THE CASE FOR EQUITY
“…it takes time to forget Lili Boulanger’s very sad fate, to turn our attention exclusively to her work…I wonder why there is a certain reluctance to acknowledge her place in musical history. Perhaps it’s because she was on the fringes of what was happening at the time she was writing…But she is the first important woman composer in history.”
– NADIA BOULANGER
As we have explored over these past 5 weeks at San Francisco Performances, Nadia Boulanger, arguably the 20th Century’s greatest and most influential music educator, was decidedly wrong about her sister when she mentioned the above to Bruno Monsaingeon during their conversations at the end of her life. Her sister, Lili, was an important woman composer. However, she was not the first. She was one in a long line of women whose legacies were overlooked in the same ways.
Having explored the music of 26 women composers whose lifetimes span nearly 5 centuries over the course of these four salon concerts, we have barely scratched the surface of music composed by women. We weren’t able to explore the music of Isabella Leonarda, Emilie Mayer, Zenobia Powell Perry, Chen Yi, Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli, Caroline Shaw, Marianne Martines, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Louise Farrenc, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Vivian Fung, Hannah Lash, Shulamit Ran, Augusta Read Thomas, Chiara Maria Cozzolani, Hildegard von Bingen, Settimia Caccini, Louise Reichardt, and Maria Szymanowska…the list is endless.
Researching the lives and work of the women who have populated the programs we presented in San Francisco this past month, it’s alarming the number of times these women expressed an ignorance of their predecessors. From Clara Schumann in the 19th century and Nadia Boulanger and Undine Smith Moore in the 20th, woman after woman betrayed a belief that no great woman composer had come before them, that there were few or no examples of women’s compositional excellence, or that if there were, they were invisible.
The irony here is that many of these women, despite facing incredible societal misogyny, wielded enormous influence over the course of music history themselves. Fanny Hensel worked along with her brother to renew interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music is perhaps the most revered in today’s classical music canon but had largely been neglected at the time of her own music education. Clara Schumann’s legacy includes not only the canonization of her husband’s music, but also the current performance practice of playing recitals from memory and programming a repertoire that places a higher value on artistic “depth” over wunderkind, virtuosic, shallow showmanship. Leaps in transportation technology and infrastructure during the 19th century made it possible for both Clara Schumann and Pauline Viardot to achieve international fame as performers in ways that would previously have been unthinkable. Through their programming choices, they were instrumental in establishing the canon of repertoire focused on the music of Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven to which we still subscribe to this day. A product of this belief system that blossomed in the 19th century, Nadia Boulanger built on this as she taught multiple generations of composers and musicians, grounding her teaching in the study of “great works” by the “masters”, adding to this canon even earlier composers, such as Claudio Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez.
That each of these women would work so hard to promote the compositions of men, while neglecting the works of women is noteworthy. Assuming they knew of the operas of Francesca Caccini and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, the cantatas of Barbara Strozzi, the madrigals of Maddalena Casulana, or even the chants of Hildegard von Bingen, their dismissal of this repertoire is a testament to how difficult it is to resist internalizing the very oppressive views with which women are and were targeted. Alternately, they may not have had the resources and scholarship at their disposal to know of this music. Regardless of the reasons, most of these women were unwilling to varying extents to promote their own music and that of their contemporaries. It seems that Clara Schumann did not advocate for the music of her good friend Fanny Hensel in her recitals. Nor did Pauline Viardot widely program the songs of her friend Clara Schumann. Nadia Boulanger taught and knew many women composers, but the only one for whom she really seemed to advocate in a serious way was her sister.
“And another legend, that I am a neglected genius!... Crazy, because the music I have written is useless, not even badly done, useless! It is very offensive.”
– NADIA BOULANGER
It is hard to not internalize the destructive narratives society and history perpetuate in order to marginalize people on a second-by-second basis as we navigate the arduous path of life. A couple of weeks ago, in response to a tweet I posted of Clara Schumann’s infamous quote that “a woman should never wish to compose”, a fellow fan of Clara’s music posted an article she wrote about how much pain this infamous quote continues to cause. While I appreciate why the quote is incendiary, I also feel like it’s important, in context, to examine the textbook display of self-harm caused by internalized beliefs. Yes, Clara loved composing (as the author beautifully pointed out in her piece linked above). And despite that great love of composition, she still relegated her compositional work to a lesser plane than that of her husband. Clara Schumann survived her husband by four decades. In those forty years, she had ample opportunity to devote herself to her own music and promote it through her prolific concert tours. Instead, she only composed a very small handful of pieces after his death and devoted herself towards preserving Robert’s compositional legacy. Having deeply internalized misogynist beliefs about women’s artistic capabilities as well as women’s place in society and the home, the harm to Clara’s creative life was irreparable.
This harm doesn’t just extend to people. It also extends to music itself. A concept that has come up time and time again in researching these programs is a deeply gendered view of musical form. History has placed value on composers based on their success in the “masculine” musical forms of opera and large symphonic works. The “feminine” forms of song and piano “miniatures” are often deemed less worthy. Even Franz Schubert is largely remembered for the symphony he didn’t finish and the “great” one he did, rather than the 600+ lieder he composed. This gendered view of musical form is part of why women’s compositions have been historically overlooked. The narrative we are taught is that “simpler” music composed for smaller-scale forces historically deemed appropriate for women (voice and piano) and meant for the domestic sphere can be dismissed as cheap salon music, musical trifles lacking in depth and complexity. Yet an examination of Alma Mahler’s Lieder displays an innovative musical imagination that pushed the boundaries of form and tonality, conveying a depth and complexity of emotion on a par with (if not surpassing) her contemporaries, including her much-lauded husband, leaving one to wonder: what might have been?
Creativity is a fragile flower that must be protected and nurtured at all costs in order to properly have the chance to bloom. When it is denied the basics of water (artistic and community support) and soil richly fertilized by the historical possibility that comes before it, it cannot have the same opportunity to grow. Without the time for proper examination, through a lens fine-tuned to any implicit bias that could disadvantage a fair hearing, music of composers from any marginalized group will struggle to be seen and heard enough to enter the into the canon of the “greats”.
Canon is a human creation. It is dangerous to buy into the belief that all of the “great masters” rose into the pantheon of their own accord, simply on their own merit, like some sort of cream rising to the top. The narrative that as the classical music world leans into being more “woke”, we are being relegated to some sort of morass of mediocre music is a destructive fallacy. We view the masters as great largely because we have taken the time to examine them. We appreciate the genius of their works, because we have afforded them the opportunity to be understood and properly studied. By devoting time, resources, and energy to music largely ignored by history due to sexism and racism, we are finally giving the work of these composers the chance to be heard and understood in the same ways we have afforded those of their male, white counterparts.