Amidst debates of the early 1880s about the status of women in music, the English organist and scholar Stephen S. Stratton delivered a self-avowed ‘polemical’ paper at the 7 May 1883 meeting of the Musical Association.¹ Entitled ‘Woman in Relation to Musical Art’, the talk included a list of women composers ‘drawn from many sources’ and compiled, he said, ‘as evidence that women have been engaged in composition for a longer period of time, and in more branches of the art, than is generally supposed’. Stratton’s ‘list’ consists in 389 names of mostly verifiable historical women dating back to the trobairitz Beatrix, Countess of Dia (twelfth century), each annotated with an approximate date of birth and the genres in which they had composed.² Where Stratton unearthed this remarkable trove of information he does not say, although as co-author of the then forthcoming British Musical Biography (1897), he may well have been culling pre-existing reference works for information.³

Fast forward to March 2015. Jessy McCabe, a seventeen-year-old English school student, launched an online petition seeking a change in the national curriculum to include ‘just one woman’ among the sixty-three male composers on the existing A-level syllabus for music.⁴ The largely positive response to her petition met with some media backlash.⁵ A male author rating music by some of the syllabus contenders, Clara Schumann (Piano Concerto: ‘within 10 seconds we know it’s a dud’) and Fanny Hensel (Sonata in G minor: ‘it’s bloody awful’), opined that ‘Neither would have been recorded had they been written by a man.’⁶ Another author, a ‘woman and a feminist’, felt McCabe’s petition premature since ‘far too few women composers [existed] in the past to warrant attention’.⁷ These responses encapsulate two obdurate music historical myths that persist with fierce tenacity to this day: first, there weren’t (m)any historical women composers, and secondly, there were historical women composers but their music lacks ‘genius’, and is hence unworthy of attention.

While the proposals of both Stratton and McCabe – spanning some 130 years – exemplify laudable initiatives towards gendering ‘the canon’ (that is, the vaunted body of ‘great’ musical works that has excluded women), they might also be read as cautionary tales about the fraught reception history of women composers.⁸ Like the outcry elicited by McCabe’s petition, Stratton’s proposal drew sharp criticism from (all but one of) the men in attendance, their objections indistinguishable from those in 2015.⁹ To dwell on misogynous shibboleths of the past that endure into the twenty-first century obscures a more intriguing question. How did Stratton’s list of 389 women composers in 1883 plummet to zero – not a single one on the syllabus – 130 years later? Where did these women disappear to in the course of the twentieth century?

The Transience of Female Musical Fame

A half century ago, Germaine Greer highlighted ‘the phenomenon of the transience of female literary fame’ whereby some women writers celebrated during their own lifetimes seemed ‘to vanish without a trace from the records of posterity’.¹⁰ Elaine Showalter noted its serious implications: ‘Thus each generation of women writers has found itself, in a sense, without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew.’¹¹ Examples of the phenomenon in the history of art permeate Greer’s The Obstacle Race (1979), whose opening describes the curators of a ‘pioneering’ 1976 exhibition of women artists who, unaware that a Paris exhibition seventy years earlier had covered the same ground, ‘had to start virtually from scratch’.¹² As with their literary and artistic counterparts, women composers manifest a ‘transience of female musical fame’, fading from the historical record on their deaths until their ‘rediscovery’ generations later.¹³ My aim in this chapter is to offer some exploratory thoughts on the transient fame of women composers, to consider the social, historical, and ideological discourses that contribute to it, and to propose strategies for ending the recurrent cycles of amnesia that have consigned the music of women (and other identity groups subordinated by race, class, and sexuality) to oblivion.

Creative Women and the Evanescence of Posthumous Renown

The disappearance of women from all spheres of creative and intellectual endeavour dates from the beginning of recorded history. In a survey of 1,000 years of Bible criticism by women, the historian Gerda Lerner demonstrated ‘the endless repetition of effort, the constant reinventing of the wheel’ by women unaware of their predecessors:

Studies of artistic reputation, such as the classic prosopographical research of Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang on British female etchers, have noted several criteria that tend to foster the likelihood of posthumous renown: 1. active self-promotion and self-curation during the artist’s lifetime; 2. biological heirs and/or artistic progeny with a stake in preserving the artist’s legacy; 3. proximity to networks of wealth, fame, and influence; and 4. retrospective interest in individuals conforming to emergent cultural/political identities (notably, gender, race, class, and sexuality).¹⁵ A fuller assessment of how these and other factors have impacted on the reputations of women composers over time must await another occasion, but some general observations can be made.

1. 1. ‘Self-promotion’ often worked to the detriment of women constrained by prevailing societal expectations of feminine propriety and modesty. Those who dared to attract a reputation through publication risked campaigns of innuendo and calumny.¹⁶ Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), for example, dedicated her Opus 1 to a female patron ‘so that, under a cloak of gold it may rest secure against the lightning bolts of slander prepared for it’.¹⁷ Corona Schröter (1751–1802) equated publication of her music with promiscuity: ‘A certain feeling toward propriety and morality is stamped upon our sex … how can I present this, my musical work, to the public with anything other than timidity?’¹⁸ Two hundred years earlier, the first named woman in the history of music to appear in print, Maddalena Casulana (c. 1540–90), betrayed similar expectations of cultural disapprobation in the dedication of her first book of madrigals (1568) to Isabella de’ Medici Orsina: she aspired ‘to show the world the vain error of men, who so much believe themselves to be the masters of the highest gifts of the intellect, that they think those gifts cannot be shared equally by women.’¹⁹

2. 2. Casulana’s publications appeared amidst what I have called ‘an evolving biopolitics of musical genealogy’ in early modern Europe, in which male composers had begun acknowledging and paying public homage to their teachers as metaphorical fathers.²⁰ In so doing, they established their creative pedigrees and self-consciously situated themselves within a music historical continuum – a lineage of ‘good teachers and fathers’.²¹ Women, bereft of their own histories, cannot fail to have noticed their exclusion from these discourses of creative genealogy linking generation after generation of musical fathers and sons. ‘Their questionable creative paternity’ rendered them ‘“illegitimate children”, as it were, of music history.’²² Whether lacking (or outliving) biological heirs and/or musical progeny with a stake in preserving their creative legacy, another criterion for achieving lasting renown often eluded women composers.

3. 3. Access to relational networks of cultural power and influence explains in part the posthumous survival of women composers whose reputations have by now become common coin, Clara Schumann (1819–96) and Fanny Hensel (1805–47) above all. These wives, sisters, and other relatives of famous male composers – ‘women of’ – are often stigmatized as beneficiaries of undue reputational and creative advantage with respect to others who lacked such relationships. It is worth bearing in mind, though, that social conventions have historically fallen disproportionately upon women – bearing, supporting, and caring for children, husbands, or ageing parents – and have often worked to the detriment of their creative legacies. Even the extraordinarily well-connected Schumann, beset with severe economic challenges while Robert was in the asylum, stopped composing at age thirty-six to concertize internationally in support of their eight children.

4. 4. Retrospective interest in individuals conforming to emergent cultural and political identities accounts for the greater proportion of historical recovery work on women and other composers of minority status. It is no mere happenstance that the work of Stratton and others in the 1880s arose in the context of first-wave feminist activism. Nearly a century later, the Civil Rights and second-wave feminist movements gave rise to the advent and rapid proliferation of Women’s Studies programmes in American universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s.²³ Academics began questioning time-honoured androcentric assumptions, researching historical women in every sphere of creative endeavour, writing their own histories, and above all, reclaiming and rediscovering the creative pasts that had been ignored, overlooked, marginalized, trivialized, or obliterated.²⁴ As Ruth Solie observed, though, ‘quick upon the heels of one’s initial glee at these discoveries comes the uncomfortable awareness that intentional acts of one sort or another have occurred to consign these women to historical limbo’.²⁵

One ‘uncomfortable awareness’ of ‘intentional acts’ involved the speciousness of androcentric assertions about musical quality. Another awareness dawned that male composers were canonized because the intentional acts of individual scholars and critics rested on arbitrary aesthetic hierarchies and personal preferences.²⁶ Systematic investigation of the entries on women composers in historical periodicals and standard music reference works, comparable to the regression analyses of Tuchman and Fortin on British women writers in the Dictionary of National Biography, would doubtless prove enlightening to those inclined to underestimate the power of reviewers of the past to influence our understanding of the present.²⁷

The Discourse of the Exceptional Woman

This brings us to the most insidious reason women composers are ‘forgotten’: a timeworn critical discourse that sees music as an ‘all male affair’ and women as lacking musical genius and hence incapable of creative production.²⁸ Where evidence to the contrary proved undeniable, women acclaimed for their work were subjected to ‘the discourse of the exceptional woman’ that proves the rule of female creative incompetence.²⁹ Owing to their aberrance, these exceptions could, as Coventry Patmore (1851) wrote of their literary counterparts, be safely ignored: ‘There certainly have been cases of women possessed of the properly masculine power of writing books, but these cases are all so truly and obviously exceptional … that we may overlook them without the least prejudice to the soundness of our doctrine.’³⁰

An early feminist consciousness of the discursive hegemony of male writers appears already in the work of medieval poet Christine de Pizan (1364–1431) whose texts were set to music by fifteenth-century male composers: ‘if women had written these books, I know full well the subject would have been handled differently’.³¹ Eighteenth-century female writers often earned chivalrous ‘spurious praise’, as Greer labelled it, through a ‘critical double standard’ for characteristics that would be deemed risible in men: ‘purity of sentiment, delicacy, piety, and womanliness’ (and execrated for an absence thereof).³² Women composers in late eighteenth-century northern Germany were celebrated for similar aesthetic criteria, ‘delicacy’ above all. For a brief time, though, as Matthew Head observed, this encouraging ‘feminocentric’ creative environment gave rise to no fewer than fifty women composers, including the remarkable Sophie Westenholz, court Kapellmeister in Ludwigslust.³³

After 1800, however, as ever greater numbers of women composers began to publish, assessments of their music assume a formulaic critical tactic: isolate the especially gifted woman; juxtapose her accomplishments with an anonymous mob of female musical mediocrities (like Hawthorne’s ‘damned mobs of scribbling women’); and bestow the highest compliment any woman could expect – ‘she composes like a man’. A classic formulation can be seen in the report (1830) of Scottish composer, John Thomson, concerning Fanny Mendelssohn:

As with myths of musical genius, ‘these formulations then become conventional wisdom and as such tend to go unchallenged, thereby eliminating competing discourses’.³⁵ Such commentaries recur for the next century. The critic Victorin Joncières labelled the Irish–French composer Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) ‘an exception to the rule. Her music has a vigor, a virility, an enthusiasm that deserve better than the banal praise that is ordinarily given to women composers.’³⁶ The German composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850–1927) garnered attention in pejorative juxtaposition with ‘the work of such Blaustrümpfe [bluestockings] who currently [are found] by the hundreds in our conservatories’; she was hailed as a ‘laudable exception among women’ who ‘composes like a man’.³⁷ Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), whose songs were thought to ‘breathe the very fire of genius’, was said to be ‘lifted … from the mob’ of female mediocrities.³⁸ Her compatriot Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), the sole female member of Les Six, though saluted ‘as a charming exception’ by her colleague Jean Cocteau,³⁹ provoked a vituperative diatribe from Cecil Gray (1927), immortalized for posterity in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929):

