Introduction

In her lecture ‘The public voice of women’, Mary Beard begins with Homer’s Odyssey and the ‘first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up”’. Penelope, patient wife of adventuring Odysseus, requests that a bard sing happier tunes; her son, Telemachus, is not impressed. ‘“Mother”, he says, “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household”’.¹ With this moment, Beard highlights continuity between antiquity and the present, revealing the importance of female silencing to male identity. Telemachus, she observes, becomes a man by confining Penelope, setting her out of sight and hearing. Her silence amplifies his voice.

Comparable moments in the history of musicology spring to mind. Suzanne Cusick tells of Ruth Crawford’s fury, as a student composer, at her exclusion from Joseph Yasser’s lecture on composition at the founding meeting of the New York Musicological Society (22 February 1930). Charles Seeger – Crawford’s teacher, subsequently her spouse – explained years later that this exclusion was ‘to avoid the incipient criticism that musicology was woman’s work’.² In other words, female exclusion was intended to lend authority to American musical scholarship, in the face of male anxiety about the status of a fledgling discipline, and perhaps about the ambiguous gendering of music itself.

If women were excluded from equal participation in the emerging institution of musicology, they were also removed from its historical materials and subjects of research. We still live with the consequences of twentieth-century musicology’s most powerfully Telemachian technique: the omission of women composers from music-historical surveys (as documented in Chapter 1). So systematic was this erasure that generations of music students in the twentieth century formed the impression that women of the past either did not compose or did not compose anything requiring attention. ‘The history of Western music’, as told at mid-century by Paul Henry Lang and by Donald J. Grout, involved a Whiggish plot: the progress of European music towards autonomy. Great male composers served as worldly agents in this self-fulfilling process, throwing off the shackles of church and court patronage, and liberating ‘music’ (the protagonist) from the contamination of other media, from procrustean forms, and from ritual function.³ A considerable amount of scholarship has been concerned with the ‘history of Western music’ as a complex ideological formation serving a range of gendered, racial, and national interests. This kind of history is so deeply compromised as male/masculine (as well as socially elite, and white), that its implications cannot simply be rectified by putting women back in. As Beard observes (and others have done similarly), ‘you can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure’. To this end, she recommends, ‘it is power that we need to redefine rather than women’.⁴

Beard’s analysis is compelling, but there are limits to the explanatory reach of silencing and exclusion in writing women’s history as composers. Women composers, across all times and places, were not necessarily subject to as brutal an exclusion as they suffered in twentieth-century textbooks. Beard focuses on hostility to women’s public speech-making in the political arena, but composition is not in itself so transgressive, and can be undertaken in private. A latter-day Penelope might swap her distaff for staff paper, just as, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women might choose the piano over embroidery. Even in the Odyssey, there are powerful female voices: not simply that of Penelope – who is silenced only after, and because, she has spoken publicly – but also in the allure of Siren song, where (in Book 12) the enchantress Circe warns Odysseus of the Sirens (on that legendary phenomenon see Chapter 6). Political speech-making aside, the Odyssey registers the power of female voices, at least in mythological guise.

The Suppression Hypothesis

In this chapter, I take the notion of ‘silencing’ in thinking and writing about the history of women composers, together with related concepts of exclusion and prohibition, as emblematic of a hypothesis of social suppression. The most comprehensive formulation of this perspective was published by Marcia Citron in Gender and the Musical Canon (1993, reissued by University of Illinois Press, 2000). Among the strengths of Citron’s analysis is the way it conceptualizes power: hers is not primarily a story of overbearing fathers and brothers ruling by arbitrary dictate but of institutionalized obstacles such as restricted access to advanced education, the primacy of domestic and familial responsibilities, and the exclusion from professional posts involving composition. Citron also considers the alienating effects of what Foucault calls discursive power: the male appropriation of genius, notions of female creative weakness, and the sexual aesthetics of genre and form that figured the musically masculine as prestigious and normative.⁵ She traces the impact of these obstacles on women’s confidence as composers. Another strength of Citron’s analysis is its specificity: it concerns women’s access to the most prestigious forms of composition in the bourgeois public sphere after 1800. She does not assume that her findings apply to earlier periods, nor does she comment on women’s place within popular or middlebrow idioms. Even with regard to elite music making after 1800, she does not imply that women were excluded from composition tout court, but rather from repertorial canons. Thus Citron’s research does not posit suppression as a transhistorical and universal feature of women’s history as composers.⁶

