its time – in varying degrees of temperature – embodying the individual composer’s own creative choices and very particular cultural and social environment. Each one succeeded in breaking through the Cold War’s musical sound barrier.
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
In a way the anti-avant-garde musicians are similar to those who oppose the lunar landings. There are others – and they include me – who, though themselves would hate to go to the moon, accept the landings as inevitable.2
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:
To continue composing in the post-war years without capitulating to Schoenberg’s serialism was like being left behind in a backwater, when everyone else was swimming ahead with the tide.4
(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:
I have avoided things which were wrong for me such as serialism because it was not melodically suitable. But remember, every composer has his own series of notes which form his own idiom … we’ve all got a ‘series’, or there would be no style.7
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
It was both disturbing and exciting. It was very much connected to the general situation at the time which was the Cold War. You had to take sides, it was very clear, you had to decide what kind of music you were going to write … It was tyrannical … there was the right and left in music as well as in the world.8
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
I like to use serialism as a tool and to incorporate it with the other forms in music. I see no reason for chopping off what’s developed simply because something new has come along.20
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
most women have quite enough to do, to keep the world going, without their being expected to indulge in fantasies, or the concentrated thought and feeling that brings these fantasies to fruition as works of art.31
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
The very fact that there have been so far rather few women composers makes it that much harder for a woman … [I]t’s very hard in any case to master the craft and the art of composition without having to fight at the same time the battle against self-consciousness and one’s right to do it at all.33
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
