What percentage?!

five15 Launch Video from London Oriana Choir on Vimeo.


Bravi to the London Oriana Choir. When it turned out that fewer than 4% of people questioned could name a composer who was female, they decided to do something to help redress the balance.

Their new project, five15, centres on the commissioning of 15 new works, aiming to give "a voice" to women composers. Cheryl Frances-Hoad is to be composer in residence. The project will launch formally with a concert on the Cutty Sark on 6 July.

It looks absolutely excellent and includes everything from a competition for young composers to a recording, the publication of an anthology, workshops and incentives for others to follow suit.

The website explains everything. Do take a look.

The project’s aims are:

To help address the lack of recognition shown to women composers in the UK.

To champion the work of British women composers so that they and their work are more widely recognised for the long term.

Through our performances and education/outreach work, to provide opportunities for women composers and mentoring for young composers.

Activities planned over the five years include:

Commissions: Commissioning 15 new choral works from five emerging women composers of all ages over a period of five years which the choir will perform in the UK and abroad. Each composer will have the chance to work closely with the choir and Music Director over a period of a year and receive three paid commissions.

Anthology: Publishing an anthology of work by British women composers, including all the works the choir commissions, to provide a useful resource for other choirs.

Competition: Organising a competition for 18-24 year old composers and performing the top three winning works.

Programming: Committing to including the work of women composers in its self-promoted concerts, wherever possible.

Workshops & training: Developing and promoting a programme for workshops and training for the next generation of British women composers, including mentoring by an existing established female composer such as Cecilia McDowell and others.

Recording: Creating an album of all the commissioned five15 items and other works by women composers.

Festival: Launching a high profile festival with other partners devoted to the works of women composers.

Pledge: Encouraging other choirs in the UK to take the five15 pledge to support the work of women composers and commit to performing more of their works.

The choir’s passion and dedication in the project is demonstrated by the fact that it is funding the commissions in the first year out of its existing funds but will be seeking partners and other forms of sponsorship to help with executing the other aspects of the plan.

Why do we care so much? Look at the results of our survey into awareness of women composers

Choristers aren't only for Christmas

The composer Roxanna Panufnik isn't only writing an opera at the moment (our Silver Birch for next year's Garsington). She's also raising money for Friends of Cathedral Music, which aims  to support the making of music in cathedrals and sustain it for future generations. Reduced funding means that an increasing number of cathedral choirs are under threat and with them the wonderful musical experiences and educational opportunities for their young choristers. Rox has helped to launch the Diamond Fund for Choristers. They're doing a sponsored cycle to get the fundraising underway. Not just another Beethoven cycle, either: they're riding from Windsor to Westminster.

Choristers off duty! Photo: Steve Bainbridge

Here's a message from Roxanna:

Every Christmas we take for granted the sublime angelic voices that radiate from radio and TV - and are part of the very fabric of British culture. But many cathedrals choirs are at risk because of reduced funding and not enough boys and girls are aware of the amazing experience, opportunities and education being a chorister can bring. The Diamond Fund for Choristers has been launched by Friends of Cathedral Music as a supersonic drive to keep our choristers flourishing - please support us in our epic cycle, from St George's Chapel Windsor to Westminster Abbey as part of this journey! 
Love from the WACky RacerS(cycling team of Westminster Abbey Choir School) xxx

Please help support the choristers of the future at her JustGiving page, here.

It's the Proms!

A concert in a car park, pufferfish with doughnuts and a dancing Katie Derham: here's my Proms preview for the new-look Independent. 

It's a very safe season, on balance, but there are some great experiments with venues, five women conductors (in two months of daily concerts...I haven't worked out the percentage, but it's small) and some real gems among the performances. The selection of top ten Proms is my personal one, but there are at least ten others I could have included equally happily. 

I wouldn't say no to a waltz around the arena, but I do think it would be more of a thrill if some conceptual feathers could be ruffled now and then... Still, we all think we know what we want of the Proms - but we aren't the ones who have to deal with the realities of filling that hall.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/proms-2016-the-highlights-and-the-top-10-proms-a6986751.html

Three days left...

