They were kind enough to say that a small collection of her songs offered an ‘artistic study of masculine seriousness’ but, sadly, a woman could only go so far: all but one lacked ‘a commanding individual idea’. They could, for example, hear the chromosomes in the compositions of Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn’s big sister. We are still not in Amy Beach’s brave new world.įor centuries, commentators have been quite sure that women ‘betray’ themselves in their music. As for recordings, the imbalance is even more striking. The harsh reality, however, is that for every performance of any one of Maconchy’s thirteen string quartets there are hundreds of performances of Shostakovich. Throughout her long career, she worked tirelessly to achieve everything that her American predecessor, Amy Beach, suggested needed to be done to create a world in which the public would ‘regard writers of music’ and estimate ‘the actual value of their works without reference to their nativity, their colour, or their sex.’ Get your work out there, advised Beach: compose ‘solid practical work that can be printed, played, or sung.’
All she wanted was for the category of ‘woman composer’ to be rendered absurd, redundant. All Maconchy wanted was to be called a composer.
#Dee compose musition series#
Her luscious work, The Land, was performed at the 1930 Proms to international acclaim (‘Girl Composer Triumphs’ screamed the headlines – she was 23) and she would compose a series of string quartets that have been compared to those of Dmitri Shostakovich. Consider Elizabeth Maconchy, who has been described as Britain’s ‘finest lost composer’. For millenia, women have tried to take their sex out of the cultural equation, all the while dreaming of a world in which people forget about your gender and simply commission, perform and hear your music because it’s good. Because what we believe about men, women and creativity is what matters – and has determined, for too long, who is allowed to compose music, what they are allowed to create, and whether their work is performed and remembered. Because the fact is that it is impossible to tell the sex of a composer, simply by listening to their music.ĭoes that mean the sex of a composer doesn’t matter? Hell no.
It’s not obvious, is it? And I can guarantee that you did not correctly identify which pieces were written by women, which by men.
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