He looks at me in confusion: quirked brow, tilted head, opened mouth. I can nearly hear the cogs whirring in his brain as he tries to reconfigure his perception of me.
"So you arrange music," he asks me after a moment.
"I've made some arrangements, but usually I write my own stuff," I reply as kindly as I can.
"Oh, well I arrange music for band all the time," he says.
"That's awesome," I said not knowing what else to say.
For context, I just told this man I have a Master of Music in Composition from Carnegie Mellon University.
Conversations like this occur often in both my professional and personal life. I am incredibly proud of my musical accomplishments, yet I always dread bringing them up in conversation. A piece of the confusion is simply the fact that contemporary classical music is a bit esoteric and can feel elitist to non-musicians, but I feel that a larger part of these reactions has something to do with my identity as a woman.
When I was still in school, there were professors who only knew me as a singer even though I was in the composition program. Certain colleagues would criticize my work in the same breath they used to praise the work of our male peers. I have no problem receiving criticism, but when you are one of five women in a room of thirty men...criticism holds a different sort of weight. There were times when I had to present in studio alongside my male colleagues, and there was a palpable shift in unfocused energy when I spoke. The quiet attention awarded to my colleagues turned to a distracted buzz of side conversations and fidgeting when I presented my work.
And on the other hand, there were times when men would compliment me in a way that felt diminishing. The shock and awe with which they would express how my work and words impressed them tainted their praise with condescension. Should I be grateful that he finds my work worthy of his praise? Should I be impressed that he, as a man, seems to understand the work of me, a woman? It is possible that I am reading these situations too deeply, but, in my experience, praise from male peers is often part of an agenda.
This is all to say that to be a woman composer is to be a lone flame in a rainstorm- a powerful entity on its own which struggles to shine amidst the deafening maelstrom of masculinity.
Western classical music has long felt like an exclusionary, elitist, pseudo-intellectual brotherhood. Many of our first encounters with classical music are in elementary school music classes and consist of introductions to "the great" composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. Our young minds associate classical music with brilliant white men in powdered wigs. If we learn about women, we often learn about them in relation to more famed composers. In these teachings, women are muses for male genius as opposed to the possessors of their own innate talents and gifts. Perhaps we spent a few minutes talking about Hildegard von Bingen, or Clara Schumann, or Fanny Mendelssohn, but never did I ever hear an educator talk about them with the same intellectual gravitas they held for "the greats." I don't know that I ever played more than two pieces by women in all my years in concert band. I certainly sang music by women in choir, but that could honestly be its own essay.
When I did learn about women composers in school, it was of my own volition. In my senior year at Skidmore College, I discovered the work of Susan McClary. If you don't know, Dr. McClary is a musicologist who specializes in feminist music criticism. One of her most important works is Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991) which engages with intersections of history, music theory, and gender. If you are at all interested in musicology and gender, I highly recommend taking a look at her work. It is nothing short of inspiring. While McClary analyzes the work and representations of women in classical music, she also takes a page from Foucault and analyzes what the absence of gendered discourse says about conservative musicology. She likens her own quest for finding gender and sexuality in music to the tale of Judith in Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. This particular quotation beautifully sums up her comparison: "perhaps more disturbing still to those who would present music as autonomous and invulnerable, it frequently betrays fear- fear of women, fear of the body."
McClary speaks to the likes of Eduard Hanslick and Igor Stravinsky who both asserted that the purest music possesses no content other than music: no words, no program, no extra-musical concepts. While music can and often does speak for itself, the assertion that there is pure music insinuates that there is such a thing as impure music. In the largely Christian context of Western Classical music history, words like "pure" and "impure," it is difficult not to associate this language with sexual oppression. If we take this concept of gendered language further, we notice that the verbiage we use to describe musical aesthetics is often interchangeable with the verbiage we use to describe women: beautiful, sublime, sumptuous, lovely, languid, sultry, lush, gorgeous, etc. There are, of course, more traditionally masculine adjectives we may use to describe certain sounds: brash, powerful, blaring, dominant, for example. However, the historical precedent for personifying objects as feminine leads me to the conclusion that music purists value non-programmatic instrumental music above all else because it supports the notion that composers wield the hand of God.
Let us consider the ideal piece of music for the likes of absolute music purists: molded from the mind of man and untainted by non-musical material. In this framework, music composition sounds like a new sort of creation myth where the music is Eve, and the composer is Adam. As someone who has spent quite a bit of time analyzing corrupted creation stories like those of Frankenstein, Dracula, and even the recent Poor Things, I find this narrative concerning. Oftentimes, these man-centric stories punish women simply so that man can conquer nature and create life on his own. In Frankenstein, all the women characters die. In Dracula, Lucy and Mina are both taken advantage of several times over. In Poor Things, which I have only recently seen, Bella undergoes unimaginable amounts of sexual and medical trauma. Though these are all works of Gothic fiction, I believe that there is a lesson to be learned about the consequences of erasing and discounting women's labors.
Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I do not personally believe in biologically predetermined roles for any sex or gender expression. This blog is simply a reflection of my own thoughts and experiences as someone who identifies as a woman in a historically masculine field.
Women have always created art, but the Western canon has long excluded us from its glory. There are countless reasons for this ongoing slight, but I believe the infantilization of women's minds is at the forefront of this issue. While men were schooled in creating masterworks of genius, women of the same social standing were taught domestic arts. She should be able to paint and draw and sing, but her accomplishments will never overshadow her gender. Her artistic bent will be a quaint, cute, character quirk. I use these words because I've heard them all used regarding my own creativity. Though women can now access higher education, music composition remains a predominantly masculine field. I believe the absence of highlighting women composers within the canon is the main reason women and girls feel discouraged pursuing composition. To be quite honest, I did not even know composition was a possibility until my second year of undergrad when I just happened to take an elective in the subject...and now it is my career.
McClary writes that many women compose in their own musical languages which often stray from the musical norms of their time. Her first and most famous example is Hildegard von Bingen and her work: "Of Patriarchs and prophets." According to McClary, this piece flagrantly violates the norms of medieval chant. Whether these creative violations were intentional, if women are excluded from musical discourse, then of course their work will sound unconventional. I would further this notion to say that simply the act of writing music as a woman under a patriarchal framework makes every piece inherent works of protest. It does not matter whether a woman who composes intends to be an agent of change, but to be a woman composer is to oppose tradition. There is a reason the term woman composer exists, and it is because the default is man.
To bring this back to my foray into the philosophies of Hanslick and Stravinsky, the implicit protest in women's work automatically lowers its value to the absolute music purist-- thus excluding women from the narrative of greatness. The consequences of this exclusion are both economic and social. Just look at the 2022 NPR exposé on sexual misconduct in Juilliard's composition program. Without delving too deep into the article, several women revealed that male professors offered sexual exchanges for professional development and one, John Corigliano, even excluded women from his studio completely. Though institutions have begun taking Title IX violations more seriously in the years since the #MeToo movement gained traction, the culture of sexism in classical music impacts whether women feel safe enough to pursue professional opportunities. I once mentioned the issue of only examining male "greats" to a professor, and he told me that my generation wants to see change too quickly- that progress is just slow in our industry. I don't understand how asking for respect and acknowledgement in a thousand-year-old institution is asking for too much too fast, but maybe I'm just impatient.
I do think, however, that there is a certain freedom when writing in the margins. I feel no kinship with the so-called greats of music history, so I do not strive for brilliance. The music I write is simply an extension of myself and what I have to say. My identity as a woman is completely enmeshed with my work, which is likely why I have developed such a strong musical language. Perhaps my music isn't as intentionally heady as my male colleagues, but I know that it is anything but derivative. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible is always exciting, but I think that a lot of composers, on their quest for male genius, cross the line between making music that is riveting and music that is simply masturbatory intellectualism. Many equate emulating the likes of Bernstein, Mahler, Stravinsky, Krum, etc. with brilliance, but I find no thrill in imitation. This is not to say that I don't desire acclaim deep down, but I create art that I find meaningful in the hopes that others may also recognize and appreciate my message.
I could go on for several thousand more words, and someday perhaps I will, but for now I leave you with this:
The classical music institution as we have long known it is not sustainable because it is inaccessible. This blog is purely a reflection of my own experiences, so I have only written about what it is like to be a white woman composer. Misogyny is, unfortunately, only a piece of the bigotry within the classical music world, and I do not have the experiences to speak to the rampant racism in the industry. If we want this historical institution to remain relevant, esteemed, and even profitable, the institution as a whole needs to take a page from Hildegard's book and flagrantly violate the tradition of upholding white male genius.
Further Reading:
McClary, Susan. “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism.” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994): 68–85.
Susan McClary. “Of Patriarchs... and Matriarchs, Too. Susan McClary Assesses the Challenges and Contributions of Feminist Musicology.” The Musical Times 135, no. 1816 (1994): 364–69.
Tsioulcas, Anastasia. "Former music students accuse two Juilliard teachers of sexual misconduct." Deceptive Cadence, (2022).
Neither your work nor any aspect of who your are is derivative. Keep up the critique and continue to compose with your joyous essence.