The Woman Composer

Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition

Jill Halstead

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781859281833
• eBook ISBN: 9781351539432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Unlike previous anthologizing examinations of women and musical composition, this book concentrates on the reasons why there have been, and continue to be, so few women composers. Jill Halstead focuses on the experiences of nine composers born in the twentieth century (Avril Coleridge Taylor, Grace Williams, Elizabeth Maconchy, Minna Keal, Ruth Gipps, Antoinette Kirkwood, Enid Luff, Judith Bailey and Bryony Jagger) to explore the physiological, social and political factors that have inhibited women from pursuing careers as composers. Is there a biological argument for inferior female creativity? Do social structures, such as marriage, serve to restrict potential women composers? Is the gender of a composer reflected in the music they write? If so, how would this manifest itself? The conclusions that are reached are as complex and challenging as the questions that are raised. This powerful and provocative book aims to open up debate on these issues, which have all too often be avoided by critics and musicologists whose writings have perpetuated arguments that denigrate women's ability to compose. By confronting these arguments, this study will hopefully begin a reassessment of attitudes towards women and music, so that women composers are less of a rarity by the end of the next century.

Part One:
Psychology

1
Music and Aptitude

Women, it should be remembered, only in our own era are beginning to emerge from a long period of social and economic subjection. But, it will be rightly urged, there have been great novelists and even poets during this same period […] but there is no composer of even second-rate rank among women. What is the explanation? […] The most frequent conjecture has been that women just don’t have what it takes […] it is possible to predict that there will never be a female composer of the first rank […] If […] she does make her appearance, she would […] be a biological freak.¹

Virtually all of the people throughout history whose achievements are acknowledged as products of undisputed genius have one thing in common. They come from a great variety of geographical, national, social and religious backgrounds, but they are all male. Starting with names like Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Galton, Shakespeare, Edison, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Picasso, we might have to fill many pages before the first comparable women would appear. When we consider the claims of women for inclusion in a list of outstanding accomplishments, their contributions can be seen mostly in the fields of literature […] humanitarianism […] or politics […], rather than science, technology, music or fine art […] Few social learning theorists […] would deny the preponderance of male genius, but would proffer an explanation in terms of the limited educational opportunities for women throughout history and general discouragement to achieve outside the realm of motherhood and the home. This explanation seems to be unsatisfactory on a number of counts […] it would seem more fruitful to seek an explanation for the appearance of male genius in constitutional factors […] intellectual, motivational […] [and] temperamental.²

Biological differences between men and women have often been adduced to provide justification for male domination, and this has been the case in music as in many other areas. The emerging field of research which examines women’s role in, and contribution to, Western ‘art’ music has for the most part attempted to highlight the social inequalities lying behind the observable fact that the vast majority of this musical canon has been created by men. However, there is a long tradition of arguments which state that women have not become ‘great’ composers (or indeed composers at all) because they are biologically or psychologically less well equipped than men to create music. These ideas have persisted throughout the twentieth century and continue to place a question mark over the extent of women’s innate musical and creative abilities. Such charges must be answered, as otherwise the body of arguments which ascribe women’s relative lack of contribution (or indeed, lack of distinction) in musical composition to some kind of biological or mental inferiority will surely persist, inhibiting their progress towards full integration in the musical mainstream.

The route to understanding how male and female musical aptitude may differ is complex and lies within a range of disciplines. In the course of this chapter I intend to examine sex differences in biology (genetics, hormones, brain structure, sensory perception) and psychology (brain organization, intellect, cognitive ability and types of thinking), since these areas form the basis for the various functions and abilities that we understand collectively as musical aptitude.³

It is an indisputable fact that men and women differ in their physiology. It is also one of the first realizations made by children in relation to themselves and those around them. The understanding of one’s biological sex is fundamental to any person’s identity. However, beyond the understanding of the obvious differences in internal and external sex organs, there is much confusion over how such differences may affect men and women either physically or mentally. It must be admitted that research into sex differences is a hotly contested area and is often marked by contradiction, claim and counter-claim.

A firm starting point, however, is the genetic difference. A female has two X chromosomes (XX), whereas a male has one X and one Y chromosome (XY); this constitutes the genetic sex of an individual. In the first seven weeks of development, there are no anatomical differences between a male and female foetus. The onset of the sexual changes in anatomy, and so the beginning of sex differentiation, is initiated by hormones. Contrary to popular belief, no hormone is exclusively male or female, although men carry higher concentrations of steroid hormones called androgens, particularly testosterone, whereas women carry higher concentrations of two steroids of similar structure, called respectively oestrogens and progestogens.⁴ Sex hormones are very powerful chemicals, and it is only in recent years that scientists have begun to understand the effect they, and other groups of hormones, have on the human body, brain and behaviour and hence how far these hormones may dictate sex-differentiated skills, behaviour and ability.