The identical adjective reverberated sixty years later in the sweeping denunciation of Fanny Hensel by Edward Rothstein, music critic of the New York Times (1991): ‘No matter how much her talent was left undeveloped, her achievement was negligible.’⁴¹ Nor do such misogynous attitudes remain relics of the past: a Google doodle celebrating Hensel’s birthday on 14 November 2021 triggered a Twitter rant from a male writer who proclaimed her ‘the definition of mediocrity’, ‘at best 12th rate’, and ‘her music justly forgotten’.⁴²

While male critics dominated the musical press well into the twentieth century, recent research has drawn attention to the burgeoning French, German, and English feminist press from 1880 to 1930, targeted at women readers and ranging politically from radical feminist to moderate to working class/populist. Music, seen as extraneous to the first-wave feminist activist agenda, was rarely discussed in radical outlets. The moderate and populist press featured women composers on occasion; but women critics, complicit in their own oppression, tended to echo the prevailing androcentric narrative of male genius, portraying ‘female creative brilliance … as exceptional to women’s general musical mediocrity’.⁴³ Philippa Senlac, for example, voiced equivocal optimism while pandering to conventional male wisdom in her evaluation of Ethel Smyth (1858–1944): ‘the contention of men that she is a brilliant exception has a sufficient critical germ of truth in it to rouse women’s pride to make the exception less rare’.⁴⁴

Whatever the gender of their authors, critical evaluations of women composers time and again expose the confirmation bias of female creative ineptitude. Thus an anonymous critic in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1811), reviewing publications of the fifteen-year-old Hélène Liebmann (1795–1869), ‘was carried away so far beyond his expectations’ that he had to keep flipping back to the title page to confirm that the composer was indeed a woman.⁴⁵ More than a century later, Charles Seeger, a founding member of the American Musicological Society, admitted similar bias when he faced the prospect of taking on Ruth Crawford as a student:

That Seeger attributed his negative opinion of women composers to their absence from histories of music highlights the dire intellectual stakes of their exclusion. Until recently, the standard music textbooks used in most American colleges and universities were as exclusionary of women as the British National Curriculum, thus perpetuating the hoary misconceptions encountered at the outset: ‘Women composers don’t exist. They’re not in the textbooks/they’re not on the Syllabus. The music of the rare exception is “negligible”.’⁴⁷

Musicology, Feminist Criticism, and Postmodern Theory: A Retrospective View

Musicology has never fully engaged with the remarkable critical agendas of second-wave feminism witnessed in the disciplines of art history and literary studies, that is, an assessment of women composers from the theoretically informed historical perspectives of gender, patriarchy, power, and ideology.⁴⁸ That the magisterial anthology Women Making Music (1986), with fifteen ground-breaking contributions from leading musicologists, was never reviewed in JAMS speaks volumes.⁴⁹ This oversight may be owed in part to the proximate publication of Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music (1985) which, while raising the alarm at the absence of feminist criticism in music, relegated composer studies and edition-making to an outmoded, ‘positivist’, second-rate (‘low-level’) status within the then so-called New Musicology (now ‘Critical Musicology’).⁵⁰ Even Susan McClary, author of the enormously influential Feminine Endings (1991), proclaimed: ‘Within the last two generations, it has finally become possible for relatively large numbers of women to enter seriously into training as composers’,⁵¹ echoing the words of Fanny Morris Smith nearly a century earlier (1901): ‘The first practical entrance of women into music as composers has been within the last twenty-five years.’⁵² (Both were wrong.) Like the radical feminists of the first wave, McClary, too, sidelined historical women composers, leading her to privilege popular female musicians of the late 1960s and beyond as ‘models for serious women musicians’ to emulate.⁵³

As I observed at the time, ‘[T]he vigorous critique of allegedly “positivist” scholarship became fashionable to a (largely male) critical elite just around the time that a whole generation of feminist musicologists had uncovered and brought to light a rich hidden history of women composers.’⁵⁴ I also warned of the theoretical conundrum facing a discipline torn between historical musicology that centres its work on women and postmodern theory that dismisses such work as ‘positivist’, ‘low-level’, and dépassé: ‘we must insist intractably on a feminist musicology that welcomes a plurality of diverse and eclectic critical approaches’.⁵⁵

Meanwhile, younger scholars of the mid-late 1990s, keen to position themselves on the cutting edge of the discipline, jumped on the newly fashionable ‘constructions of gender in the (traditional male) canon’ bandwagon. One (now senior) scholar recalled colleagues reminding him ‘that “gender and sexuality” were hotter themes than “women composers”’ and noted that the ‘stigma’ once surrounding their music had begun to extend to research about them.⁵⁶ By 2010, Sally Macarthur was lamenting the failed promise of work on women: ‘what seemed like a future full of hope in 1993 is, perhaps, a shattered dream, for it seems … that feminist research on women’s classical music has all but disappeared’.⁵⁷ In 2012, Judith Tick, co-editor of the pioneering Women Making Music, diagnosed the situation in retrospect:

Indeed, empirical studies conducted by Macarthur and others (2017) documented a declining number of texts on women in music from 1995 to 2015 and its direct correlation with a diminishing number of performances of music by women during the same period.⁵⁹ The proliferation of individual composer monographs since 2006 would modify this view, but some of them manifest the ‘add women and stir’ approach of the 1970s and 1980s,⁶⁰ that is, treating the history of women as if they were men, while overlooking a half-century of feminist thought relevant to their gendered subjects.⁶¹ Prosopographical studies that investigate shared characteristics of groups of women composers through a collective study of their lives remain exceptions.⁶² Entire sub-fields, such as early music, eighteenth-century studies, and music theory, above all, have remained immune if not recalcitrant to historical concepts of gender, race, class, and sexuality.⁶³

Ending the Cycles of Transience

The media frenzy surrounding Jessy McCabe’s 2015 successful campaign for a woman composer on the A-level syllabus drew worldwide attention to the ongoing exclusion of women composers in the twenty-first century.⁶⁴ As if on cue, yet another sea change, like those spawned by earlier feminist activisms of the 1880s and 1970s, is now in progress.⁶⁵ Women composers, it seems, have at last become a ‘hot topic’ in musicology. An explosion of interest from younger scholars and performers active on social media has created a critical mass of passionate advocates enhancing the public visibility of historical women composers and championing living women composers as well. A veritable cottage industry of handbooks, companions, conference proceedings, and essay collections, recently published or imminently forthcoming, has been devoted to Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, Amy Beach (1867–1944), Fanny Hensel, and Florence Price (1899–1952).

And yet, many seem unaware of the hard-won scholarship, undertaken without fanfare in less receptive times, of their predecessors.⁶⁶ Needless ‘duplication of effort’ manifests itself anew in forthcoming monographs on women for whom recent authoritative tomes exist, while lesser known but deserving candidates languish in obscurity. This is owed in part to the much-touted and misguided scholarly fashion, rampant on social media, of ignoring bibliographical sources more than ten or so years ‘old’, as if to stamp products of the life of the mind with a commercial ‘use by’ date.⁶⁷ As Griselda Pollock observed in the discipline of Art History, ‘the idea of the new creates what then becomes the old … long before any serious understanding of the impact, resonance, or significance of any feminist intervention so far has been achieved’. Ignoring the founding work on women composers by intellectual forebears replicates the cycle of transience that has consigned their music to the dustbin. Instead, we might do well to follow Pollock and explore ‘the rich settlements of thought and critical practices produced by the exciting developments in both [music] history and [music] in the last half century’.⁶⁸

Ultimately, like female writers and artists, women composers will be remembered not as names in a list but rather by the promulgation, performance, and study of their surviving artefacts: that is, their music, which must be published in critically edited scores to survive permanently. Apart from Louise Farrenc (1804–75),⁶⁹ not a single complete works critical edition exists for even the best known women composers (Schumann, Hensel, Smyth), let alone those less well known but once deemed worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with their male contemporaries.⁷⁰

Because they were unpublished, important musical landmarks by women composers have been ‘lost’ – the orchestral works of Cornélie van Oosterzee (1863–1943), performed by Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic⁷¹ – or destroyed (often by the composers themselves), such as the Dramatic Overture, Op.12, by Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867–1972), the first work by a woman performed by a major symphony orchestra (Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1893).⁷² Victims of their own longevity, both women faded into obscurity towards the end of their lives, supplanted by younger, more fashionable composers.⁷³ And these are far from the only casualties: myriad titles of ‘lost’ music appear in the work lists of Barbara Strozzi, Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759–1824), Alma Mahler (1879–1964), Louise Bertin (1805–77), Chaminade, and many others.

Perhaps the time has come to harness the energy and exuberance of this historically unprecedented moment and create monuments of music by women composers that will enshrine their renown for posterity. More than ever before, it is now possible to ‘build on the shoulders of giants’ – music-historical foremothers (and forefathers as well) – who laid the foundation for further study. Complacency is not an option if we are to end the perpetual cycles of historical forgetting and remembering – the transience of female musical fame. For even in this auspicious climate, a woman who ranks among the ‘most famous’ of historical female composers is still confused (as is her portrait) with her brother’s wife: ‘That musicians of the twenty-first century cannot recognize Fanny Hensel suggests how far she and her music still have to go to achieve a place in our musical world.’⁷⁴

‘I don’t think you intend to be discouraging in your book. I think you have merely overlooked those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population.’¹

The words of Reta, in Carol Shields’s Unless, are applicable to the analysis of women composers’ works. Among areas forming a musical canon, the sub-discipline of musical analysis has only recently displayed awareness of the attention to women composers and their music that has taken root in the practice and productions of musicology over the past few decades. Yet at the time from the 1980s onwards when literature on women composers began to present a significant challenge to the pedagogical canon, a new wave of interest in analysis was sparking the publication of textbooks and journals that could have offered an opportunity to include women’s works as valid subjects for analytical interpretation.²

In the 1990s, Marcia Citron declared: ‘Given the makeup of the current canon, I believe it is especially vital to place women’s works into analytical discourse’.³ This prefaced Citron’s analysis of the first movement of Cécile Chaminade’s Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 21 (1895) with reference to nineteenth-century ‘gendered’ sonata form theory. Citron’s suggestion that Chaminade’s sonata movement ‘may reconceptualise the ideologies of masculine and feminine as encoded in gendered readings of sonata form’, signalled her feminist approach. While Citron acknowledged that an interrogation of gendered sonata form could be equally applicable to music composed by men, the application of this approach to women’s music has special significance. The status of the ‘feminine’ second theme in relation to the ‘masculine’ first theme, entrenched in nineteenth-century sonata theory, invites consideration of how far women composers might subvert its theoretical formulation in their works.⁴

Among notions clinging to the evaluation of women’s works, and underlying the lack of serious attention to them, are assumptions of superficial attractiveness rather than depth. These are belied by analytical findings such as emerge from studying Fanny Hensel’s setting of ‘Der Abendstern’, H-U 70 (1823): see Example 2.1. Motif ‘x’, the descent from 3̂ to 1̂, appears in an intricate variety of forms. (Its use as a pervasive motif with programmatic intent is familiar in horn-call guise from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E flat major, Op. 81a, ‘Les Adieux’.) Hensel could have learned her motivic technique from other Lied repertoire, including Schubert’s songs; additionally, she could have absorbed it from the motivic intensity in Bach’s chorale harmonizations, which she studied and performed. It became a personal ‘fingerprint’ of her style. The closely woven fabric it creates in ‘Der Abendstern’ bespeaks an integrity and a profundity in her music beyond purely decorative surface or simple ‘word-painting’, pleasing though the effect of those can be.

