MUSIC FROM THE DISTAFF SIDE

"All the daughters of music shall be brought low." —Ecclesiastes, 12:4

Some time ago, at the perennially-dull Classical Archives Forum there was an atypical moment of controversy when some women (themselves atypical at the Forum) brought up the subject of female composers. Being the last of the unrepentant Male Chauvinist Suinae, I naturally snorted at the very concept. The only time women exhibit creativity is with the truth and in finding something to throw up in your face during an argument. When it comes to music, women are very adept at doing things by rote, but inspiration seems to have its germ in the gonads. To prove this point, I went to my local public library and obtained a pile of sheet music of the works of female composers. Once I returned home with it, I immediately began perusing the pages for evidence of artlessness. I even began sequencing some of the shorter piano pieces.

How ironic it was, then, that I became attracted to this music. Surely this was because of my galloping egotism, as I am naturally fond of anything in which I've had a hand. But then, I submitted my sequences to the Archives, and to call attention to them I beseeched Pierre to create an entire page of compositions by women. To correlate my comments with the actual music why not open a new window in your browser now (Command+N on a Mac; Control+Alt≠Bios≈SysCom-∑∫رreboot+configure properties on Windows) and listen to the compositions as you read. Simply go to http://classicalarchives.com/broads.html No, wait! That's incorrect; the proper URL is http://classicalarchives.com/women.html

Once this page was assembled, I was astonished at how many files by women composers had already existed at the Archives. Listen to a few and you may notice that the performances are quite good—better, on average, than what is on tap at the whole of the Archives—but we are concerned here not with the performances; instead, the question is whether music written by women possesses genuine inspiration and the power to capture our emotions and intellect.

I do not believe that my prejudices have tainted my judgment when I say that the music of Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) lacks such inspiration. Ms. Smyth is one of the most famous female composers who was not related to or married to a famous male composer, and she enjoyed considerable success as a composer during her lifetime. Her one-act opera Der Wald was staged at Covent Garden and at the New York Metropolitan Opera, an honor that even her contemporary, Gustav Holst, never enjoyed. Her opera The Wreckers was performed by the famous Sadler's Wells company.

Although I have sequenced several works by Ethel Smyth, some are yet under copyright, and the only things posted are her Short Choral Preludes. In her youth, Ms. Smyth studied counterpoint at the Conservatory of Leipzig under Heinrich von Herzogenberg, and I can report that none of the Choral Preludes are marred by parallel fifths. She remembered her counterpoint lessons (the preludes were written when she was 55), but although they are competently written, they are hardly inspired music. Besides the small works I have sequenced, I am also familiar with the overture to her opera The Wreckers, and it's similarly unsatisfying—it sounds like Mendelssohn having a bad-hair day.

I suspect that Ethel Smyth wrote music not so much out of love or inspiration, but rather to prove that she could do whatever a man could. Indeed, she all but abandoned her musical career in favor of the nascent feminist movement. Here is an account from the broadcast reflections of Sir Thomas Beecham:

She led processions, she made speeches, she thumped many tubs here and there, and finally distinguished herself by throwing bricks through the dining-room windows of Cabinet ministers. This was tolerated for a little while, but it became too much of a habit to be encouraged, and so Ethel was....sent to Holloway prison. Accompanying her were about a dozen other Suffragettes for whom Ethel wrote a stirring march of freedom. On one occasion when I went to see her, the warden of the prison, a very amiable fellow, was bubbling with laughter. He said, "Come into the quad!" There were the ladies marching up and down, singing hard. He pointed up to a window, where Ethel appeared, was leaning out and conducting with a toothbrush.

This, to my lights, raises further doubts about Ms. Smyth as a composer, as I consider feminism to be the scheme of women with no ability but a craving for attention, and the modern feminist authors are, without exception, utterly devoid of any talent other than mendacity. (My job here is to write about music, so this is not the place to dissect feminism, and I refer the interested reader to the meticulously-researched book, The Myth of Male Power, by Warren Farrell, which exposes the sham of the strident complaints.)

