The Routledge Handbook of Women's Work in Music

Rhiannon Mathias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367192099
• eBook ISBN: 9780429575044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Routledge Handbook of Women's Work in Music presents a unique collection of core research by academics and music practitioners from around the world, engaging with an extraordinarily wide range of topics on women's contributions to Western and Eastern art music, popular music, world music, music education, ethnomusicology as well as in the music industries.

The handbook falls into six parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the rich variety of subject matter the reader can expect to encounter in the handbook as a whole. Part II focuses on what might be termed the more traditional strand of feminist musicology – research which highlights the work of historical and/or neglected composers. Part III explores topics concerned with feminist aesthetics and music creation and Part IV focuses on questions addressing the performance and reception of music and musicians. The narrative of the handbook shifts in Part V to focus on opportunities and leadership in the music professions from a Western perspective. The final section of the handbook (Part VI) provides new frames of context for women's positions as workers, educators, patrons, activists and promoters of music.

This is a key reference work for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in music and gender.

PART I Challenging gender inequalities

1 Grace, Betty, Maude and Me: 30 years of fighting for women composers

Sophie Fuller

DOI: 10.4324/9780429201080-1

Grace, Betty and Maude, the three women of my title, have played an important part in my life. These women were all British – although Grace Williams was Welsh, Elizabeth (‘Betty’) Maconchy had Irish ancestry and Maude Valérie White was born in Dieppe to a thoroughly cosmopolitan family. I did not know any of these three women personally (although I did once briefly meet Maconchy in the early 1990s), but I have spent the past few decades researching and evaluating their lives and music. At times, I feel that I know them well enough to call them fondly by their first names, but in my writings, I usually respectfully refer to them by their surnames. All three women encroached on an area deemed by most of their contemporaries to be the preserve of men. In studying them and their music, I myself was venturing into an area of feminist scholarship that was regarded at this time as irrelevant and of little value to the field of musicology.

I will start with some personal history. In the summer of 1977, as a teenage flautist, I took part in the Orchestral Summer School at Coleg Harlech, north Wales. The only piece of music I remember from a week of intense rehearsing and bonfires on the beach, was Grace Williams’s Penillion of 1955. I knew nothing about the composer except that she was Welsh and, unusually for my youthful experience of classical music, a woman. I returned to England, to my local youth orchestras and a world of male composers. Fast forward a decade to the mid-1980s. I was in my early 20s – a politically engaged feminist who had recently graduated from London University with a degree in Russian and a life-long love of all kinds of music. I was living in Brixton, not quite knowing what to do with myself, and ended up spending much of my time busking on my flute at Charing Cross underground station and composing a Stabat Mater on the out-of-tune house piano.

Eventually, I decided to go back to college and study music, with the ambition of becoming a composer. I chose London University’s King’s College, where the people who interviewed me were apparently convinced that, with a degree in Russian, I had to be working for MI5, and where I was able to study composition with the composers Nicola LeFanu and her husband, David Lumsdaine. I was introduced to musicology by inspiring, male scholars such as Kofi Agawu and Arnold Whittall, and I enjoyed creating music: playing my flute, setting Russian texts and composing a lament for a friend who had died of AIDS. But I was always a questioning and scholarly person and was quickly bitten by the musicology bug, wanting to find out about musicians and the issues they faced.

As a music student, I was drawn to British music-making, particularly during the interwar period. For my undergraduate dissertation, I researched an innovative London concert series from the 1930s that promoted contemporary music. One of the unusual things about the Macnaghten-Lemare concert series was that it was organised by women musicians.¹ Two of the composers who featured most frequently in the concerts were Williams and Maconchy. It was at this time that I first heard Maconchy’s First String Quartet (1933), a life-changing experience that raised a whole series of questions. Why didn’t I know that Maconchy wrote a series of 13 string quartets, and why weren’t they available as recordings or taught on undergraduate music programmes? Exploring these questions set me on the path I have travelled for over 30 years – a path on which I have uncovered a wealth of little-known music created by women and tried to unpick the complex webs of their careers, reception and, all too often, their neglect.

Revising my ambition of ‘becoming a composer’, I embarked on a doctoral thesis, initially with the idea of investigating the generation of British women composers who came to prominence in the 1930s – including Dorothy Gow (1893–1982), Imogen Holst (1907–84), Phyllis Tate (1911–87) as well as Maconchy and Williams. With what they clearly saw as my best interests at heart, most of the King’s musicologists did their best to dissuade me from this topic: ‘Researching women in music is an academic fast lane to nowhere’ was one memorable comment. My invaluable supervisor was Nicola LeFanu, Maconchy’s daughter, and a composer rather than a musicologist. Ever questioning, I began to wonder if these women of the 1930s were really Britain’s first professional women composers? And what made a composer a ‘professional’ rather than an ‘amateur’?

As a voracious reader of women’s literature and biography, I knew of one British woman of an earlier generation – the ubiquitous Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) – who, in her 70s, had fallen in love with Virginia Woolf: Woolf described being the object of Smyth’s affection as ‘like being caught by a giant crab’ (Woolf, cited in Bell 1976, p. 151). Smyth was also a prolific writer of memoirs, all of which I avidly read, and in which she portrays herself as a lone trailblazer in her work as a woman composer. Unconvinced, I decided to go to original sources and spent much of the first year of my doctoral research reading through every copy of the Musical Times from 1880 to 1920, searching for names of women composers. The 1930s were forgotten, as I developed an ever-growing list of earlier women who had published music or whose work had been heard at a variety of concerts and venues. Certain names appeared more than others and I began to piece together a fascinating picture of women who had often been household names during their lifetimes but were, by the end of the century, little more than footnotes to the history of music making in Britain – if they were remembered at all. I also began to track down their music.