Example 2.1 Fanny Hensel, ‘Der Abendstern’ (Mailáth), H-U 70, bars 1–15

If feminism is, as Ruth Solie put it, ‘the commitment to the well-being of women and to the importance of their creative participation in culture and history’, then focusing on women’s music as the object of close analytical scrutiny is a feminist act, whatever analytical approach is involved.⁵ In what follows, I explore some specific approaches within that broader category, by means of four case-studies from among published analyses of women’s works. Two feature solo piano music: Fanny Hensel’s Piano Sonata in G minor, discussed by Matthew Head, and Amy Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, Op. 15 no. 2, analysed by Edward D. Latham. The third is from the Lied repertoire: Kadja Grönke’s study of Alma Mahler’s ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’, and the fourth focuses on chamber music, in Liane Curtis’s analysis of the first movement from the Sonata for Viola and Piano by Rebecca Clarke.⁶ Collectively they raise issues sparked by the emergence of women composers, including the value of comparison with their male contemporaries, the ramifications of their choice of genre, and the significance of the contexts that not only influenced their compositional aspirations but also might inform our analytical readings of their music.

Genre is prominent in both the first case-study, where Matthew Head assesses the status of the sonata genre in Hensel’s time in relation to gender, and the second, apropos Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, a piece based on a poetic source, thus belonging to programmatic music. A comparative approach is central to Grönke’s reading of the differing attitudes to love reflected in Lieder by Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler. Contextual information constitutes a special feature of the analytical methods adopted by Liane Curtis regarding Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata movement. Grönke on Schindler, and Curtis on Clarke, particularly espouse novel approaches to analysis inspired by their choice of subject.

We can sense in these readings a flexibility with regard to analytical method, eschewing a narrowly formalist approach in favour of an empathetic effort to discern what, and how, the composers sought to communicate through their music. In all four cases, the composers’ biographical contexts, and their aims (expressed or inferred), feature alongside discussion of their compositional technique, and inform that discussion.

Fanny Hensel: Sonata for Piano Solo in G Minor, H-U 394 (Autumn 1843)

The structure underpinning Matthew Head’s analysis of Hensel’s sonata resembles a frame around a landscape painting. Head views the two prime materials of his framework, gender and genre, in the context of Hensel’s life and German musical culture in the 1840s. The year spent in Italy with her husband and son (1839–40), was for Hensel a time of increased confidence in her compositional abilities. She now harboured professional aspirations. Applying for membership of a learned society in a letter of 24 November 1843 to the family friend and singing teacher Frank Hauser, she submitted a work ‘in support of what she described as a “daring” application’.⁷ That work, Head suggests, may have been the G minor Sonata.

As Head notes, the 1840s was a time of renewal for the genre: ‘No sooner was the trope of the sonata’s decline in place, than critics noted signs of revival’.⁸ The combination of the challenge this represented, and Hensel’s impulse towards professional status, produced in her G minor Sonata, one of her few large-scale compositions, a substantial result that may have felt hard-won. Entering into sonata territory in the nineteenth century could engender for women composers a feeling of trespassing on quasi-sacred ground. As Head observes, with Hensel’s G minor Piano Sonata, ‘she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany’ with mixed feelings, ‘alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area’.⁹

Conveying the impact of the deprecatory messages routinely directed at aspiring women composers, Hensel, writing to her brother, compared his handling of Beethoven’s influence with her own: ‘I’ve reflected how I … came to write pieces in a tender style. I believe it derives from the fact that we were young during Beethoven’s last years and absorbed his style to a considerable degree … You’ve progressed beyond it in your composing, and I’ve remained stuck in it.’¹⁰ I would suggest, however, that the Beethovenian qualities of her opening gesture in her G minor Sonata resemble Franz Schubert’s procedure in his C minor Piano Sonata, D 958 (1828), whereby the unmistakable echo of Beethoven at the start (specifically the theme of Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, WOO80) throws into relief the Schubertian qualities of what follows. Hensel’s similarly confident opening gambit in her sonata recalls Beethoven’s in his last piano sonata, Op. 111 in C minor; she places a comparable emphasis on diminished sevenths deployed to dramatic effect.

Among the overarching features Head identifies in Hensel’s sonata is its topical zone: he finds the ‘Scottish’ style in evidence throughout the work, forming one of the many links between the music of the siblings. Hensel adopts the key of Felix’s ‘Hebrides’ overture, B minor, for her sonata Scherzo, lending an exotic aspect to the inter-movement key scheme (predicted in the first movement). Within individual movements, she treats key imaginatively. The first movement’s second theme, rather than mild and passive in character, as would conform to socially constructed notions of femininity, is urgent and active. As Head notes, Hensel accords ‘perceptual primacy’ to the second theme in the recapitulation, where, in conventional feminist readings, it would be suppressed, relegated to the tonic key reasserted by the first theme. In Hensel’s sonata movement, the second theme ‘returns at the moment of harmonic recapitulation (in place of the primary theme)’; after serving as closing idea to the recapitulation, it ‘haunts the coda as if it were the movement’s idée fixe’. In its closing role prior to the coda it ‘wistfully mixes G major and minor with the Neapolitan’, suggesting that the theme’s ‘picturesque wandering could carry on unendingly’.¹¹

The work’s topical associations, reflecting the prominent role of Scotland in Romantic artistic culture, allied to the freedom with which Hensel roams the tonal landscape, contribute to the project of renewal. The music, housed in the four-movement ‘symphonic’ form strongly associated with the sonata after Beethoven, derives further energy from a variety of sources, including dance topics. Hensel’s sonata structure features the kinds of inter-movement connections, which she forges both directly and more discretely, characteristic of Romantic formal experimentation. Symphonic and programmatic connotations in her textural choices range from vigorous orchestral-style tremolo in the first movement’s opening bars, to otherworldly tremolo in the Scherzo’s untitled trio, evoking Ossian’s harp – that Romantic trope representing ‘the single most persistent image of Scots music in the Teutonic imagination’.¹² Altogether the work, in Head’s words, ‘disrupt[s] the assumption that a woman was not capable of such high-powered dialectical authorship’.¹³

Amy Beach: ‘Phantoms’, Op. 15 no. 2 (1892)

Edward Latham’s analytical essay on Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, together with the biographical sketch that prefaces it, combine to introduce the composer and her work with a series of pronouncements establishing her status before the analysis unfolds. The biographical sketch begins by presenting Beach (then Amy Marcy Cheney) as ‘unquestionably a musical genius, composing lengthy, two-hand piano waltzes by the age of five’, attracting attention as a performer at the age of seven, and achieving publication of her work by the age of sixteen. After noting the success of ‘her first large-scale work’, the Mass in E flat, Op. 5 (1892), which led to important commissions, it singles out her ‘Gaelic’ Symphony, Op. 32. This made her, at the age of twenty-nine, ‘the first American woman to compose a symphony’, prompting the Boston composer George Whitfield Chadwick to declare her entitled to the epithet ‘one of the boys’.¹⁴ Latham begins his analysis with the declaration that, ‘with “Phantoms,” … the groundbreaking American composer stakes her claim for the consideration of her music alongside the works of nineteenth-century icons such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Frédéric Chopin’.¹⁵ (This statement invites debate that is beyond the scope of the present chapter.) While the grouping of Beach among other composers continues to feature in the first few pages of his analysis, Latham’s focus thereafter is largely on the intensive study of her compositional processes in ‘Phantoms’.

Beach’s piece derives its inspiration from the line of poetry by Victor Hugo quoted beneath its title: ‘Toutes fragiles fleurs, sitôt mortes que nées’ (Such fragile flowers, dead as soon as they are born.)¹⁶ In the course of his analysis, Latham illuminates the subtle programmatic effects Beach creates musically. His analysis has the effect of inviting the reader to focus closely (as he does) on the intricacies of the piece. He shows how Beach exploits a variety of parameters in the music to paint the evanescence of Hugo’s phantasmal flowers. Her techniques include the fashioning of a melody that is ‘indeed fragile, floating … over inverted augmented-sixth chords, extended dominant ninth and thirteenth chords and the like, and including not one but two gaps in its descent from 5̂ to the tonic’; and the manipulation of ‘standard phrase types’ to accentuate ‘the transient nature of her “Phantoms”’.¹⁷ Among the analytical methods he applies to the piece, which include Schenkerian theory, he examines the form and period structure of “Phantoms”, showing how ‘a tightly woven web of keys is deployed’. In the distinctively fashioned phrase-structure of the recurrent ‘A’ section he finds an arc from start to finish, privileging harmonies ‘suspended halfway between tonic and dominant’, and helping to underline the unstable state of the phantasmal flowers that ‘become fragile “as soon as they are born”’.¹⁸ He notes the unusual hovering towards the mediant key, C sharp minor, at the end of every 8-bar antecedent unit of the phrase-structure. This, coupled with the effect of the consequent’s starting each time on the ambiguous augmented sixth chord with which the piece began (and which Beach placed in a meaningfully unstable choice of inversion, rather than the standard root position), creates a harmonic subtlety evoking a realm other than that of the straightforward ‘call-and-response’ possibly suggested by the melodic repetition.

In the light of Latham’s commentary, we might wonder if Beach took inspiration also from the experimental harmonic language developed by Chopin, for example, in his mazurkas. Her ‘Phantoms’, too, is a dance-piece: it speaks the language of ballroom waltz, here imagined in particularly delicate formation. The coupling of dance and fantasy forms a powerful trope in nineteenth-century music: Berlioz’s ball scene in the Symphonie fantastique, and Schubert’s ‘Frühlingstraum’ (Dream of Spring) and ‘Täuschung’ (Illusion) in his Winterreise cycle come to mind. We might regard song, also, as implicated in ‘Phantoms’, as is suggested indirectly through Latham’s analysis. His demonstration of the ways that the various layers in the musical fabric of Beach’s ‘Phantoms’ are involved in representing the poetic idea resembles strategies used in the analysis of song, with reference to text–music relationships.