The limits of the suppression hypothesis were highlighted as early as 1994 in a landmark collection of essays, Cecilia Reclaimed, to which Citron contributed. In the opening chapter, she noted that over-emphasizing suppression inadvertently marginalizes and devalues what women have achieved in music.⁷ In her foreword, Susan McClary observed that studies of women composers sought to balance accounts of constraints with empowerment: that is, with what enabled women to compose.⁸ In their introduction, the editors, Susan C. Cook and Judy Tsou, take the next step in the analysis of suppression, locating it not simply in social structures and repertorial canons but also in the organizing categories of musical scholarship. They diagnose the distinction between Western and non-Western, high and low, and ‘separate spheres’ (the public/private opposition) as ideological formations that inscribe hierarchy under the guise of objective knowledge. Although they don’t mention Foucault, their approach echoes his theory of knowledge-as-power, which imbricates power in our ways of knowing the world.⁹ Thus the issue of suppression expands to encompass not only the lives of women composers but the ways in which scholars write about those lives. Insofar as studies of women composers inherit intellectual frameworks of the German-speaking nineteenth century, they may unwittingly sustain elite, white, male, European values – may confirm aspects of the hegemony they seek to critique. This has implications for what Elizabeth Wood calls ‘compensatory history’, in which neglected women composers, rescued from obscurity, are included in the story of Western music history as conventionally told.¹⁰

In her chapter in Cecilia Reclaimed, Citron broaches this topic further. Women composers, she suggests, were not simply excluded from the nineteenth-century symphony but avoided that grandiose genre out of artistic preference. They tended to view composition as a craft – preserving a historically earlier notion of the composer – and were drawn to types of piece, such as the Lied, that were collaborative and multi-media. Why would they be interested in a genre concerned with the triumphant ego, an ‘exaggerated notion of self’, metaphysical notions of transcendence, and coded as male despite the mythology of absolute music? Paradoxically (and with notable exceptions) women’s agency as composers did not lie in overt assertions of autonomous authorial agency. This chimes with Citron’s earlier suggestion, in Gender and the Musical Canon, that ideals of the composer inherited from the German nineteenth century may simply not work for women composers. Already there she had recommended that musicologists develop flexible, ‘de-centered’, historically nuanced notions of what a composer is and does.¹¹

The ‘Rise’ of the Woman Composer

If deployed incautiously, the suppression hypothesis could over-determine interpretation, construing women’s composing as imperilled or rebellious agency. It is from there a short step to notions of progress, the history of women composers appearing as a march towards the perceived equality of the present. Such notions of agency and progress are not entirely misleading. The roughly seventy-year span of what is today called first-wave feminism – from 1848 to circa 1920 – witnessed a gradual expansion in the presence and public recognition of women composers writing for the concert hall and opera house, a development fostered by the conservatoire system and changes of attitude brought about by the women’s movement. Understandably, the period tends to be characterized in celebratory terms, as witnessing women composers’ move from domesticity and amateurism to professional status and the public sphere (for a nuanced approach to this, see Chapter 4). This progression is employed not only in histories of European art music. Adrienne Fried Block and Nancy Stewart trace the same trajectory in the USA. They begin in the early nineteenth century with the quintessential genres of genteel Victorian womanhood – parlour songs and dances for keyboard – quantities of which were often published anonymously, by ‘A Lady’. In the 1830s, the veil of anonymity began to lift, and by mid-century ‘more skillful and more professional’ composers emerged, their songs expanding beyond sentimental topics to matters of patriotism, abolition, and temperance. Around the turn of the century, Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1861–1946) hybridized parlour and art song idioms, selling ‘eight million copies and five million records’ with her hit ‘A Perfect Day’. Instrumental art music enters the story at the end of the nineteenth century with the works of Clara Kathleen Rogers, Helen Hopekirk, Margaret Ruthven Lang, and Amy Beach (1867–1944), members of the Boston-based Second New England School. In the authors’ words, they serve as the culmination of ‘the women’s movement and the long and slow rise of women as composers’.¹²

