do we actually need to do this? - a message from saskia
When Hannah first suggested doing a concert focussed on Pauline Viardot, my response was pretty much ‘that sounds nice, but does anyone know who she is, or care?’ (you can read our exact conversation below). We’d been close to finalising plans for another concert with a focus on much newer music. We’ll still put it on eventually, but I’d been so excited. Suddenly I was being asked to help organise something I didn’t know if I’d want to attend myself.
Of course, once I thought about it for two seconds, that’s kind of the point. Being an entity focussed on the music of unheard voices means programming concerts you know your audience will enjoy, by musicians they may not have encountered previously. While the women featured in this concert were not marginalised by today’s standards —they were in incredibly privileged positions in society to have careers in music— they have been almost completely erased from history or at least sidelined by the more famous men in their lives. Pauline Viardot, Maria Malibran, Clara Schumann, Fanny (Mendelssohn-) Hensel, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, Clémence de Grandval, and Josephine Lang were part of the first generation of women who could actively work as performers, composers and pedagogues, like men had been doing for centuries. How many of those names do you recognise?
Personally, I would like Tenth Muse to mainly programme music from the 21st century, not the 19th, but it feels extremely important to acknowledge, and actively demonstrate, that women have been part of art music as long as art music has existed. We just haven’t been told about them. Gender diverse, queer and disabled people surely have been as well, but (as far as I can tell, and I would love to be wrong about this!) it hasn’t been historically acknowledged and documented until recently, so is really really hard to learn about now.
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I found my undergraduate degree in classical music very alienating.
In my final year of highschool I’d been president of my school Amnesty group. We raised something like $2000 for charity over the year and organised an inter school human rights/ activism workshop which groups from 10 schools attended. Obviously I had a lot of teacher support, but I was very aware of my privilege, racial and gender inequality, and plenty of international political issues that have only recently become mainstream (for example, Palestine.) And I thought this was normal, and normal to talk about.
So, I arrived at uni, excited to finally learn what classical music was really like, and about. And then, over three units of music history, taken by multiple lecturers, we discussed one woman. It was Clara Schumann, for her role in changing the piano recital format by memorising repertoire, i.e. not her compositional career. I’m pretty sure that our textbook mentioned the major role that women had in printing, publishing and distributing music, but this wasn’t covered in class. We may have also touched on Hildegard of Bingen, but more as an example of very old music, than acknowledgement of the fact that women do in fact also compose.
Women weren’t discussed much in other units and contexts either, and if they were, it was almost always in a performance context, not for an academic contribution, and almost never as a composer. In our year and a half of history units, I don’t think we discussed a single Indigenous person, or person of colour— maybe when we briefly talked about the rise of Jazz? A few queer composers (e.g. Benjamin Britten) were covered, but their sexuality wasn’t a factor in this.
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I really did just think that women didn't write music, or that if they did, no one cared. It sucked. Obviously, I could have done my own research, but instead I just felt like maybe classical music wasn’t for me. The things I was learning were interesting, but completely without nuance or intersectionality until I started my honours degree. It was through the advocacy of other students, and listening to the women composers studying at uni, that it became obvious I was wrong. What a relief that was! But not for long, because why was this information new in the first place?
I’ve arrived here in a very roundabout way, but all of this is why this concert is so important to me. So often, women composers aren’t programmed, because people are performing the music they’ve already learned about, and they are literally unaware that women wrote music in that genre too. Or they think that audiences aren’t interested. But if they have’t heard it before, whose fault is that? Particularly in chamber contexts, there is SO much music by women, spanning hundreds of years, that is just as good as the music by men that you’ve probably already seen five times by now (if you happen to live in Perth, at least). I don’t want any music student, or person, to be wondering if women write music too, or not even noticing if they haven’t learned about any before.
If you’ve heard of Pauline Viardot, Maria Malibran, Clara Schumann, Fanny (Mendelssohn-)Hensel, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, Clémence de Grandval, or Josephine Lang, I’m confident that you’d already be planning on coming to our concert. If you haven’t, but you like 19th century salon music, this will be right up your alley. If you haven’t really heard classical music by women before, here’s a chance to rectify that. There will even be cake.
Love,
Saskia
Co-Founder of TMI