Latham implicitly makes the case for women composers’ works not only challenging the canon but also potentially unsettling hierarchies of genre linked to the canon, with the shifting ideas of value accorded to miniature versus more extended forms, absolute versus programmatic music, and instrumental music versus song, during the nineteenth century. It proves possible to link the apparently disparate approaches shown in the introductory biographical section and the central analytical argument of Latham’s essay. By illuminating the methods employed in ‘Phantoms’, Latham alerts us to the qualities that make Beach’s miniature work an example of ‘multum in parvo’, much in a small space. This places her alongside women composers of previous generations – Fanny Hensel is one example – who similarly conveyed a largesse transcending the conventionally assumed limits of Lied and piano miniature, those small-scale genres considered (for spurious reasons) their ‘proper’ territory.¹⁹

Alma Schindler(-Mahler): ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’ (1899)

In her diary entry for 7 January 1899, the nineteen-year old Alma Schindler (who had not yet met Gustav Mahler – it would be another three years before their engagement) noted: ‘Just composed in 5 minutes a little song. Whether it’s any good, I don’t know. I only know there’s enough amorous passion [Liebesleidenschaft] in it’.²⁰ Schindler’s words convey a sense not only of the fluency with which she composed, but also the emotional intensity in her setting of Heine’s poem. She noted further that she felt ‘a strong urge to write songs that fit my mood’.²¹ In her commentary, Grönke evokes the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, including societal attitudes to the role of women. She notes the presence of such influential figures as Sigmund Freud (whom Gustav Mahler consulted during the marriage to Alma) and Gustav Klimt, to whom Alma Schindler was strongly attracted in the period her song dates from.²² As her chapter unfolds, Grönke produces an effect almost of interviewing Schindler and Mahler in order to understand their feelings towards the love objects in their lives. It is, though, their compositions that Grönke primarily interrogates for this purpose, drawing on biographical sources to complement her analysis. She conveys sympathetically and with a measure of objectivity not only Schindler’s difficult family situation (from which the ‘prestigious marriage’ to Mahler offered an escape) but also her vulnerable emotional and psychological state. Grönke’s reference to the ban Mahler placed on Alma’s composing is potentially a disturbing revelation to readers unaware of this deprivation.

Before comparing their respective settings, Grönke considers each separately. In ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’, the poet, Heine, conjures the mood as the protagonist wanders through the blossom. Heine’s final lines make clear that it is the public exhibition of amorous feeling that is considered improper, according to conventional attitudes, and is feared by the protagonist (ll. 5–8): ‘Oh hold me tight, beloved, / Else drunken with love [Liebestrunkenheit] / I fall at your feet / and the garden is full of people!’²³ Schindler demonstrates music’s power to make an imagined event seem real. She conveys musically the overwhelming emotion leading to the sudden fall, by a combination of increasing speed (‘Plötzlich sehr schnell’, bars 9–10, then ‘Prestissimo’, bars 11–12³), with the vocal part, marked f, rising in a chromatic scalar line, declaiming ll. 5–7 syllabically, together with an abrupt scalar gesture in the piano part, marked cresc. to ff, its culmination coinciding with the voice’s downward octave leap on the word ‘Füßen’ (feet). The syllabic setting of the final line returns to the opening ‘Langsam’, and piano dynamic, for a hushed, subdued monotone in the voice with minimal accompaniment, followed by a tiny cadential arpeggiation marked ppp, forming the piano’s postlude gesture (which Grönke sees as possibly representing ‘a hurried exit’).²⁴ The association of amorous intensity with danger and risk formed a component, as Grönke notes, of the troubling attraction Schindler experienced towards Klimt.

Gustav Mahler’s setting of ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (with its text by Rückert) is imbued with intimations of marital love. The song was ‘conceived as a gift of love for his wife, Alma … immediately prior to the birth of their first child’.²⁵ Rückert’s protagonist rehearses a series of potential love objects in verses 1–3, beginning with ‘If you love for’ – beauty, youth, then treasure – and following up with ‘Then do not love me’. The alternatives belong to the natural cycle (‘Love the sun, for its golden hair’, ‘the Spring, who is young every year’); and the supernatural (‘Love the mermaid for her many bright pearls’). The final verse substitutes for the recurrent negative, the hopeful, ‘If you love for love – oh then love me!’ (‘o ja mich liebe!’), concluding: ‘Love me always, as I will always love you!’ Grönke notes that Mahler introduced an additional repetition of the word ‘immer’ (always) to that exhortation; his piano postlude, rather than confirming the tonic in positive terms, slides chromatically and ambivalently into its closing plagal cadence. She discerns in his setting that ‘however sure the text’s speaker is about his own love, the musical “Ich” remains correspondingly unsure of the feelings of the beloved “Du”’, and she sees Mahler’s move towards the minor on the word ‘Jugend’ (youth) ‘perhaps as a reflection of the age difference’ between the spouses. This is supported by her quotation from a letter early in his acquaintance with Alma, where he doubted whether ‘a man … in the grip of becoming old has the right to take so much youth, and vitality into his overripe state – linking the spring to the autumn’.²⁶

Grönke uses the contrast between the two songs to illuminate the nature of their composers’ incompatibility. Her analysis of their marriage, like her assessment of the psychological makeup of each partner, is expressed at a level of objectivity beyond the sensationalism that she notes has tended to colour accounts of Mahler’s and Schindler’s lives. That her psychological findings emerge from her analysis of the music, in tandem with the poetry, takes her interpretation to a new level of discourse, going beyond the application of analytical method, by yoking to it the composer’s lived experience.

Rebecca Clarke: Sonata for Viola and Piano (1919), First Movement

Liane Curtis structures her search for an appropriate analytical approach to Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata movement as a multi-faceted enquiry, lining up three possible candidates. She performs in the main portions of her article the equivalent to a series of interviews, sharing with us in advance her fundamental questions: ‘What was Clarke’s purpose in writing this work? What cultural or social agenda might we expect to find her – consciously or unconsciously – communicating?’²⁷ The first candidate consists of ‘a conventional descriptive analysis’. We would be misguided in assuming this to be drastically limited in its capacity to bring the notes on paper (or as heard in sound) to life. Nevertheless, as a procedure it risks bearing some relation to reading aloud a piece of prose or poetry in a monotone, avoiding inflections and minimizing any variation in pitch, articulation, or volume. Curtis here goes beyond colourless factual description, and indeed writes quite rhapsodically, reflecting in her prose the vividness of Clarke’s writing: ‘The opening gesture … is bold, with the trumpet call of the leaping fifths evoking a martial feeling: the dotted rhythms are charged with energy. This outward assertiveness seizes the listener’s attention in a striking manner.’²⁸ The style resembles those concert programme notes that take the listener through the music, predicting their response to hearing it. Descriptions such as ‘The second theme contrasts dramatically with the previous material, with hushed dynamics, restricted range, and chromatic motion’ create a link to the section that follows (‘A Coded Sonata-Form Analysis’). In concluding this first portion of her analytical commentary, Curtis acknowledges that, in its ‘reliance on descriptive adjectives’, her ‘road map through a vivid movement’ foregrounds subjectivity but also accessibility: ‘it depends neither on the jargon of music theory nor on critical theory’. More crucially, ‘it also lacks any attempt to understand the work as having cultural meaning – as composed by someone for a particular goal, with a certain audience and set of cultural referents in mind’.²⁹

Gendered sonata form, characterizing the two main themes as masculine and feminine, seems a promising candidate, in view of the theoretical tradition that had developed by the time Clarke was writing. Curtis’s commentary in the preceding section on the recapitulation’s reversal of character in Clarke’s movement provides support for a gendered approach, particularly in view of Marcia Citron’s suggestion that women composers may have resisted ‘the conventional [recapitulatory] procedure of oppressing [the] second theme’.³⁰ Curtis formulates her purpose cautiously, in advance of her summary of gender-related theory (drawing on the work of both Citron and Susan McClary): ‘This understanding of the form may have contributed to Clarke’s musical consciousness … thus, its possible relevance deserves exploration.’³¹ After experimenting with it, she concludes that ‘the anthropomorphizing of themes as masculine and feminine can certainly enliven an analysis, but the results remain a completely individual reading. Any number of other interpretations encoding different gender stereotypes or narrative perspectives could be made with equal validity.’ She goes on to observe:

The final approach supplies a missing link to Clarke’s professional aspirations. With this third approach, focusing on factors that impact directly on Clarke’s work, Curtis finds the best match between the music and the interpretative apparatus she applies to it. Under the heading ‘Music for the Coolidge Competitions’, she notes that the 1919 composition competition featuring the viola (which Coolidge encouraged Clarke to enter) ‘represented an unusual situation for Clarke’; and that ‘in the context of her musical output as a whole, Clarke’s use of sonata form is also unusual’. Curtis proposes that ‘the authority of a patron, together with the institutional event of a competition, served to authorize, perhaps even compel, Clarke to write large-scale, multimovement works employing sonata form’.³³ This brings us back in a circle to Hensel’s piano sonata with Curtis’s proposition that ‘for Clarke, the sonata as a genre (with sonata form as a necessary component …) was seen as a masculine domain and thus for her basically a foreign one’.³⁴ In her commentary on a selection of critical reviews, Curtis notes that ‘Pervasive among the critics of Clarke’s sonata is a sense of wonder at the exceptional nature of a woman acting outside the realm of orthodox “feminine” behavior.’³⁵ Curtis’s generously developed and nuanced exegesis around Clarke’s Viola Sonata pays due consideration to the ramifications of this bold venture.

Concluding Remarks

Examining these case-studies has highlighted the ways their authors link the music under discussion to its cultural context and the circumstances of the composers’ lives. In considering the composers’ personal situations and their compositional projects with a holistic approach to suit each case, the authors endow their analytical interpretations with feminist values, providing a thought-provoking quality of argument. Such endeavours enrich and inspire analytical discourse. The Belgian-born composer Irène Wieniawska entreated shortly before her death in 1932, ‘Do look after my music!’³⁶ By devoting careful, searching analytical attention to women’s works we contribute towards the process of embedding these erstwhile neglected composers and their music rightfully, not only in the current consciousness but also in the musical heritage we can hope to pass on to posterity.

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.