This is a heartening story, but it is also socially Darwinian, plotting the evolution of women composers from suppression in the home – and their practice of vernacular music – to enfranchisement and high art music. To celebrate women composers on these terms is ironic given the authors’ observation that ‘social Darwinism placed women lower on the evolutionary scale than men, incapable of creating high art’.¹³ An alternative approach might question the existence of such hierarchies and invite us to look more closely at those parlour songs and dances. As the authors hint, these sometimes addressed issues of national import and so reached beyond the private sphere of their performance. Elizabeth Morgan, for example, has explored women’s performance and composition of battle pieces for the piano during the American civil war, noting that such pieces, although performed at home, simulated the experience of being at the front and so blurred the boundaries of the private sphere.¹⁴ Catherine Hennessy writes of the international circulation of apparently homely compositions by women in the pages of magazines published in the USA. A case in point is ‘The Life-Road: A Marriage Song’ by Miriam Graham, which appeared alongside a piece by Edward Elgar in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1910. We need not wait for the Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform Margaret Ruthven Lang’s Dramatic Overture in 1893 to find music by women going public, in both the subject matter of its lyrics and its circulation in print.¹⁵ Rethinking hierarchies of musical idiom would make it difficult to sustain a narrative of progress that consigns some women’s music to a transitional stage.

There is another reason for caution about the historiographical plot of women’s movement from amateurism and domesticity to professionalism and the public sphere during the long nineteenth century. Block and Stewart hint at this in commenting that there had long been professional female musicians, although in earning a living they sacrificed genteel reputation and were considered a class apart.¹⁶ The story of emancipation, at least as told so far, pertains only to a subset of women composers, those who – although born into the bourgeoisie – went public with their music. They are relatively small in number – Reich mentions Teresa Correño, Luise Adolpha Le Beau, and Ethel Smyth.¹⁷ We might add Fanny Hensel, insofar as (in Julie Dunbar’s words) she ‘walked the public/private line’.¹⁸ As Reich observes, the majority of female composers of the nineteenth century remembered today as serious composers ‘competed, as the men did, for the honors and rewards of a musician’s life’.¹⁹ As artisans they had portfolio careers that encompassed teaching, reviewing, public solo performance, and composing. Their careers rarely ended with marriage and motherhood. Among these working, but not ‘working class’, women Reich numbers Luise Reichardt, Louise Farrenc, Louise Bertin, Léopoldine Blahetka, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, Ingeborg von Bronsart, Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, and Luise Adolpha Le Beau.

Reich’s analysis is rich in its implications. As told, the common historiographical plot from domesticity to the public concert hall excludes more women, and more kinds of music, than it celebrates. Beneath the surface, this story upholds the prestige of absolute music and compositional autonomy. These are lofty ideals, formerly bestowed upon great white men: why not let women composers bask belatedly in their glory? However, as Citron has suggested, more flexible concepts of the composer may prove more productive. An alternative history of women composers might be grounded less in autonomous works and more in work itself. Although sacrificing notions of unfettered creative agency, a history sensitive to composing as musical labour opens a wider field of meaning.²⁰

Composing as Women’s Work

Recent scholarship in women’s history reveals that before 1800 (and to some extent after) most women worked for pay either in their own homes, or other people’s homes, or in marketplaces, fields, or factories. They wove and sewed, cooked and cleaned, took in washing, laboured in fields, wielded pickaxes in open-face mines, sold goods from market stands, or did sex work. Those from prosperous families – of merchants, tradespeople, artisans, carriage- and musical instrument-builders – worked alongside their fathers, husbands, and brothers, even taking on the entire business in situations of bereavement or wartime conscription.²¹ As early as 1988, Linda Kerber argued that the mythology of unpaid female domesticity arose simply from a lack of research and from historians’ mistaken acceptance of a nineteenth-century ideal of ‘separate spheres’ as a transhistorical fact. ‘Separate spheres’, a discourse of the self-sacrificing woman at hearth and home, was a male-authored conduct ideal, aimed at elite women.²²

This newly uncovered history of work illuminates the history of women composers, in that many of the now canonical women composers active before 1800 were professional musicians. They worked for social elites as artisans – primarily as performers and teachers – and their composing was closely linked to those roles. From around 1600, music offered relatively respectable and sometimes well-remunerated work to women born into musical, literary, or theatrical clans. When the law, medicine, universities, military, and government were off-limits, women could embark upon careers in music as singers, instrumental soloists, teachers and (through the printing press) composers. Among their number were Maddalena Casulana, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Anna Bon, and Corona Schröter. Their music, far from being suppressed by contemporaries, was burnished with the prestige of their aristocratic patrons. However, the composers themselves were artisans, trained intensively in childhood. They frustrate any attempt to plot the history of women composers as merely one of progressive emancipation from domesticity.