However, before discussing this most recent instalment in the research into sex differences, I intend to confront perhaps the oldest known sex difference which has been used as the biological basis for female inferiority: that of brain size and structure. Although the basic structure of the human brain is common to both sexes, women’s brains are, on average, smaller and lighter than those of men; they also vary slightly in their proportions.⁵ Put simply, it was first suggested that male brains were bigger than female brains because males are more intelligent! Indeed, this was first proposed by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago.⁶ From this time a clear line of neurologically-based arguments which have sought to reinforce bigoted attitudes about women can be traced. Naive as all this may seem, the extension of this argument has provided the biological justification for the subjection and oppression of women for hundreds of years; it has underscored restrictions on female education and opportunity, by denying female capabilities across a wide range of intellectual skills.

The results of scientific data on sex differences have often been misinterpreted and used as part of the wider political opposition to women’s rights. The importance assigned to the difference in brain size found between men and women emerged anew in nineteenth-century disciplines such as craniometry and phrenology, which took for granted that absolute brain size reflected intellectual capacity. For example, in 1879 Gustave Le Bon, a prominent French man of medicine, concluded:

In the most intelligent races […] there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains […] All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women […] recognize that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilised man.⁷

Such theories were said to ‘prove’ that women were less intelligent than men and therefore justified the legislation that denied women access to equal education (or indeed the opportunity to take control of their own lives), at a time when women were demanding equal rights across most of Europe. These supposedly ‘scientific’ theories had many other political applications and were used against other oppressed groups. For example, the information that European brains were larger than non-European brains was used as biological support for the continuation of slavery and colonialism. It is disturbing to witness just how unobjective scientists could be and how often they misinterpreted results to lend proof to their original theories – theories which could be loaded with prejudice.⁸ The emergence and decline of the theories of inequality in mental abilities as determined by sex-linked and racial differences in brain size have always been as much social as scientific in origin. For example, only in the early 1900s, when women were proving their claim on higher education to be legitimate, achieving academic results comparable with men, was the belief in a biologically determined lack of general intelligence no longer able to be intellectually respectable.

Early in this century it was demonstrated (and widely accepted) that neither brain weight nor cerebral dimensions had any effect on intelligence. Moreover, it has been proposed that women’s proportionally smaller brains only parallel their proportionally smaller bodies and that any measurements of brains should correlate brain size in relation to overall body size.⁹ Yet some scientists have continued to argue that male brains are proportionally bigger than female and that the explanation for the difference in size and weight corresponds to levels of intelligence. For example, a recent piece of research suggested that even after the difference in body size was taken into account, the average male brain was still about 100 grams heavier than that of the female.¹⁰ This led a recent review of such research to conclude:

[…] many scientists deny that there is any connection at all between brain size and intelligence, although a number of recent studies have found that a weak correlation does exist […] only one thing is sure. The size difference […] has the same implications as the rest of the sex differences found in the brain: it shows that men’s and women’s brains are different […]¹¹

Although it is often stressed that difference does not necessarily mean inequality, almost without exception the information is then used to support reasons for a biologically-based difference in women’s social and cultural position. Scientists speak of such differences in brain size as if they were unchallengeable, but on closer inspection the methods used for assessing brain size and weight in relation to body size and weight (even at the present time) appear at best varied and at worst flawed:

[…] modern students of brain size […] have still not agreed on the proper measure to eliminate the powerful effect of body size. Height is partly adequate, but men and women of the same height do not share the same body build. Weight is even worse than height, because most of its variation reflects nutrition rather than intrinsic size – fat v. skinny exerts little influence upon the brain. Manouvrier took up this subject in the 1880s and argued that muscular mass and force should be used. He tried to measure this elusive property in various ways a […] When he corrected for what he called ‘sexual mass’, women actually came out slightly ahead in brain size.¹²

Hence fact and figures which relate to sex differences in brain size should be approached with the utmost caution. Moreover, even if it is proved beyond doubt that female brains are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Psychology
• Part Two: Education and Social History
• Part Three: The Gendered Politics of Music
• Bibliography
• Index