The last years of the nineteenth century saw many high-profile performances in Britain, Europe, and the USA of complex, large-scale musical works composed by women. In 1890, for example, a distinctive four-movement orchestral Serenade by the British composer Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was performed at the Crystal Palace in London. In 1895 La Montagne, a drame lyrique in four acts and five tableaux by the French composer Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), her fourth opera, was premiered at the Paris Opéra while the ‘Gaelic’ Symphony by the American composer Amy Beach (1867–1944) was first heard in Boston’s Music Hall the following year, 1896. The ‘Gaelic’ Symphony went on to be widely performed in Europe and the United States, and was critically well received, with one reviewer of the premiere praising it as ‘high-reaching, dignified and virile’.¹

Orchestral music, especially the symphony, and opera were two of the most prestigious genres of Western classical music at this time. London’s Crystal Palace, the Opéra in Paris, and Boston’s Music Hall were important high-profile venues. Smyth, Holmès, and Beach all achieved notable success as composers who were taking on and engaging with the mainstream classical music worlds of their respective countries. They were also regarded as breaking new ground as women creating work in genres that had previously been considered the exclusive preserve of men, and beyond the capabilities of women. For Smyth’s early performances in England the composer was given ambiguously as ‘E. M. Smyth’. The Crystal Palace performance of Smyth’s Serenade elicited the following reaction in the English musical press: ‘But surprise rose to absolute wonder when the composer, called to the platform, turned out to be a member of the fair sex.’² Two years later, in a frequently quoted review, George Bernard Shaw, as music critic for The World, wrote of another of Smyth’s orchestral works: ‘When E. M. Smyth’s heroically brassy overture to Antony and Cleopatra was finished, and the composer called to the platform, it was observed with stupefaction that all that tremendous noise had been made by a lady.’³

Among other significant musical works created by women that appeared in the 1890s, in 1892 an Album of English Songs by Maude Valérie White (1855–1938), comprising settings of texts by Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Robert Herrick, and others, was published by Stanley Lucas, Weber & Co. A few years previously, André de Ternant had discussed some of these, writing: ‘All these songs are in themselves little masterpieces, and if ever the time shall come to regenerate the once honoured English ballad, the name of Maude Valérie White will certainly be remembered as one of those who did their best to prepare the way.’⁴

In 1893 the American publisher Gustav Schirmer had brought out a new edition of ‘Automne’, a piano piece by Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), originally published as the second of her Six études de concert, op. 35, in 1886. In 1896 the song cycle for four voices and piano by Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), In a Persian Garden (‘The words selected from the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayam (Fitzgerald’s translation)’), a work that deftly captured some of the cultural concerns of the fin-de-siècle, was published by Metzler.

Despite falling out of favour as the twentieth century progressed, White, Lehmann, and Chaminade were all critically respected composers at the turn of the twentieth century, and also extremely successful and popular with the general public. Lehmann’s In a Persian Garden was heard throughout Britain and the United States well into the twentieth century, as were individual songs from the cycle. In 1903, the critic Edwin Evans wrote of the work’s ‘phenomenal success’.⁵ Admiration for Chaminade and her music was considerable, as seen in the large number of Chaminade Music Clubs that sprang up in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century.⁶ White, Chaminade, and Lehmann also fulfilled contemporary expectations of a woman composing music, in terms both of genre (songs and piano pieces), and of the spaces in which their works tended to be most frequently heard – the more private space of the home or musical salon.⁷

These six women all achieved undoubted success, personal and critical, in lives devoted to creating music. Were they, and others like them, professional composers? What did the term professional mean for a composer, male or female, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries? Did the late nineteenth century see a shift in attitudes towards women as creators of music, and were the women who followed this richly creative generation of women composers able to consolidate and build on this success? Was it easier for a woman working in the mid-twentieth century to build a career as a composer than it had been some sixty years previously? Was there progress for women as composers?

It is fascinating to explore the shifting definitions of professionalism in regard to musical composition. It has always been a slippery concept, and numerous late twentieth-century scholars have simply used the term regarding the women’s lives and music they have studied, to denote a degree of acceptance and success for those women who are their subjects. Other scholars have been more concerned to unpick the concept as applied to women, and to interrogate it as to whether it is anything more than a marker of approval. Among these, Marcia Citron, whose 1993 monograph Gender and the Musical Canon remains one of the richest and most thought-provoking exploration of the issues facing women composers in the Western classical tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, devoted a chapter to ‘Professionalism’, noting that it ‘has generally been considered a goal of a nurtured and practicing creativity in music’.⁸ Citron explores issues affecting women, such as societal expectations, publication, and the Foucauldian ‘author-concept’, and ends her chapter calling for an understanding of professionalism that ‘will be capable of multiple models’. She adds: ‘As a result of this diversity women composers may well find themselves swimming in new mainstreams that re-define what being a serious composer in Western art music is all about.’⁹

In the last half of the nineteenth century, women throughout Europe, Britain, and the USA, particularly those from the middle and upper classes, were moving beyond their expected roles as nothing more than wives and mothers. They started to take on the professional and public lives and careers that had previously be seen as degrading or unseemly, embracing a spirit of growing freedom, self-determination, and opportunity. In this age of the independent and disruptive ‘new woman’, femme nouvelle, and neue Frau, growing numbers of women were choosing to lead independent lives, networking with other women, demanding equal rights in education and employment, and challenging the idea that woman was inferior to man.¹⁰ As one social historian has described it: ‘[This was] a period of continuous and quite seminal, if partly invisible, change in the perception of women’s roles and in the realignment of male-female relationships. Such changes can be detected in many spheres: political, legal, economic, intellectual, personal, and psychological.’¹¹

Women’s battles for access to a variety of professions, particularly the medical and legal professions, have been well documented.¹² Key to their success were resolve and grit, together with determination for their career ambitions to be taken seriously. The situation for women creating music for themselves and others to perform, reaching the ears and imaginations of contemporary audiences, was more complex than that of women aiming to become doctors or barristers. The profession of being ‘a composer’ was less straightforward than fulfilling the requirements to enter the legal profession, for example, which required access to a particular training and accreditation that in most countries was simply not available to women until they fought through the excluding barriers. Education and training are always important in developing any skill, including learning ways to express any kind of creativity. Some countries, indeed, had systemic barriers for women who wanted the musical training that would enable them to produce works to be heard by others. In the nineteenth century, such training was one of the options offered to students at conservatoires, alongside training in musical performance on a range of instruments or voices. But many German conservatoires, for example, simply did not allow women to attend composition classes. The American composer Mabel Wheeler Daniels (1878–1971), who studied at the Royal Conservatory of Munich in the early years of the twentieth century, explained in letters home that she was the first woman to be admitted to the principal’s score-reading class, and that it was not until the late 1890s that women had been allowed to study counterpoint at the Conservatory.¹³ (Both score reading and study of counterpoint were seen as essential aspects of compositional training.)

For other women, the issue with musical training in composition was that their families did not consider it appropriate for women of their class to study at an institution that was seen as preparing them for a public career, and that was so closely associated with the disreputable world of the theatre. Both Smyth and White wrote in their memoirs of the parental objections they had to overcome before attending the Leipzig Conservatorium (Smyth) and London’s Royal Academy of Music (White).¹⁴ It is not surprising that numerous composers, including Chaminade, Holmès, and the German composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850–1927), studied privately.¹⁵ When a woman did finally manage to attend a music conservatoire, she was not always treated the same way or offered the same opportunities as her male contemporaries, reflecting assumptions that, as a woman, she was less capable or less serious in her career ambitions. Daniels wrote of her first score-reading class at the Munich Conservatory: ‘Just before I took my seat at the keyboard … I heard one of the men smother a laugh.’¹⁶

The question of when a composer, whether female or male, should be considered a professional was much debated in the press at the turn of the century. Financial considerations were less relevant in defining a professional status for composers than for performers. Then, as now, it was difficult to make a living from composing alone. In the late nineteenth century, there were successful songwriters, including women such as White or Lehmann, who earned large amounts of money through sheet music sales; but most composers, if they needed to earn a living, had to supplement earnings from composition with money from other sources. Many well-known composers had no need to earn money at all, and in 1907 one of the best-known British composers of the early twentieth century, Frederick Delius, was reported as saying: ‘No earnest musician should think of becoming what I may call a professional composer unless he has private means.’¹⁷ Another well-known, well-to-do British composer of the time, Hubert Parry, once calculated that in twenty years, during the early part of his career, he made no more than £25 from his compositions.¹⁸

Popular and acclaimed composers in the nineteenth century, such as Giacomo Meyerbeer, or Felix Mendelssohn, were frequently discussed, often with some bemusement, as to their professional status. In 1925, the composer Felix Borowski, writing in Etude Magazine, claimed: ‘Meyerbeer, like Mendelssohn, was an amateur, in as much as he composed for the love of art and not because he had to make a living.’¹⁹ Where did women fit into these debates about the professional composer? Did the relationship between women and professionalism in composition change as the twentieth century progressed?

In the late nineteenth century there was certainly an expectation from much of the general public and mainstream musical worlds that, as for so many careers and professions, women would pursue the creation of music as a hobby rather than developing it into a vocation that might be regarded as public or professional. Even in the first half of the twentieth century, despite the example of the liberated ‘new woman’, most women expected, and were expected, to be supported by a husband, or perhaps a father or brother. They were not thought to need or want to make money through composition and so were more likely to be regarded as amateurs, with all the attendant assumptions of lack of authority or even ability.

There were elements of a composing career other than financial that were seen as important in ensuring that a composer would be regarded and accepted as a professional. These included critical recognition, moving in establishment musical circles, belonging to musical associations or organizations, and receiving high-profile performances. As Marcia Citron defined it: ‘To be a professional composer is to be taken seriously in one’s own time and possibly in the future. It involves reputation, authority, and the circulation of a name within culture.’²⁰ Exemplifying this, the British composer Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94) was supported both financially and creatively by her husband. But she was a fiercely professional composer in, for instance, her involvement with organizations such as the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain (of which she became ‘Chairman’ in 1959), and her commissions from the BBC and from leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists.²¹

Another significant marker of recognition was the awarding of high-profile prizes for composition, usually at an early stage in a composer’s career, offering invaluable opportunities for travel and further training. In 1879, Maude Valérie White had been awarded the British Mendelssohn Scholarship. In 1913 the French composer Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) was awarded the Prix de Rome for composition, following a considerable battle by women to be allowed to enter for the prize, a fight comprehensively explored by Annegret Fauser in her 1998 article.²² The American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Music Composition in 1930.²³ White, Boulanger, and Crawford Seeger, were each the first woman to be awarded their particular prize.