Do I then maintain that the world of music has been without any discrimination against women? Certainly not. There was, and perhaps still is, thoughtless prejudice against works of genuine merit by women. Hans von Bülow, an influential voice in the 19th-century musical world, expressed outright hostility to women composers:

Reproductive genius can be admitted to the pretty sex, but productive genius unconditionally cannot....There will never be a woman composer, at best a misprinting copyist....I do not believe in the feminine form of the word 'creator'.

Despite such bitter opposition, a number of women were successful as composers during the 19th century. Here we turn to the opposite end of the spectrum from Dame Ethel Smyth to women whose music is undeniably worthwhile, and I urge you to listen to the music of Clara Wieck Schumann available at the Archives. Here is music which not only delights immediately, but it has the depth to make repeated listening satisfying. The adolescent fervor of her Quatre Pièces Caractéristiques (written when she was 17) demonstrates that she had a genuine love for creating music, and that she wasn't simply doing it as the result of any courses she took. By the time of her mature work she was capable of writing music that equaled that of any male, and I give as an example herRomance in H-moll. The music bears the date Weihnachten, 1856—Christmas Eve, 1856, and it's quite a sad and lovely piece. Robert Schumann had died that year, and the music bears the inscription, Liebendes Gedenken, Clara—"In loving memory, Clara."

Also as capable as any man was Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and I recommend her Notturno in G-minor. I don't claim to possess a thorough knowledge of all of the piano music by her brother Felix, but the Notturno is as cogent as any piano piece by him that I've heard. Her music was also published and widely played during her lifetime.

Another celebrated a virtuoso was Amy Marcy Cheney, who, after her marriage to Dr. Henry H. A. Beach, became known as Amy Beach. She had toured extensively before her marriage and was featured as a soloist with the Boston Symphony, performing Chopin's F-minor Concerto. It was understood that when she married, the new Mrs. Beach would be expected to curtail her touring, although she continued to give a few concerts each year, but this allowed her to instead focus on learning theory and composition. Although she studied harmony with Junius Hill, she was self-taught in counterpoint and she learned orchestration by translating the treatise on that subject by Hector Berlioz into English. After her husband's death in 1910, Amy Beach resumed her concert career.

I've seen modern assessments of the music of Amy Beach which deride her music as "cloying." An example of this may be found in her piano piece of 1924, Farewell, Summer, which is posted at the Archives. It's not what one would term a profound piece of music, but I'm rather fond of it's loopy chromaticism. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, however, is her Prelude and Fugue which is a serious piece that not only demonstrates her command of counterpoint, but it is a showcase for her virtuoso technique as well.

As impressive as the Prelude and Fugue is, it is symptomatic of another problem with the compositions by women. In several dreadful spots, Mrs. Beach succumbed to the fad of the time and wrote pointless chromatic runs of 64th notes in the style of Franz Liszt. Perhaps she did this merely to show that she too could put on a fustian display like the boys could, but it still sounds like imitation Liszt. It is the mark of the truly great composers such as Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, Debussy, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, et al., that they have such a unique and salient voice that even if you have never heard a particular work of theirs before, it is still patently clear exactly who the composer is. These men were not the imitators but the people who were imitated. As great as the pieces by Clara and Fanny and Amy are, they do not sound "like nothing you've ever heard before."

There has yet to be a female composer who wrote in an original style. A friend lent me his ancient LP of Du Fond de L'Abîme by Lili Boulanger with which I was highly impressed. It's a striking work, but at bottom it sounds like an amalgam of 46% Arthur Honegger and 42% Igor Stravinsky (the remainder being floor-sweepings).

This, of course, does not automatically render the music from the distaff side worthless, as there were also great composers whose work was highly derivative. The early operas of Verdi, for example, sound as if they were written by Donizetti, and early Scriabin sounds like Chopin. Women may not have devised the most exotic and innovative compositions, but that may be a good thing in this age in which classical music has been damn-near shipwrecked by avant-garde fads and crackpot theories. As the world's police forces have, I daresay, been improved by the introduction of lady gendarmes, perhaps a similar benefit may come from a corps of lady composers who are not shy about writing melodies.

