Feminism

I won’t be posting during December, so I’ll leave you with a longer piece to be getting on with. This was my keynote address at the Musique et Genre conference in Paris in December 2015.

Wishing you all a vibrantly feminist holiday season, and see you in the New Year

Individuals construct their sense of self through autobiography. We each maintain an internal narrative, using the discourses our culture provides, to make sense of our experiences and thus understand who we are, what we have done, and what we might yet do. We also do this in groups, where shared stories bind people together into cohorts. We tell the stories to newcomers to make them ‘one of us’. We re-tell the stories amongst ourselves to re-live shared experience, and update our understanding of what that experience means. In academia, we call this process ‘literature review’. We create our identities as scholars through the search terms we choose to build our bibliographies.

Here are notes on the last tranche of playlist items. The exercise has reset my listening habits in all kinds of useful ways. It’s been an excellent discipline to make myself listen to lots of music I didn’t previously know – one of those things that is as enriching as you’d anticipate, but you don’t necessarily do unless you make the effort.

I have a few notes still to bring together about what it’s taught me about how women’s history is written, so that’s to follow up in the new year. I am minded to continue the process of seeking out women’s music for regular listening – having expanded my boundaries I feel I would miss it if I let go of this outward engagement too readily. I may not blog about every item next year, though, and I will certainly allow myself to go back and explore more than one work by a single composer.

The next instalment of thoughts on my listening project for 2017. 87 items in, and I’ve not yet repeated a composer. Well, by this stage I’m not going to, am I? The full list and links to previous commentaries can be found here. Happy listening!

• Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Concerto Romantico for viola and chamber orchestra (1956). Another interesting exercise in confronting my own prejudices: I have a hunch I came across some pieces for children by Peggy Glanville-Hicks in a pile of music being discarded from Southampton University Music Department from which students were invited to help themselves. I thus had her implicitly stereotyped as (a) a writer of simple things and (b) not worth keeping. Would I have assumed that music for children by a man represented the sum of his ambition? Not that I articulated this thought consciously, you realise, I just notice it when coming across major works and thinking, ‘Oh I didn’t know she wrote this stuff!’
• Claudia Rusca, 'Jubilate Deo Omnis Terra' from I Sacri Concerti (1630). Ensemble Frottola have recorded quite a few of Rusca’s Sacri Concerti, so it’s worth a listen around.

And another catch-up on my Playlist project for 2017. Quite a long post this time, as I’ve been romping through lots of music during August while I had plenty of time for listening. I’m expecting to be adding to the list rather more slowly in September as I’ll be out and about coaching a lot.

• Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Sinfonia to Talestri, Regina delle Amazzoni(1760). The tale of a successful female ruler was apparently an appealing topic for aristocratic women of the C18th.
• Valborg Aulin, Piano Sonata in F-minor, Op.14 "Grande Sonate sérieuse" (1885). I feel I’m getting a bit repetitious when I keep remarking on composers who defy the stereotype of C19th female composers having access to the market for domestic music, but generally being locked out of more substantial genres. But it’s interesting that people keep peddling that stereotype even when listing the substantial output in more public genres such as Aulin’s.

As you know, one of my projects for 2017 is making sure I’m listening to a lot more music by women by compiling a youtube playlist. One of the obvious points that keeps coming out in my commentaries on the pieces is how splendid so much of them are, and how boggling it is that I didn’t previously know it.

A possibly less obvious, and certainly less polite, point is that it makes me wonder how some of the repertoire by men that I do know seems to be taken seriously. I’m not saying that, say, Schumann wasn’t a ‘genius’ (though I am putting in scare quotes to distance myself from that rather loaded label), but I am saying that the label unhelpfully keeps some of his more irritating efforts in the repertoire (Symphony No 4, I am looking at you) when there are clearly better examples of the genre that get ignored because they are by people to whom the ‘genius’ label has been withheld – i.e. women.

Time for another catch-up on my Playlist project for 2017. I'm now over half-way towards my goal of 100 pieces this year, and I've yet to repeat a composer. Additions may accelerate this month, as I have more listening time than usual (and in anticipation of having less listening time later in the year).

• Marianna Martines, Dixit Dominus (1774), 1st movement. I was aware of Martines as a composer for harpsichord, but her choral music is a pleasant revelation. This is a decent amateur performance – good enough for me to want to get my hands on it and make it an even better one!
• L. Viola Kinney: 'Mother's Sacrifice' (1909). Quite captivating piece, speaking through the languages of both C19th pianism and American popular song. And some extraordinary uses of sequence, too.

  The video includes two more pieces by more recent composers, Dorothy Rudd Moore and Zenobia Powell Perry, so stay on and listen to those too.

‘Versus?!’ I hear you cry. It’s true that we usually use these two words interchangeably when we talk about opening up our choirs (or our schools or our boardrooms) to attract people from a wider range of demographics than hitherto. But the two words approach the same project from interestingly distinct angles, and once you start thinking through the differences it can affect how you go about that project.

The immediate context for this is the Barbershop Harmony Society’s new strategic vision, which I both praised and critiqued a few weeks back. The topicality is far wider than this, of course, but it was this set of debates that had me thinking about this in a more focused fashion, and coming to the conclusion that, if you want to get ‘Everyone in Harmony’, inclusiveness is a more useful term to focus on than diversity.

Music history, like any history, isn’t a neutral portrayal of the past, but the result of a value-laden selection process. Somebody decides what counts as salient historical fact worthy to be included in the narrative.

Revisionist history comes about when someone notices that the choices underlying the narratives we have inherited about our pasts no longer chime well with the values with which we aspire to live our presents. They then go and dig out information about people and events that had hitherto been omitted, and they re-interpret those already included, sometimes finding quite different meanings in them.