A composer would also be more easily regarded as a professional if she or he worked in some other musical sphere as well – as performer, director, or educator, for example. Dorothy Howell (1898–1982), who caused a sensation in 1919 at the age of twenty-one when her symphonic poem Lamia was premiered at London’s Promenade Concerts, was a professor of harmony and composition at London’s Royal Academy of Music from 1924 to 1970. Despite this prestigious teaching position, Howell’s compositional work was largely forgotten, or overlooked, after her period of acclaim in the 1920s.²⁴

There is no doubt that in the late nineteenth century it was common for a woman who had established a high-profile career as a performer to use her public platform to play or sing her own music. Both Chaminade and Beach, for example, had highly successful careers as pianists, while Lehmann had been a renowned concert singer. All frequently included their own music in their recitals and concerts. This was nothing new. Earlier in the century Clara Schumann, widely recognized as a highly successful concert pianist, like many other women of the time, frequently programmed her own compositions. An example from early in her career is her op. 8 Variations de concert pour le pianoforte sur la ‘Cavatine du Pirate’ de Bellini (1837) which she performed frequently on her tours in 1837–8 in Germany and Vienna.²⁵ Women performers who continued to promote their own music into the mid-twentieth century include the American pianist-composer Philippa Schuyler (1931–67).²⁶

The situation for women working as composers who were not also known as performers could be more difficult. Despite the numbers of women who were determined to succeed in complex, large-scale genres such as the symphony or opera, it was hard for them to break away from the expectation that if they were to create music it would be as amateurs, writing on a small scale in genres such as song or short instrumental pieces. By composing works like symphonies or operas, however, it was easier for them to become regarded as professionals since they were creating music that met the expectations of the canon. For women who were primarily songwriters, despite often resounding financial success following the publication of their work, it became increasingly difficult, as the twentieth century progressed, for them to be regarded as anything other than amateur composers of undervalued salon music. The change in the reputations of, for example, both White and Lehmann was dramatic and extreme.²⁷

Music created by women was expected to be as unthreatening, decorous, and demure as women themselves were supposed to be. In 1889, a British reviewer of sheet music by the Norwegian pianist and composer Agathe Backer-Grøndhal (1847–1907) found it to be ‘remarkably original, attractive, and vigorous to a degree absolutely surprising in one so fair and feminine in appearance and manner’.²⁸ Examples of similar critical language can be found throughout the history of classical music in the Western tradition. As Laura Hamer has written of our own time: ‘Women musicians are still regularly subjected to gendered criticism, which often undermines their artistry by focusing on their appearance.’²⁹

In other ways, a woman composer’s gender might be used to imply that she was simply incapable of success. Thus, despite the resolve of the British composer Rosalind Ellicott (1857–1924) to create a successful compositional career, her music frequently met with a variety of gendered assumptions. The reviewer of a performance of her cantata Henry of Navarre (text by Thomas Babington Macaulay), for example, voiced significant reservations:

As the twentieth century progressed, women composers found that their work still provoked the same kind of reaction from critics, especially if it failed to live up to expectations about what a woman composer would (or should) produce. In 1935 the critic William McNaught reviewed a London concert at which new music by Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, and Elisabeth Lutyens was premiered. He found the concert to be ‘an interesting study of the young female mind of today. This organ, when it takes up musical composition, works in mysterious ways. No lip-stick, silk stocking, or saucily tilted hat adorns the music evolved from its recesses’.³¹

As Kiri Heel has demonstrated in her doctoral thesis, the critical reception of Germaine Tailleferre is particularly interesting since she was the only female member of the composer grouping ‘Les Six’. From the early days, Tailleferre was set apart and her music denigrated. One particularly withering assessment came from the British music critic Cecil Gray in his Survey of Contemporary Music (1927):

Despite the many powerful and compelling musical works by women that had been heard in the nearly forty years since the critics’ surprise that a woman had created Smyth’s orchestral music, very little had changed regarding women’s creative capacity. In 1903, Otto Weininger, in his widely read book Sex and Character, claimed that ‘the female is soulless, and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will’.³³ Such ideas had far-reaching influence on attitudes towards women as creative artists, both the attitudes of creative women themselves, and those of the wider public.³⁴ It was not only male critics and commentators who held such views. In 1907, the novelist Marie Corelli wrote:

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a sense of excited adventure for many women as they broke down barriers, including musical ones. But at the same time as some women were demanding and gaining greater independence and opportunities for self-expression, the arguments ranged against their activities grew into a powerful force of backlash and reaction. Among the voices speaking against a picture of unequivocal progress for women is that of Margot Asquith, remembering the 1880s from her old age in the 1930s: ‘Among the young women there was more intellectual ambition, more sense of adventure, and much more originality in the West End of London in my youth than there is today’.³⁶

After the Second World War, there was a particular drive to see women return to their roles as home makers, wives, and mothers. This can be seen in the reception and careers of Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, as reflected in their correspondence over a period of fifty years. After a youth of exuberance and possibility, as well as notable musical achievements, both women settled into a quieter lifetime of creating music, while feeling overlooked and neglected.³⁷

Painstaking scholarship since the 1990s has re-examined the music and explored the careers of women who were working as composers during this period. Monographs include Adrienne Fried Block on Amy Beach, Ita Beausang and Séamus de Barra on Ina Boyle, Rae Linda Brown on Florence Price, and Judith Tick on Ruth Crawford Seeger.³⁸ These monographs have been complemented by scholarship dealing with groups of women composers, as with Caroline Potter on the Boulanger sisters, Rhiannon Mathias on Maconchy, Williams, and Lutyens, Laura Seddon on British women composers of chamber music in the early twentieth century, and Laura Hamer on French musicians in the 1920s and 1930s.³⁹ Significant work on various women composers has been published in articles in academic journals, on authoritative websites, and in doctoral theses, all of which additionally rehabilitates and reinvigorates our understanding of the significance of these women.

This scholarship also clearly shows that the barriers facing these composers were continually, sometimes subtly, rebuilt and so constantly needed to be dismantled. There was no sustained sense of progress in equality of opportunity for women who wanted to work and to be taken seriously as composers. A thought-provoking example is in the awarding of the prestigious British Mendelssohn Scholarship, won by Maude Valérie White in 1879. More than fifty years later, Elizabeth Maconchy, a finalist for the award, was told by a member of the panel that she had not been given the scholarship since she would only get married and never write another note.⁴⁰

The question of defining professionalism and applying it to women composers of these generations remains problematic, as scholars who have grappled with the issue, such as Citron, have demonstrated. Meaning different things in different countries, for women of different classes and races, is professionalism a useful or valid marker? The women who fit the image of the canonical male composer creating complex, large-scale musical works and living a public life involved in musical organizations, receiving mainstream commissions and performances, are generally the ones who have been regarded as successful and identified as professional. These assumptions overlook the worlds of women who worked outside the musical mainstream, as represented, for instance, by many of the late nineteenth-century songwriters such as Maude Valérie White, or in the twentieth century by the composer Phyllis Tate (1911–87), who refused a prestigious teaching position at London’s Royal Academy of Music because she believed that ‘creativity could not be taught’.⁴¹

For all the composers mentioned in this chapter, and the many unmentioned, living a creative life in music was something for which they had to fight. If asked who they believed they were, each would probably have answered, ‘I am a composer’. Perhaps in the end this is what matters: that weaving their sound worlds, creating their intricate, complex webs of melody, was a fundamental part of their identity.

In April 1960, the conductor Kathleen Merritt (1901–85) led an all-woman programme at London’s Wigmore Hall. Despite the fact that concerts entirely of music by women composers had been performed in Britain since at least the 1920s, by 1960 it was still unusual to find a woman’s name on a UK concert programme. Merritt’s concert, therefore, attracted press coverage focusing on her gender, and that of the composers whose music she was performing. In a promotional interview, the Sunday Times gave an account of the conductor that today reads very much like a description of a feminist, declaring: ‘[She] fights not only for women, but for new music by living composers.’¹ Merritt herself, however, was adamant that she was ‘not a feminist’.² The Sunday Times was quick to reassure readers that ‘Merritt has none of the alarming if admirable trappings of women who fight for women’s causes.’³

The composers on Merritt’s programme were Ina Boyle (1889–1967), Dorothy Howell (1898–1982), Grace Williams (1906–77), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94), Ruth Gipps (1921–99), and Antoinette Kirkwood (1930–2014). The Daily Telegraph published an extensive review of the concert that represents the critical response in general. It decreed:

Another lamented that Howell and Kirkwood’s pieces had only ‘a naive charm that might commend them to unsophisticated players in amateur orchestras’, and found the performance merely ‘serviceable enough in a home-spun way’.⁵

Merritt’s concert, and the responses to it, encapsulate many of the issues presented by approaching feminism in a historical context. As Margaret Walters observes, from the introduction of the term in the 1890s, ‘in England, right up until the 1960s at least, the word “feminist” was usually pejorative’ and increasingly associated with the campaign for women’s suffrage.⁶ Consequently, many women distanced themselves from the political connotations associated with the term, even when actively promoting women’s creative work or leading lives that subverted or resisted the gender expectations of their society. As with so many concepts, historical and contemporary usages of the word are sometimes weakly aligned: it is inappropriate to apply the term ‘feminist’ to historical composers because they appear to conform to a modern definition. Moreover, feminism is still a contested term. It ‘is a very broad church, espousing a wide range of theories, approaches, and methods and including all kinds of dissenters and arguers’.⁷ There is little consensus about how feminism should be defined, what it means to be a feminist, or indeed what the most promising avenues for feminist criticism are.

The critical reaction to the concert, however, demonstrates how sorely needed affirmative ‘feminist’ action was among musicians. British women had been working as composers for well over a century, yet critics still saw them as a curiosity, made essentialist judgements about their work, and associated them with dilettantism – especially those who distanced themselves from modernism, such as Howell, Kirkwood, and Gipps. Even those who embraced modernism, such as Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), were still judged as women first and artists second. Reviewing Lutyens’s music in 1966, one critic wrote that ‘there has always been an element of dryness about her music, and it doesn’t take an anti-feminist to suggest that it may have something to do with her sex’.⁸ The kind of thinking that marginalized women reduced their opportunities to have their compositions heard; at the 1960 Proms, for example, only one work by a woman was performed – Thea Musgrave’s Triptych. Hundreds of works by British women of the last century still languish unpublished and unrecorded.

For the purposes of this chapter, which examines women composers’ relationships with feminism through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I define feminism specifically as a critical engagement with contemporaneous debates about gender-based rights and behaviours. For composers, this might be manifested through the inscription of their own identity and experience into their compositions; through their negotiations with performers, managers, and critics; or through direct political action. My focus is primarily on Britain. For the twentieth century, I explore how Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) and Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) dealt with feminist issues, the dissimilarity of their approaches indicating that there were many different ways to be both a woman and a composer in twentieth-century Britain. My scope for the twenty-first century is somewhat wider geographically, as while there are still distinctly different emphases among feminist campaigners according to their locality, global movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have impacted heavily on British feminism and composition, and streaming has made performances worldwide accessible in the UK. The proliferation of explicitly feminist works composed by women in the last twenty years suggests that, despite its nebulousness and historically negative associations, ‘feminism’ continues to be of relevance for women composers today, with composers actively confronting and challenging violence against women, and the erasure of historical women.