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(The Lovely and) Talented: a guest post by composer Emily Doolittle

The composer Emily Doolittle has been pondering the niceties of the word "talented". She Googled "talented composer" and was both interested and not too delighted when she saw what happened. But it's not simply a patronising way in which women musicians are sometimes described: she detects a more general problem in the use of this word. Does it perhaps set up false expectations about how tremendously hard musicians actually have to work to achieve the necessary standards? Does it perhaps "deprofessionalise" the entire field? I've asked her to write a guest post on the subject, so here it is.

THE (LOVELY AND) TALENTED...

by Emily Dootlittle

A couple years ago I had a piece performed on a programme of music by women composers. I was a bit surprised that we were collectively described as “talented”: I’d always associated that word with students and young people, and most of us were professional composers in our 30s, 40s, and beyond. Although “talented” was almost certainly intended as complimentary, it came across to me as a bit patronizing. Since then I’ve noticed a number of examples where composers who are women are described, individually or collectively, as “talented”.

Wondering if it was just me who found this a slightly dismissive way of describing composers, I conducted an informal Facebook and Twitter poll on other people’s reaction to the word. Approximately a third of the friends who responded felt it was an unproblematic compliment; a third agreed that it was applied in a slightly gendered way, with (often unintended) condescending connotations; and a third found it problematic for other reasons, with or without being used in a gendered context. 

Describing someone as “talented” can erase the years of hard work that go into being a composer or performer. “Talented” may suggest that someone has potential, but has not yet produced much – perhaps a suitable descriptor for a student (though I prefer more precise descriptions like “learns quickly,” “has great ideas,” or “knows how to work to achieve what they want”), but not for someone who is already accomplished. It can serve to deprofessionalize the whole field of music, suggesting that good musicians are just lucky, not people who have devoted consistent, long-term effort (in an often hostile cultural and financial climate) to developing their skills. 

Some performers noted that people who described them as “talented” often expected them to perform for free. I think describing musicians as “talented” can also be a way of making us into something “other” – writing us off as quirky societal outliers, rather than recognising that anyone can make music as a meaningful part of their lives, if they have the opportunity to learn, a willingness to work, and a culture that supports music and the arts as an essential part of life for all.

Still curious about whether women were disproportionately described as “talented”

I turned to my other favourite online resource, Google, and did a search for “talented composer”. Indeed, my suspicions were confirmed. Of the first 40 results returned for “talented composer,” 10 referred to women and 12 to young composers. The first 40 results for “gifted composer” returned 6 references to women, and 8 to young composers. “Skilled composer” returned 2 references to women, and “genius composer” and “masterful composer” returned only one reference each! I couldn’t do a search just for “composer,” because so many of the results were non-music-related, but a search for “music composer” also returned only 1 woman out of the top 40 results. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that women and men composers are still described in different terms. A number of recent studies have shown that recommendation letters for women and men in a variety of fields tend to employ different words to describe the applicants. (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/10/letters)

This post isn’t intended as a criticism of anyone who has described women composers as “talented”: I’m more interested in bringing to light how our language use shows our lingering, often unconscious, cultural assumptions about women. We’ve reached a time where we’re collectively quite willing to accept women as having potential (more than 50% of music students in conservatories and universities are now women), but not willing to accept women as leaders (note the shortage of women conductors in the highest positions). I do suggest that if we are writing about women composers, we take a moment to consider if we would write about male composers of similar stature in the same way, and if not, think about changing our language. But I certainly hope this doesn’t put anyone off of writing about women composers, out of fear of accidentally using the wrong words. It’s only through writing and discussing that we can understand where we are, and how far we still have to go.

Composer Emily Doolittle was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1972, and lived in Amsterdam, Montreal, and Seattle, before moving to Glasgow in 2015. Upcoming projects include the premiere of her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear, by Glasgow-based Ensemble Thing, in October, 2016, and interdisciplinary research into seal vocalizations at St. Andrews University. Her CDall spring was released on the Composers Concordance Label in July, 2015.  www.emilydoolittle.com