International Women's Day: Is classical music blazing a trail?

It's International Women's Day and in the musical world it's the most exciting one yet. While protests and marches and the movements #MeToo and #TimesUp are raising awareness and causing at least the start of real shift in attitudes, the musical world seems to be going a step further - because everywhere you look, powerful organisations are making commitments to doing something positive to change this enduring societal mess once and for all.



• Today Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance unveils an ambitious plan called Venus Blazing. Essentially, they are abolishing all-male concerts.

They pledge that music by women of the past and the present will make up more than half of its concert programmes in the 2018-19 academic year. It also intends to build up an online database of composing women and expand its library to make sure the students have access to the material.

Harriet Harman is launching the programme and says: "Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance is strongly committed to diversity in all elements and it has a mission to constantly challenge the status quo. Venus Blazing is a great example of just how it can do this. It will encourage and inspire its students - many of whom will go on to shape the future of the performing arts - to engage with the historic issue of gender imbalance in music by women, and ensure that it does not continue into the next generation. I welcome this bold initiative to raise awareness of the disparity that has long existed in music and shine a light on music that has so frequently been overlooked. I am also greatly looking forward to hearing some of the musical treasures by women I might not otherwise have had the chance to hear in performance."

The programme has been spearheaded by Dr Sophie Fuller, programme leader of TLCMD's Masters programmes and author of The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, and Jonathan Tilbrook, head of orchestral studies. Sophie Fuller says: "It is widely recognised that music created by women - whatever the genre - is heard much less often than music created by men. In past centuries, it was difficult for women to find a meaningful musical education or get equal access to performance opportunities, but there have always been those who leapt over any obstacles placed in their way. We at Trinity Laban want our students and their audiences to hear their often powerful work. It is our duty to celebrate women's music, not just for one year, but to provide the structures, support and encouragement to ensure that this is a lasting legacy for all future musicians and music lovers."

Among performance highlights is Thea Musgrave's opera A Christmas Carol (December 2018), symphonies by Louise Farrenc and Grace Williams performed by the Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra, an exploration of the music of Trinity Laban alumna Avril Coleridge-Taylor (the daughter of Samuel, incidentally) and music by current Trinity Laban composition students and staff, including Soosan Lolavar, Laura Jurd and Deirdre Gribbin - whose Violin Concerto 'Venus Blazing' has given the name to this celebration.

This development really is groundbreaking, because it often looks as if it's at conservatoire level that the rot sets in.  More girls than boys take up music as children and teenagers, but that has somehow not translated into those who emerge with a high level of success in the profession. Therefore something must be going wrong in the middle.

Looking back, it strikes me that at university I was never auditioned, examined, interviewed or indeed taught by anyone who wasn't a man. My own aspirations to compose were snuffed out by the university patriarchy (or whatever it was) within one month. We never studied any pieces of music by women. The place was awash with would-be conductors, some of whom have done very well since and deservedly so - but any woman who wanted to conduct had to struggle to make headway. And was there sexual abuse going on? Oh blimey. I'm sure we used to joke about the guy who was a Handle Specialist.

So at student level everything needs attention, from the makeup of the boards (which play a larger role behind the scenes than one might realise) to the membership of the faculties to, as above, the approach to programming and role models. This does need addressing, and it needs it now.

• Today BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting 24 hours of music written by women. Every note you'll hear today was set down by a composer who was female. Listen here. Just been listening there to Francesca Caccini - fabulous stuff, sung by Ruby Hughes. Now listening: Ruth Crawford Seeger.

• This week we've already looked at the Keychange project from the PRS for Music Foundation, in which 45 international festivals have committed to 50:50 programming of music by men and women and the Proms agreed that half of all its new commissions would be by composing women.

• We've also talked to conductor Laurence Equilbey, who conducts Louise Farrenc's Symphony No.3 at the Barbican tonight with her Insula Orchestra, plus the Beethoven Triple Concerto with a dynamic trio of female soloists. I'm going along. And to Silvina Milstein, whose music is featured in the Lontano concert at King's College London tonight.