Ethel Smyth and Feminist Action

In her polemic A Final Burning of Boats, Smyth observed that ‘wretched sex-considerations were really the determining factor of my own life’.⁹ Outspoken in her condemnation of gender prejudice, Smyth and her two-year involvement with the suffrage campaign have made her one of the most famous women composers of the twentieth century. Consequently, there is a rich feminist literature on Smyth and her music, even though she remains on the outskirts of ‘mainstream’ musicology. She does not appear, for example, in Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music; and she is frequently omitted, or relegated to a marginal position, in studies of British music of the period not explicitly dedicated to women.¹⁰

Of all the composers in this chapter, Smyth is the most overtly linked to what would have been recognized as a feminist cause in her own day. Despite her initial reservation about joining women’s suffrage groups, from 1910 to 1912 she joined the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), becoming a close friend – possibly lover – of Emmeline Pankhurst.¹¹ She was jailed alongside Pankhurst in 1912, serving time in Holloway for allegedly smashing the window of Sir Lewis Harcourt. And during these years she continued to compose, penning a number of works on suffrage themes, and/or dedicated to those in the suffrage movement, such as the Songs of Sunrise (including ‘The March of the Women’, which became the WSPU anthem), her three songs of 1913, her opera The Boatswain’s Mate, and the final movement of her String Quartet in E Minor.¹² She also wrote prolifically, both during and after her involvement with the WSPU, offering invaluable insight into her opinions on debates about women’s rights.

Much of the theoretical literature on Smyth relies on the belief that she composed autobiographically in some way. Notwithstanding the difficulty of directly linking composers’ lives and works, the assumed close relationship between Smyth’s life and works, both musical and literary, has resulted in sympathetic and critical readings by scholars including Christopher Wiley, Elizabeth Wood, Hannah Millington, and Amy Zigler.¹³ The assumption that Smyth’s life and music are in some way connected has been a long-standing line of argument. As early as 1922, Sydney Grew wrote of her that ‘one cannot readily detach her own living personality from her music. Smyth and her music are in every respect one and the same’.¹⁴ For certain works, at least, Smyth’s dedications and thematic choices suggest a close parallel between her life and music, which is further reinforced by her letters. Her opera The Boatswain’s Mate, for example, was composed in Egypt while she was corresponding with Pankhurst. Not only is the opera broadly on the topic of women’s rights but also, as Elizabeth Wood has shown, there are moments which are an ‘operatic representation of Mrs. Pankhurst’s actual experience’.¹⁵

Even in pieces not immediately and obviously connected with women’s rights, Smyth may have used her music as a form of feminist activism. Her song ‘The Clown’ is the first in her 1913 set, the second and third of which are sets to poems by the activist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and dedicated to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst respectively. The latter two songs have therefore received a considerable amount of scholarly analysis, investigating what light these works might shed on Smyth’s relationships with these two women, and on her wider beliefs about suffrage more broadly.¹⁶ ‘The Clown’, however, has no dedicatee, and sets a text by Maurice Baring, a known anti-suffragist. As a result, this song has received relatively little critical attention.

The details of Smyth and Baring’s relationship, however, suggest that ‘The Clown’ also had a feminist intention. In her biography of Baring, Smyth documents that his views on suffrage caused ‘a grim conflict … between Baring and myself. […] In fact, a friendship I greatly valued, and which otherwise – of that I was certain – would stand firm to the end of my life, was tottering.’¹⁷ Smyth therefore took it upon herself to convert Baring to the cause. This was not just for the sake of their friendship, but also because one of her strategies for increasing support for women’s suffrage was to convert influential figures within anti-suffrage communities. In this case, Baring was a prominent Roman Catholic, and Smyth hoped that changing his mind would lead to further pro-suffrage conversions within the Church.

‘The Clown’, then, may have been part of Smyth’s conversion strategy, using the clown in Baring’s poem as a metaphor for the suffragettes. Baring’s text describes a clown dancing in chains, longing for freedom, because in their heart is ‘a dancing spark’. The poem opens with a particularly striking image: ‘There was once a poor clown all dressed in white | And chained to the dungeon bars.’ In an overt way, the clown could be read as a suffragette, fighting for freedom. White was one of the WSPU’s colours, and images of suffragettes chained to railings were well known by 1913. Suffrage literature frequently invoked prison or slavery metaphors, referring to women as being ‘chained’ and ‘imprisoned’. For Smyth there was additional personal meaning in the poem’s images of prison cells, given that she herself was imprisoned. The speaker’s perspective changes during the text; the first half is in the third person, but the third stanza shifts to first person, encouraging empathy and identification with the clown. Possibly, then, this song has both public and private meanings, as had so many of Smyth’s works: publicly, ‘The Clown’ allows listeners to hear it from a suffragette’s perspective, and it provides thematic continuity within the song set, linking to the images of chains and freedom that recur in ‘On the Road’. Privately, this song can also be read as a personal plea to its librettist, inviting Baring to see in his own words a stance sympathetic to women’s suffrage.

However, an assumed connection between Smyth’s life and works is not unproblematic. While it can be interpreted as a powerful way in which Smyth engaged musically with feminist issues, it has also been used as a way to belittle her and write her out of history. In obituaries, for example, her larger-than-life personality was used as a way to marginalize her musical contributions. The Musical Times declared that ‘she will ultimately rank as a brilliant author and remarkable character who also made some stir by composing music on an ambitious scale for a woman’.¹⁸ The author criticized Smyth’s extensive travelling, participation in sports, and numerous friendships, stating that ‘she would have made a stronger mark in the artistic world had she stuck more closely to the job of composing’.¹⁹ And some critics maligned her explicit engagement with feminist themes. At the 1911 premiere of her Songs of Sunrise, the Times dismissed them as ‘political tracts’ that were ‘artistically very far below the level maintained in Miss Smyth’s other compositions’.²⁰ The Daily Telegraph concurred that ‘the concert would have gained in dignity had these effusions been omitted’, arguing that they undermined Smyth’s claims to be a ‘serious’ composer.²¹ Critics repeatedly discouraged Smyth from feminist activity by dividing her music into the categories of either ‘political’ or ‘important’, a strategy commonly invoked to trivialize women’s political work. Ultimately, though, Smyth’s highly publicized involvement with the suffrage campaign motivated some of her most popular works and brought her enduring fame, as well as opening up a space for women composers to engage critically with feminist issues through their music.

Rebecca Clarke in Feminist Analysis

The composer and violist Rebecca Clarke’s feminist involvement was far more ambivalent. She played viola in Smyth’s songs under the composer’s baton at an ‘At Home’ concert of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League in 1911, but this was a rare instance of Clarke appearing at a suffrage event. Unlike her friend and colleague, the cellist May Mukle (1880–1963), who may well have facilitated Clarke’s appearance at the ‘At Home’ concert, Clarke never publicly affiliated herself with the suffrage campaign. Nor did she participate in all-women organizations like the Society of Women Musicians (SWM), founded in 1911. Where Smyth found uplift and empowerment in women’s rights groups, they made Clarke feel belittled and marginalized. She attended some of the SWM’s first meetings, but later distanced herself from them. She occasionally spoke and performed at their concerts when invited, but a 1920 event at which she performed prompted her to comment that she ‘couldn’t help wishing I wasn’t either a woman or a musician’.²²

Similarly, she was mortified at the response to her being accepted in the string section of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1913. In the early twentieth century, professional orchestras in the UK did not employ women. Thus Clarke and the five other string players hired alongside her were making history. Accordingly, their appointment was covered extensively in the suffrage press as a breakthrough for women’s rights. Common Cause’s illustrated article called it ‘a red letter day’, stating optimistically that it would ‘do much to vanquish prejudice and win a fair field for women throughout the musical world’.²³ Clarke recalled that the publicity generated by the appointments meant that when the women walked on stage for their first performance, ‘a man, who was evidently a feminist, up in the gallery of Queen’s Hall, cheered when I came in, as much as to say, “well, good enough, they’ve got some women.”’ It made her feel ‘as if I could have dropped into the floor’, because she ‘knew how the orchestra were annoyed at having women, they thought it was a fearful comedown’.²⁴

Made acutely aware of her position as a woman, Clarke instead tried to put herself in situations where her gender was not foregrounded. Ironically, one way she did so as a performer was to play in all-woman ensembles, surrounding herself with women who considered it both achievable and unexceptional for women to have successful musical careers. For example, the piano quartet Clarke established in 1927, the English Ensemble, comprised herself and Mukle, with the violinist Marjorie Hayward (1885–1953) and pianist Kathleen Long (1896–1968). They never, however, advertised themselves as an all-woman group. Equally, when Clarke performed in mixed ensembles, such as the Aeolian Players, they made no mention of her gender. Clarke preferred to showcase women’s excellence without exhibition or comment. There is only one recorded instance of her explicitly advocating for another woman, when she suggested Mukle as a soloist to the patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864–1953) in 1919, externalizing views that she usually kept private. She wrote that ‘a great cause is served in putting the work of women executants on an equal footing with that of men, – that is, only when it really is equal’, and that Mukle was ‘one of the very finest artists on any instrument, quite irrespective of sex’.²⁵

Clarke adopted the same stance with regard to her composition. When interviewed in 1922, she told the interviewer that music ‘has nothing to do with the sex of the artist. I would sooner be regarded as a sixteenth-rate composer than be judged as if there were one kind of musical art for men and another for women’.²⁶ Nevertheless, this has not deterred feminist theorists from analysing the ways in which Clarke’s gender may have impacted on her composition. Exploring the possibility of a musical écriture féminine (writing that is determined by the female body), Sally Macarthur’s analysis of the first movement of Clarke’s Piano Trio argues directly contra Clarke that her compositional style has ‘something to do with the sex of the composer’.²⁷ Macarthur notes that the movement’s ‘high points are not where one would expect to find them’, and that ‘unlike a typical sonata form movement, this one’s reliance on a stream of gestures has meant that its overall effect is that of a start/stop nature’.²⁸ Consequently, Macarthur concludes that ‘it is possible that a female composer, inhabiting a female body, conceives of her musical proportions differently than does a male composer’.²⁹

While this might be a possibility, it also possible that Clarke’s structural innovations may have been influenced by Beethoven, another of her favourite composers.³⁰ As David Greene has demonstrated, Beethoven also places climaxes in places other than at the end of the development or recapitulation (the positions which Macarthur takes to be normative). The opening movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, Op. 106 plays with multiple points of climax, including at the start of the recapitulation and in the coda.³¹ Indeed, such formal innovation is a preoccupation in analysis of Beethoven’s works, as demonstrated in the case of pieces such as the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, Op. 27 no. 2, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, Op. 57, and the String Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131, to select just a few examples. How, then, can this be reconciled with a model of analysis that posits an essentialist relationship between a composer’s sex and their conception of form? Furthermore, if it is true that the movement’s ‘start/stop nature, generated from musical phrases that behave like bodily gestures’, is determined by Clarke’s sex, it is difficult to explain why Mozart, a composer with whom Clarke was well acquainted, also employs gestures that produce a start/stop effect, as in the first movement of his Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332, for example.³² As Barbara White has noted: ‘Positing an écriture féminine allows us to celebrate certain aspects of women’s work. But in fetishizing difference, we risk fortifying the already forbidding walls surrounding the female composers’ ghetto.’³³ Furthermore, essentialist analytical approaches positing a direct link between biological sex and musical style sit uncomfortably with third- and fourth-wave feminisms adopting trans-inclusive definitions of womanhood, which do not equate sex and gender identity.