Many of the women whose names recurred most frequently in the press were primarily songwriters and, in their day, these songs were performed at public concerts ranging from the Monday Popular Concerts of highbrow chamber music to the Ballad Concerts run by publishers such as Boosey & Co. They were also sung round the family piano and were a mainstay of the late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class musical salon or the aristocratic ‘At Home’. This was a fascinating and underexplored space for music making for those who were not welcome in the public musical mainstream, particularly women.² But I quickly discovered that as the twentieth century progressed, Victorian and Edwardian British song began to be regarded as a problematic, even embarrassing genre: critic Frank Howes, for example, described all late Victorian song as ‘debased and sentimentalised’ (1964, p. 435). I began to wonder whether it was a just a coincidence that so many songs of this period had been written by women. Indeed, song writing was even regarded as a ‘feminine’ pursuit. I discovered a North American composer, Alfred William Rawlings (1860–1924), who published songs under a female pseudonym, ‘Florence Fare’, as well as the British composer Edward St Quentin (dates unknown) who published songs as Edith Fortescue.

There were practical reasons why Victorian women embraced careers as songwriters, including the comparative ease with which songs could be performed, and the fact that song writing was one of the few potentially profitable forms of composition. But other reasons can also be suggested. For centuries, whether on the opera stage or in the private drawing room, the most accepted way for women to express themselves musically was as singers, something that associated them on a fundamental level with song. Victorian women were socialised to communicate feelings and develop their emotions in ways that would have been regarded as inappropriate for men. In song, women found a genre which was capable of a direct and crystallised expression in music of feeling, ideas and emotions. Smyth once accused men of being afraid of melody (1928, p. 13), and a comparison of Hubert Parry’s songs with those written by his contemporary Maude Valérie White demonstrates that the centrality of a memorable and immediately attractive melody, something that aids the process of communication, was a characteristic of White’s songs to an extent not found in Parry’s work. Banfield has suggested that, in his songs, ‘Parry’s public manner gets the better of his private feeling’ (1985, p. 25). On the contrary, White’s best music was a direct expression of her most private feelings. Perhaps, as a woman, she simply had no public manner behind which to hide.³

White was born in 1855, the daughter of a merchant whose main business was in Chile. Her father died when she was 11 and she grew up in Wolverhampton and London, eventually persuading her mother to let her study at the Royal Academy of Music, London. In 1879, while a student, White won the coveted Mendelssohn prize for composition and continued to study and compose, achieving early critical successes with songs performed by leading singers at prestigious London venues. Like many women, however, White was insecure about her abilities as a composer.⁴ In the early 1880s, she took lessons with Robert Fuchs in Vienna, who, like her Royal Academy teacher, George Macfarren, tried to persuade her to compose something other than vocal music. In her memoirs, White describes how impossible she found this, vividly illuminating the lack of belief in her own capabilities that so many women of the time internalised:

Again I tried and again I failed. This time my failure was accompanied by such appalling depression that I felt as if I wanted to wipe music right out of my life.… I felt that even in a world of microbes I only deserved a rickety back seat. I wasted some weeks trying to compose a concerto, and at last I felt as if every scrap of music in me were dead (White 1914, p. 264).

Encouraged by an old friend who advised her not to ‘maim her talent’, White decided to stop trying ‘to compose things that I felt were utterly beyond me’. This had fortunate results:

No sooner did I feel that no one expected me to write sonatas or concertos than I began to compose again with the greatest ease. The relief of finding that I could still write was a real joy. Instead of feeling that mentally I was developing into the equivalent of something rather more stodgy than a half-boiled suet pudding, I began to feel like a gay and cheerful soufflé (ibid., p. 265).

White was probably the best known and certainly one of the most highly regarded British songwriters in the 1890s, but by the time of her death in 1937, she, and her music, had largely been forgotten. She played little part in later scholarship on the so-called English Musical Renaissance, generally regarded as the period from about 1880 to 1914, the period of her greatest popularity. Historian Percy Young, for example, dismissed White as a composer whose ‘limited technical accomplishment gave no more than adequately processed drawing-room songs’ (1967, p. 539). White’s continued neglect was brought home to me vividly in 1993 when I came across an article on unusual wall coverings in a copy of the interior design magazine Elle Decoration:

If paint is too plain, but you can’t find the wallpaper you want – think lateral. Cover your walls with brown paper for the ultimate cheap, chic backdrop or for the armchair traveller, pin up your maps. Nothing is sacrosanct... (‘Off the Wall’ 1993, p. 50).

The first proposal was to use old sheet music, material which the author was quick to point out can always be picked up very cheaply. The piece of music used to illustrate the article, the first thing to meet the reader’s eye, was a copy of White’s ‘How Do I Love Thee?’, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning setting from 1885. I had already been researching White’s music and life for several years, slowly piecing together her story and discovering her striking musical voice. That for others this voice was silent, worthy only of providing cut-price wallpaper, seemed a bitterly appropriate metaphor for the place of White and her contemporaries within the history of British music.

At around this time, an editor for Pandora Press asked me to compile a guide to women composers. I was slightly dubious for two reasons: first, wasn’t this simply adding the names of women to those of men, without questioning the reasons why they were silenced and unknown? And second, the danger of creating an alternative canon of women; who would I choose to include? But I could not resist the chance to tell the stories of the American and British women, including White...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Editor’s introduction
• PART I: Challenging gender inequalities
• PART II: (Re)Discoveries
• PART III: Aesthetics and music creation
• PART IV: Performance and reception
• PART V: Opportunities and leadership in the music professions
• PART VI: New perspectives on women’s work in music
• Index