• The WOW Festival at the Southbank Centre is in full flood - the annual Mirth Control music and comedy evening, compèred by the incomparable Sandi Toksvig and conducted by Alice Farnham, is on Sunday. It's called 'Arts Over Tit'.

• Here's an important editorial from The Guardian, on the fact that promoting music by women is good for everybody because it widens the talent pool and doesn't threaten excellence but promotes it.

• Jude Kelly is leaving her post as artistic director of the Southbank Centre later in the spring to concentrate on running WOW full time. She has also introduced the WOW Women in Creative Industries Awards - the result, I understand, of the suggestion with which I went to her about four years ago, that we need awards for women in music to help blaze this trail. (Now we may also need one specifically for women in classical music.) I do think these things make a difference because they become emblems of success, helping to establish role models and being a high-profile example of what people can achieve, putting those achievements on very public display.

• Yesterday we had a fabulous day in which the Women in Music Breakfast at the Southbank Centre was attended by a huge number of women and a goodly number of men too, which is really important - if we don't get men on our side, the battle for change is impossible.

• And then an evening at the Institut Français, part of its Women Shaping the World series, in which I served as moderator to a seriously inspiring panel of conductors Claire Gibault and Alice Farnham, composer and conductor Eimear Noone and director of Harrison Parrott Lydia Connolly. The discussion went with real pizzazz. Claire told us that if we think things are bad for women conductors in Britain, we should just try France - in the UK 6 per cent of conductors represented by agents are female, but in France only 4 per cent - and that it is much more difficult to be a great musician than to be a politician (she spent 5 years as an MEP). As for being a moderator, the only snag, I discovered, is that none of us were remotely moderate. Huge thanks to the Institut Français for a smashing occasion, and wonderful cheese and wine.

Have a wonderful day, my sisters and brothers. We can do this.

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Tonight: discussion on Equality and Conductors at the Institut Français

Slightly short notice, I know, but here's what's happening tonight. Do come along if you can. I'm chairing and we have some really amazing speakers! It's part of the Institut Français's Women Shaping the World series and takes places at the Institut's premises in South Kensington.

To celebrate International Women’s Day and echoing French conductor Laurence Equilbey’s concert at the Barbican [tomorrow], the Institut français is hosting a panel of women conductors to debate on gender equality issues in the domain of classical and contemporary music. To this day, the gap between female and male conductors is mind-blowing and should be addressed.

Women conductors Claire Gibault (France), Eimear Noone (Ireland) and Alice Farnham (UK) will bring their own perspective on equality on the podium and the role of women conductors in programming women composers and musicians. Lydia Connolly, joint managing director of Harrison Parrott, a leading advocate for more women on the podium, will also join the debate.

 
£10, members & conc. £8 

The talk will be followed by a wine and cheese.

See also on 8 March at the Barbican, Insula Orchestra: Beethoven and Farrenc, conducted by Laurence Equilbey and including Symphonie n°3 by French composer Louise Farrenc as well as Beethoven’s Triple Concerto performed by the violinist Alexandra Conunova, the cellist Natalie Clein and the pianist Elisabeth Brauss.

In which Anna Magdalena goes to Australia

You might remember I trotted off to Leipzig in October and was duly bowled over by Bach's Thomaskirche, to say nothing of all the Mendelssohn and Schumann connections. But there was a special reason for going to see Bach's home environment, and at last it is all announced.

Kathryn Stott, who has taken over as artistic director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Far North Queensland, has assembled an astounding, fresh and gorgeous festival for this July-August, with a stunning array of international performers and repertoire old, new and brand-new, from Chausson to Bach - the violin partitas by candlelight with Karen Gomyo - to the Gypsy Kings; Chinese music from Sheng master Wu Tong, and Argentinian bandoneonist JP Jofre with tango; and there'll even be concerts on uninhabited coral islands - Townsville is on the Great Barrier Reef coast. The full festival programme is here. And I am just a little bit thrilled to be part of it all. The festival has performed some of my stuff before - A Walk through the End of Time and the Viardot-Turgenev programme were both done there 8-10 years ago under Piers Lane's direction - but for logistical reasons this will be my first visit.