I suggest that a more fruitful avenue for interpreting Clarke’s creation of phrases that do indeed behave like bodily gestures might be found through reading her memoir. Written when Clarke was in her eighties, the memoir is, at least in part, a story of sexual awakening. Clarke talked about how sexually naive she was in her schooldays, recalling her shock at the realization that her father had affairs and had invited one of his lovers to stay in their family home, and she frankly shared her experiences of sexual harassment both by strangers and by those known to her. Importantly, she also described her relationship with music as follows: ‘I do not know how it is with others, but for me the dividing line between music and sex is so tenuous as to be almost nonexistent. Even when listening to music a mutual glance of shared recognition can induce a momentary shiver of something very much like a kind of rarefied sex.’³⁴ She describes composition in terms associated with sexual desire and pleasure, calling it an ‘obsession’, and saying that when she was composing well she was ‘flooded with a wonderful feeling of potential power – a miracle that made anything seem possible’, and that this feeling was ‘a glorious one. I know of almost nothing to equal it.’³⁵ But she also writes most explicitly about performance as the source of her association between music and sexual desire, describing how she developed a crush on her uncle’s lodger, because they played the Bach D minor Concerto for Two Violins together. She explains that playing this concerto was ‘a rather dangerous procedure for me, for the slow movement invariably stirred me to such a degree that […] I was apt to fall slightly in love’ with anybody with whom she performed it.³⁶

Where sexual desire is concerned, Clarke did not talk about harmony, structure, or thematic elements within works – these are only relevant insofar as they facilitate lived experiences between players and listeners. Rather than focusing analytical attention on these elements, then, we might instead look towards gesture in Clarke’s music as a means of expressing female desire, following Suzanne Cusick’s call for analysts to acknowledge ‘the bodies whose performative acts constitute the thing called music’.³⁷ Clarke’s 1921–22 song ‘The Seal Man’, for example, uses theatrical techniques and gestures that foreground the performers and their bodies. By allowing both singer and pianist to explore a wide range of timbres and physical gestures, it expresses desire through the bodiliness of the performers themselves, and the intimacy of expressive interaction between singer, pianist, and audience. The song’s text comprises an extract from a short story by John Masefield about a woman who falls in love with a man who is half-seal. She follows him into the sea and drowns. As Deborah Stein notes, Clarke cut the end of Masefield’s original text, in which the seal man weeps over his dead lover’s body, thereby throwing the emphasis on to the woman. Clarke’s abridgement of the tale makes it a song that is first and foremost about desire, told from the woman’s point of view.

The way Clarke structures the song is extremely theatrical. She alternates between lyric and quasi-recitative sections to differentiate between the voice of an old woman, who narrates the tale, and the reported direct speech between the woman and the seal man, thereby creating two different musical personas or characters. When the seal man speaks, the piano part stops, so the emphasis is on the vocalist and their body. To call these sections recitative, however, is a little misleading – it is closer to a semi-spoken, melodramatic voice, especially when compared to the woman’s ‘speaking voice’, which is set much more lyrically. In the theatre, the melodramatic voice has well-established associations with the supernatural, making it appropriate for the text of the ghostly seal man, but, as Jacqueline Waeber argues, the melodramatic voice also ‘magnifies its aural quality – its “grain” – and its presence acquires devastating potential as pure signifier’.³⁸ These half-spoken, half-sung sections are where both the grain of the individual singer’s voice, and the differences between interpretations, are most perceivable. And by setting these sections in such an overtly theatrical way, Clarke provides the opportunity for the singer to incorporate physical gestures as part of their characterization of the seal man and the woman. Such gestures again foreground the body and take up time, meaning that different singers’ pacing of the melodrama sections vary wildly. Amy Petrongelli’s 2016 performance, for example, demonstrates how the singer can use movement in these moments – she holds out her hands to the audience, then clasping them to her heart.³⁹ This is a very intimate gesture, almost an invitation, building up a physical rapport between singer and audience.

The piano part has similar moments of theatricality that foreground the performer’s body. Elisabeth Le Guin has written convincingly about the importance of theatrical gesture and visuality in the music of Boccherini, and I argue that in light of Clarke’s statements about music and sexual desire a similar importance can be attributed to theatricality in her music.⁴⁰ The piano part covers a vast range of the instrument – in the first six bars alone the pianist traverses a full six octaves. This is one of Clarke’s most virtuosic piano parts, and the singer and pianist are in a process of constant negotiation, perhaps power play, as it is easy for the pianist to overwhelm the singer, particularly at moments of musical climax. The potential for imbalance between the piano and vocal parts was commented on by contemporaneous reviewers at the song’s premiere. The Daily Telegraph’s review criticized Clarke’s writing: ‘The composer has not been just clever enough, and the Lisztian waves give the lady so pianistic a drowning that the imaginative atmosphere, which Mr. Goss worked so gallantly to sustain, is completely nullified a few bars before the end. How much more cunning to have allowed the voice to finish alone!’ Perhaps so. But Clarke may be doing something different here, and she wants the singer to be ‘drowned’, as the reviewer put it, by the piano part. Throughout the song the piano represents the sea, the place where, in this tale, both death and desire are subsumed. So it seems fitting that it is the piano part, the sea, that concludes the song.

Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

The circumstances in which many women composers are working today are, in some ways, almost unrecognizable in relation to those of composers like Clarke and Smyth. Although some elements have proved remarkably resistant to change, particularly where ‘classical’ music is concerned, the sheer number of women working globally as composers over the last few decades has resulted in an extraordinary variety of different engagements with feminism.⁴¹ Public discourse around women’s rights has progressed to the point where composers can openly discuss how their work critically engages with contemporary feminism, and the digital emphasis of fourth-wave feminism has facilitated the emergence of cross-continental movements such as #MeToo.

Resisting violence against women is a core concern of both third- and fourth-wave feminism,⁴² and, indeed, an increasingly common theme in contemporary compositions by women. Within works that address sexual violence, composers frequently use theatrical and virtuosic techniques that foreground the body, as Clarke does in ‘The Seal Man’. Here, though, virtuosity is weaponized, and the physicality of the performance is used to articulate pain or difficulty. Shelley Washington’s 2016 Big Talk, for example, was composed ‘as a personal response to the repulsive prevalence of rape culture’. The composer describes the work, written for two baritone saxophones, as ‘an endurance piece that incorporates all aspects of the body’, emulating the ‘everyday endurance of a constant barrage of physical and verbal abuse’.⁴³ The piece is deliberately exhausting for both performer and listener, with a propulsive rhythmic drive and energy that gives it an ‘unrelenting, churning’ quality.⁴⁴ Similarly, in Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s string quartet where the conflict ends (2020), she instructs the players to make ‘white-noise vocal sounds that eventually become a […] blood-curdling scream’, using ‘visceral sounds’ as an ‘expression of frustration’ against ‘the violence of being silenced’.⁴⁵

In Özden Gülsün’s 2020 song cycle Al kan Kuşak (The Bloody Red Belt), however, the singer is foregrounded as a way of creating intimacy between performer and audience, and humanizing the women about whom they sing. The work, a cycle of seven songs set to a poem by Didem Gülçin Erdem, is a commemoration of Turkish women killed as a result of patriarchal violence. Özden Gülsün wrote that one of her motivations was to ‘share my grief and anger as a woman living in Turkey’.⁴⁶ The poems alternate between fictionalized accounts of murdered women’s stories, and sections of ‘anger and resistance’ focused on protest marches held in Turkey to raise awareness about patriarchal violence.⁴⁷ In the latter sections the voice is used in a comparable manner to where the conflict ends, with the singer instructed to scream as recordings of the marches are played, creating a clamour of shouting voices. But in the narrative sections, although the material makes considerable demands of the singer (the piece covers a full coloratura range, reaching up to e), the tone is elegiac, not aggressive. Chelsea Hollow, the soprano who commissioned, premiered and recorded the work, writes that despite this music’s theatricality, it should ‘be treated with the intimacy of a recital setting […] There isn’t a costume and character; the singer is a human presenting a perspective’. For her, the drama and virtuosity in the work are essential for communicating ‘genuine humanity’, physicality conveying empathy as well as anger.⁴⁸

Resistance to the silencing of women has also been manifested in the form of compositions that directly refer to historical composers and engage in dialogue with their works, thereby contributing to the ongoing recovery of women’s voices. Particularly in a career where women have been so marginalized, the establishment of a lineage, precedents, and role models is of paramount importance – an issue that Smyth in her time recognized, stating that she penned so many memoirs because she wanted other women to ‘realise that they are not as alone as they perhaps believe’.⁴⁹ She felt this was especially important for composers, because of the ‘temptation to pretend that woman are non-existent musically, to ignore or damp down our poor little triumphs such as they are’.⁵⁰

Clara Schumann has, unsurprisingly, provided a focal point for this kind of composition: Gabriela Ortiz’s Clara (2022) reflects on the relationship between Clara and Robert. The composer stated that the piece ‘signals my gratitude to all the women who, in their time, challenged the society they were raised in by manifesting their artistic oeuvre’.⁵¹ Even here, though, programming habits that have pushed women’s creative work to the margins persist: although the focus of Ortiz’s work is ostensibly on Clara, the piece was premiered alongside Robert’s First and Second Symphonies, with no music by Clara herself, once again foregrounding Robert and his music within Clara’s story. This is a narrative that Chloe Knibbs aimed to subvert in her 2019 Clara, a three-movement choral work that foregrounds Clara as composer and pianist.⁵² ‘It seems odd that [Robert] should have so much of her narrative’, Knibbs argues, so she makes no reference to him throughout her composition, instead emphasizing Clara’s personality, independent of her husband.⁵³ The first movement, for example, sets fragments of Clara’s diary – and where she expressed reservations about composition, Knibbs splits the choir to create a sense of internal struggle. ‘I wanted to get this idea of a dialogue going, and not really resolve it’, Knibbs says, allowing a space for Clara to be conflicted and unsure of herself without it diminishing her achievements as a musician. ‘The way she talks about her professional life felt very emotional and colourful and passionate’, Knibbs observes, aiming to convey something of Clara’s multi-faceted personality in her work.⁵⁴

Both intentionally and involuntarily, the lives and music of women composers have been, and continue to be, closely interwoven with the history of feminism. Historical women have been the instigators of feminist action, the subjects of feminist analysis, and now the inspiration for feminist composition. It remains important to differentiate, though, between feminist composition and compositions by women, lest the two become equated. A woman composing might once have constituted a feminist act of itself, but women’s compositions can only be accorded the kind of nuance automatically afforded their male counterparts if they are not automatically assumed to be concerned with gender issues. Clarke, for example, did not intend her music to be construed as feminist, and resented being thought of as such purely because of her gender, even if her career had many elements that can be considered feminist. This, in turn, allows explicitly feminist compositions to stand more convincingly as political statements and interventions, drawing attention to the ongoing need, still, for women to resist their artistic erasure.