By the later eighteenth century, music was like a Trojan horse. The accomplishment ideal made musical education all but obligatory for aristocratic and bourgeois women, but their need for instruction and for suitable music to play created a market for female teachers and composers. For example, in London, Maria Hester Park, née Reynolds, supported herself by teaching the well-to-do in their homes, before and after her marriage in 1787. Between 1785 and circa 1811, she published a stream of music for the drawing room, primarily sonatas for the piano. Her motivation was not limited to personal creative fulfilment: publication supplemented her family’s income, established her professional credentials, and provided students with suitable repertoire. Correspondingly, her music is less self-expressive than bound up with the sociability of the people who played it.²³ Musical work was also undertaken by some women as an alternative to marriage. Josepha Barbara Auernhammer, Viennese fortepianist, considered (though she did not take) this route, confiding a secret plan to her teacher, Mozart – who duly relayed it to Salzburg in a letter to his father (dated 27 June 1781). More often, though, it was economic necessity that drove educated women to take on work as music teachers and composers. From around 1800 in Britain, the socially liminal role of governess beckoned to educated women of precarious means. Kathryn Hughes observes that for women educated as ‘ladies’, teaching was far preferable to labouring alongside working-class women in shops and factories.²⁴ The story of the composing governess has not yet been told, beyond the vivid but fictional pages of Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814). For women seeking teaching work, the publication of a set of sonatas or songs could serve to advertise advanced musical skill, and it held out the implicit promise that their youthful pupils might be capable of the same feat. Perhaps it was in this spirit that Charlotte Wainewright (a composer currently unknown to musical history) published her Three Sonatas for the Harpsichord, Op. 1 (London: author, 1787). Her market positioning seems to have paid off. In a later work of moral pedagogy – Friendly Admonitions to Parents, and the Female Sex in General (1803) – she refers to her extensive experience in educating children, although not to being a mother.

The matriarchal tone of Wainewright’s tract was grounded in her unshakeable religious convictions. While she did not bring these to bear on her composing, other women did. Her contemporary Maria Barthélemon (née Young), channelled her Christian obligation towards charity into Three Hymns and Three Anthems, op. 3 (London: author, c. 1794). She published these pieces, scored for female voices and organ, with over 300 subscribers, as a fundraiser for the Asylum or House of Refuge for Female Orphans and the memorably named Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes. The music, richly illustrative of the psalm-based texts and awash with pious feelings, is perfect both to raise morals and to loosen purse strings.

The nexus of woman, music, and faith reaches much further back, forming a major branch of women’s history as composers. Across Europe, from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, Catholic convents were contexts of sacred, although not exclusively liturgical, composition. In Vienna around 1700, at the convent of St. Jakob auf der Hülben, Maria Anna von Raschenau (daughter of a court servant), whose work for the convent is discussed by Rebecca Cypess in Chapter 8, composed celebratory oratorios for the name day of St James. Much was at stake on these occasions, when the court visited en masse. In Janet Page’s appraisal, Raschenau (the recipient of a small, oft-defaulted stipend from the court) managed brilliantly to uphold the dwindling prestige of the convent; through her music the nuns were able ‘to fulfil the institution’s pious duty to God and emperor’.²⁵

In sixteenth-century northern Italy, convent music making was already a tourist attraction, its mystique enhanced by the performers’ invisibility. As discussed by Laurie Stras, musical specialists within cloistered religious communities, such as Leonora d’Este (1515–75) at Corpus Domini in Ferrara, assumed positions resembling those of chapel directors, their religious vocation inseparable from a quasi-professional musicianship. Their composing, often anonymous, probably accounts for a proportion of the extant unattributed repertory of sacred polyphony from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stras makes a persuasive case for Suor Leonora’s composition of Musica quinque vocum (Venice: Scotto, 1543), a collection of twenty-three voci pari motets (a term indicating that the voices share the same pitch range), rich in allusion to Leonora’s Ferrarese and Clarissan context (the latter term referring to the Order of St Clare). While convent life was no musical utopia: nuns’ singing, although occasioning civic pride, was also subject to bishopric crack-down,²⁶ composing seemed to pass under the radar, not subject to any greater censure than convent music as a whole. The religious obligation to perform the liturgy, and the spiritual rapport between nuns, music, and the heavenly choir, were profoundly empowering.

