The Reason Why - making Female Composers visible.
The term ‘classical music’ spans almost a thousand years of cultural history and unites a variety of styles and tonal languages that couldn’t be more different from each other. Johann Sebastian Bach has about as much in common with Hector Berlioz as Dolly Parton has with David Bowie. But Sebastian and Hector have one thing in common: they were both men. To this day, the classical canon that is played in concert halls and taught in schools is predominantly male.
According to statistics from the Bachtrack website, only 22 of the 200 most-performed composers in 2023 were women. In 2013 there were only 2. So it seems that there is at least a small upward trend. But parity is still a long way off. Why is that? One of the many reasons for this imbalance is ignorance.
For example, there is a widespread belief that there simply have not been enough female composers in the history of music to make a more diverse programme possible. And at first glance, this assumption seems logical. As the writer Virginia Woolf noted so very astutely in her famous essay A Room of One's Own, productive artistic work requires above all two things: a room of one's own and 500 pounds per year.
What Woolf means by this is that many talented women of the past lacked privacy and financial independence: in order to be able to paint, write or compose, you need a place where you can be undisturbed. And ideally, you also need a small financial cushion so that you can survive creative dry spells free from existential worries. For centuries, both seemed unattainable for the overwhelming majority of women. It is possible that many talented women simply gave up in the face of these huge obstacles. And anyway, why should a woman in the 19th century have gone through the struggle of writing a symphony if there was little to no possibility that the score would ever leave her desk drawer and be performed by a real-life orchestra?
But history is almost always more complicated than it is told, and as we all know, there is an exception to every rule.
As the archive Archiv Frau und Musik in Frankfurt is able to prove, many, many musical works by women have blossomed in the shadow of history – despite all social and historical hindrances: The archive has been focussing on the compositions by women since the 1970s and has accumulated letters, manuscripts and printed scores of around 2100 female composers from the 9th up to the 21st century. This treasure must be unearthed and made accessible to the general public.
Of course, one could ask at this point: what does political correctness have to do with art? Shouldn't a piece of music first and foremost be beautiful, touch us, stir us, make us laugh, cry or dream? Does it really matter who wrote it?
All these questions are justified, but they fail to recognise that every work of art needs someone to fight for it and bring it into the world: if Max Brod had not published Kafka's manuscripts after his death, if Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had not rediscovered and performed Johann Sebastian Bach's Saint Mathew-Passion - how many great works of art would have disappeared forever under the veil of oblivion? The same applies for female composers: this current and still very tentative renaissance of female composers is not about making the creator greater than the work. Nor is it about a petty tit for tat between the genders. It is about diversity.
As long as the work of these female artists remains unheard in the archives, we will miss out on unique concert experiences, emotional impulses and artistic perspectives. If we want the world of classical music to remain alive and not degenerate into a museum, from time to time we must make space for new narratives and listen to new voices. This is the only way in which music can be a faithful and honest mirror to society – one which reflects our own stories, dreams and struggles and which reminds us of what it means to be human.
by Anna Schors