This returns us to the problem of sexism and why the music of women is not performed more frequently today. We have seen how Mrs. Beach and Mrs. Schumann had lucrative careers as concert pianists and their performances usually included one or more works of their own hand. Dame Ethel enjoyed numerous productions of her operas. Mrs. Hensel (neé Mendelssohn) and the sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger all had works in print by famous publishers, and they received income from the sale and performance of them which was not infrequent. This was at a time, if the feminist harpies are to be believed, of endemic sexism and when women were treated as chattel. So how is it that now, in these enlightened times of "No Means No" and the draconian trammeling of campus mating rituals, women composers are not prospering and they are not performing their own concertos with major symphony orchestras? Why has the Met or Covent Garden not recently staged a woman's opera? Is the male chauvinist conspiracy yet in effect? Are women secretly being chained to the kitchen fixtures?

The answer, I fear, leads me to once again hymn my familiar refrain that classical music has become closer to a religion than entertainment. And because it is a religion, patrons and worshipers (audiences) will not brave the elements and urban gangs to travel downtown to attend services in which the works of Amy and Fanny are presented. No, they will settle for nothing less than the main deities, the immortal Ludwig and the immortal Amadeus. Was Franz Liszt a greater composer than Amy Beach? Then the patrons will not settle for second-rate merchandise. It must be all the hits, all the time—in classical no less than pop music.

A classical concert is, according to the attitude which has taken hold, a spiritual event at which one is supposed to be held spellbound and in awe of the miracle that is The Ode to Joy! Philistines and hoi polloi (they're referring to me here) blink at the Ode to Joy uncomprehendingly, as to us it's a dopey tune about on the level of Pop Goes the Weasel, because only a person who has a post-graduate degree and a leather-bound set of the Great Literature series (purchased from an ad in The Reader's Digest), a DVD copy of The Dead Poets Society, and a bath towel embroidered with the motto Carpe Diem is enlightened enough to appreciate such a work of genius. And that's why they demand only genuine and certified masterworks. (If purchasing a recording, only a CD from "The Great Recording of the Century" series will do.) They will flock to hear Beethoven's Ninth, Handel's Messiah (the abridged version) and the Piano Concerto that Mozart called his "Elvira Madigan" concerto because those are what today's classical audience has generally agreed to be the true, immortal, ever-loving, serious masterpieces.

But Amy Beach is, most would assess and I would agree, second-rate. She is not in the hallowed pantheon of immortal geniuses. To the upwardly-mobile classical aficionado, listening to Amy Beach is as déclassé as purchasing factory-seconds or day-old baguettes. And Fanny Hensel? How could anyone with a name that elicits snickers (in America) be an immortal genius? Don't even bring her CDs in the house—the grandchildren might start asking questions.

Thus, the female composer is doomed even before she writes her first note. A woman with talent would do better today to instead go into pop music (but only if she has the hot bod and the tattoos). Some women composers may score for a government grant (from the National Council for the Humanities or some such welfare agency) and scam a few bucks that way, but as for joining the pantheon of immortals, they'll have to take the route of [the mystic and notorious anti-Semite] Hildegard of Bingen and wait 900 years to be discovered.

Don't blame it on the men! I have no statistics at my disposal, but it seems to me that the modern classical audience is predominantly female. I can attest to the fact that in the record shop where I was employed, the majority of customers for classical music were women (although the ratio may have been skewed by the number of women who came in because of my handsomeness.) When classical music was dominated by men, we gave Clara and Fanny and Amy and Lili and Ethel a chance and attended their concerts and applauded their works. Now that women are on the boards of orchestras and opera companies and have a say in the program schedule, now that women call the tunes, female composers are shut out!

You can see for yourself that Pierre and I have done our parts in advancing the sake of female composers, but women are not reading this nor are they visiting the page of female composers. Instead, they are out buying Andrea Bocelli CDs!

Thus, as with so many problems, women have only themselves to blame.