Conclusion

We have arrived at a seemingly contradictory position regarding the history of women composers. On the one hand, they were excluded and trivialized; on the other hand, they participated meaningfully and enjoyed success. It could be that both perspectives are correct, and that the landscape of possibility for women to compose varied, according to time and place. Social position, or class, might be an incentive for one musical woman to compose and an obstacle for her equally gifted friend. For some women composers, what we regard as suppression and empowerment were not always opposites: composing could flourish in spaces of apparent confinement, while attempts at suppression inspired resistance and marshalled resolve.

There is another explanation. The exclusion of women composers from official and pedagogic historical narratives – from surveys of the ‘history of Western art music’ – has over-determined our sense of women’s activities as composers in the past. There is a difference in kind between inequality of opportunity on the ground and systematic elimination from published history. In the latter regard, we need to know more about those composers neglected by history. Aaron Cohen’s Encyclopaedia of Women Composers contains some 6000 composers; RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) online gives sources of published and manuscript music for around 1000 women – how many of these have a secondary literature?²⁷ Another problem is music history itself, when it takes the form of chronological grand narratives. The genre has a long, complex intellectual history, as Warren Dwight Allen explored in his erudite Philosophies of Music History (1939/1962).²⁸ Yet, as Solie notes, even critique of historiography can leave conventional hierarchies intact.²⁹ Conventionally, music-historical narratives do not simply omit women composers but rather they are constituted by that omission. The ‘great man’ of music history is not just a symptom of patriarchal thought, he is a historiographical device – his creativity explains historical change, his influence accounts for the forms that music takes at any one time. Allen, though otherwise gender-blind, comes close to this in observing that ‘the great-man theory [of music history] will never be entirely superseded … [because] there are inexplicable factors in genius which elude analysis’.³⁰

Tokenistic inclusion of women composers tends to confirm the point. In Christopher Gibbs’s redaction of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music as a single-volume textbook, the syllabic setting of ‘Erlkönig’ by Corona Schröter (1751–1802) stands as the sole example of female composing between Barbara Strozzi (1619–77) and Fanny Hensel. This is an unfortunate choice. As Taruskin and Gibbs are aware, ‘Erlkönig’ is Schröter’s evocation of popular or traditional song and was composed as a stage song for the Singspiel Die Fischerin (The Fisherwoman). As part of her work as a singer-actress at the court of Anna Amalia, Dower Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, it fell to Schröter to provide musical supplements to lyrics selected from a collection of Volkslieder, compiled by the court poet Herder. With her ‘Erlkönig’, Schröter sought to compose a song that did not sound composed. Though clearly well intentioned, this inclusion is suppression by another name. It sets up the Schubertian revolution in the Lied at Schröter’s expense. Elsewhere, Thomas Bauman, writing of the development of German opera, assumes that in Die Fischerin Goethe was held back from exploring continuous, opera buffa-inspired, music drama by Schröter’s compositional limitations. In both cases, there is a fundamental dissonance between ‘the history of Western music’ and the figure of the female composer. Notions of development, progress, genius, and greatness continue to require female suppression in even our most prestigious historical surveys.³¹

In examining the historiography of women composers, I have made some suggestions for approaching this still-emerging discourse. I have noticed a bourgeois narrative of women’s emergence from domesticity into the public sphere that excludes all those women composers (forming the vast majority) whose artisanal backgrounds, or economic need, necessitated that they worked for a living. Seeking a more inclusive historiography, I have suggested an approach anchored in women’s work. As part of this, we might bring notions of ‘the composer’ into the domain of music-historical research and apply our curiosity even more to women’s occasions and motivations for composing.