Kathy has commissioned a new music-and-words piece from me called Being Mrs Bach. It's the story of Anna Magdalena Bach and will be in the Bach by Candlelight evening on 1 August, with music from baritone Roderick Williams, soprano Siobhan Stagg, cellist Guy Johnston and many more - here's the full programme and line-up - and I get to narrate it myself. I am also giving a talk in the festival's Winterschool about some notable women composers of the past. As for the prospect of sitting on stage while Roddy Williams sings 'Mache dich mein Herze rein', I reckon for that it would be worth going to the ends of the earth. (And do you think Anna Magdalena wrote the cello suites?)

Whatever happened to...Rebecca Clarke?

This Thursday is International Women's Day and the music world is going gratifyingly bananas over it. Here at JDCMB we have already had posts about two of the events and there will be more during the course of this week (and no doubt beyond).

Today I would like to explore the fate of one of Britain's finest historical women composers, someone whose work remains underrated and deserves much better: Rebecca Clarke (pictured above).

Recently I was asked to write some programme notes about Clarke's Dumka, or Duo Concertante, which was being given at the Wigmore Hall by Henning Kraggerud, Natalie Clein and Christian Ihle Hadland, so I spent a little time reading about her. Please visit the Rebecca Clarke Society for more...

Briefly, here are 10 things that happened to her.

1. Born in Harrow to a German mother and American father, she studied violin at the Royal Academy of Music until her harmony teacher proposed marriage. She left.

2. She became a pupil of Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music instead - his first female student. Unfortunately her father then threw her out of the house and cut off her financial support.

3. She therefore had to leave the RCM and began to earn her living as a professional violist, playing in Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra. She was one of its first female members.

4. In 1916 she moved - alone - to the USA, where she drew notice three years later when her Viola Sonata tied in first place at a competition at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music, sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. She termed this her "one little whiff of success". Coolidge commissioned her Rhapsody for Cello and Piano in 1923.


5. The Viola Sonata, still one of her best-known works, impressed people so much that they couldn't believe it was written by a woman. It was rumoured that 'Rebecca Clarke' must be a pseudonym for a man and it was even suggested that the piece was really by Ernest Bloch. Clarke did not speak up to refute those expressed doubts regarding her genuine authorship of the work until 1977.

6. By 1924 she was back in London and becoming a sought-after violist on the chamber music circuit. She worked a lot with our old friends Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri. She was a founder member in 1927 of the English Ensemble. However, her composition began to take a back seat.

7. World War II: she returned to America, lived with her brothers and took a post as a nanny. But - was her creativity drying up? Nope. The Duo Concertante dated from about 1941.

8. She married an old friend from her RCM days, the pianist James Friskin, who was on the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York.

9. As late as her nineties, she returned to some of her old pieces and reworked them. She died in 1979 aged 93.

10. Despite increasing recognition of her work at long last, much of her music remains unpublished. Several works were issued in 1998-9. More remains. In fact she wrote more than 100 compositions. In her lifetime, only 20 were published.

Here's hoping that more will emerge, sooner rather than later.

Here's the Viola Sonata played by no lesser team than Gerard Caussé and Katya Apekisheva at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford a couple of years ago. Enjoy.

Spilt champagne, burnt umber and words that have no sound...

In a special concert for International Women's Day at King's College London on Thursday, there's a chance to explore the music of Silvina Milstein and Effy Efthymiou, with Lontano under the baton of Odaline de la Martinez. Here's a guest post from Silvina telling us about some of the paintings, places and poetry that inspired her to create the works featured - from Argentinian night scenes to Vermeer's earth-toned interiors. Tickets for the concert are free, but please reserve a place via Eventbrite, here. JD

SPILT CHAMPAGNE, BURNT UMBER AND WORDS THAT HAVE NO SOUND

Guest post by composer Silvina Milstein

The Music Department of King's College London celebrates women's contributions to contemporary 'art' music with a concert conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. The programme features recent works by Effy Efthymiou (currently doing a doctorate under my supervision) and a selection of my chamber music written in the past 20 years. The post-concert discussion, chaired by musicologist Matthew Head, will explore what the category of 'woman composer' means to Effy and me. 

For me, preparing for this concert has been a powerful and mysterious experience, as it has involved revisiting works that go as far back as 1998 (as in the case of Book of Shadows, written for the Endellion String Quartet and a narrator). In those days I was fascinated by Borges's interpretations of Oriental literatures, mysticism and Edgar Allan Poe's macabre imagery. Book of Shadows is a montage of two Chinese tales and a fragment from a story by Poe. Motifs of magic, love and death cast shadows upon each other. In this concert we will hear its second movement (in the version without narrator), depicting Poe's accounts of the images that rush through the mind of a prisoner of the Inquisition as he hears "the dream-sentence of death". It was in this piece that most of the ingredients that make my current musical language emerged.

Approaching death is further explored in "and told her in words that had no sound" from The Undending Rose diptych for solo violin (1999), which takes its title from a poem by Borges, in which the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur addresses a rose "in words that had no sound, as one who thinks rather than one who prays". Attar has reached old age; he is blind and admits to knowing nothing, but foresees that "there are more ways to go; and everything is an infinity of things". The Sufi images of eternity as experienced by Borges, himself old and blind, approaching the end of his days, reminded me of what Lukács calls "the touch of vertigo...the most profound meaning of form: to lead to the great moment of silence". So I attempted a piece that has the form of a sigh, a sort of exhalation, whose contrasting and precipitous final section, while aspiring to an "unending" quality, eventually turns out to be a sort of cadence.

Silvina Milstein

In the context of a concert to celebrate International Women's Day, I have been reflecting on the extent that female and male voices are reflected in my music. It seems that in the above two works my imaginings were triggered by voices of men articulating universal experiences. But in "cristales y susurros" ("crystals and whispers", for a mixed septet with harp), the source is more overtly erotic and mundane, springing from memories of what I heard as a young woman about the night districts of Buenos Aires. Here, evocative gestures and motives drawn from Buenos Aires vernacular continuously proliferate, echoing the ripples left by a magical night as it is forgotten to later resurface as torn lace, shimmering silk and split champagne.

Contrastingly while composing the other septet to be heard in this concert, "ochre umber and burnt sienna" (2012), the source of inspiration was further remote: I was preoccupied with Vermeer's depictions of women in their private spaces, in paintings that I saw at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. While composing this piece I attempted to enter the intimate world of those 17th-century women and became absorbed in a mode of looking at those portraits that involved focusing on how their expressive backgrounds - saturated with tiny strokes of earth pigments - invite us to enter domestic spaces, in which pensive women ponder and rest. H Parry Chapman commented that some of Vermeer's paintings "focus so closely on the solitary, thoughtful, absorbed woman as to create the possibility for self-identification on the part of a female viewer. Of course we can no more read what is inside these women's hearts and minds than we can read what it in their letters. Still we are drawn in by the suggestion of their inwardness. In short, the Dutch domestic interior becomes a metaphor for a kind of interiority that includes women."
SM

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lontano-conducted-by-odaline-de-la-martinez-tickets-43231912815

Hear extracts of the music here:

https://soundcloud.com/silvinamilstein/cristales-y-susurros-excerpt

https://soundcloud.com/silvinamilstein/ochre-umber-and-burnt-sienna-excerpt-opening

Silvina Milstein was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. After the Argentinian military coup of 1976 she emigrated to Britain. At Glasgow University her composition teachers were Judith Weir and Lyell Cresswell, and at Cambridge University she studied with Alexander Goehr.  In the late eighties she held fellowships at Jesus College and King's College (Cambridge), and is currently a professor of music at King's College London.

In addition to composing Silvina has a distinguished career as a teacher and scholar.  Her book Arnold Schoenberg: notes, sets, forms was published by Cambridge University Press.

She has received commissions from leading ensembles and the BBC.  A selection of her chamber works has been recorded by Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez and issued by lorelt.  Several of her most recent pieces for large chamber ensemble --tigres azules (London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern), surrounded by distance (London Sinfonietta) and de oro y sombra (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group)-- were premiered under Oliver Knussen.