IAWM Journal Article
The article below was published in the Fall Issue of the Journal of the
International Alliance for Women in Music (Vol 27, No. 2, 2021)
The IAWM is the world’s leading organization devoted to the equity, promotion, and advocacy of women in music across time, cultures, and genres.
Breaking Ground in An Isolated City and Celebrating Pauline Viardot’s 200th Anniversary
HANNAH LEE TUNGATE, Founder and Artistic Director
In 2021, it is not surprising that the lack of works by women on orchestral programs is a hot topic. The latest statistics from Donne UK have shown how dire the gender balance is in our orchestras throughout the world. It is therefore not unusual that the West Australian Symphony Orchestra has programmed just seven works by women out of 81 works for its 2022 season. This is a slight improvement over the previous year, when just two works by women were programmed. (Only one of those was performed due to the pandemic, and the other has been postponed to 2022.)
Perth, in Western Australia, has been mostly safe from Covid due to our isolated location, our state government’s stringent border closures, and snap lockdowns at even a murmur of an outbreak. Thanks to these factors, concerts have been performed, albeit with local artists. This has meant that many smaller arts organizations, such as Tenth Muse Initiative, have been able to thrive. Started by Saskia Willinge and I in February 2020, Tenth Muse Initiative grew from a passionate research project of mine, which I began in 2016 while I was studying at the University of Western Australia Conservatorium of Music. Dismayed at the lack of gender diversity in the music I was performing and hearing, I began my own projects. I organized multiple “Celebration of Women Composers” concerts, initiated my “WomenComposersProject” Instagram, advocated for performing works outside the “canon,” and started the Tenth Muse Initiative immediately after graduation.
The Initiative is a new collective based in Boorloo/Perth. Our mission is to set a new standard for art music events through championing and platforming underrepresented musicians and creators, while providing inclusive spaces where art music is welcoming and accessible. Our city is quite isolated, and while much innovative music is heard here, equitable programming still has a long way to go. We intend to educate the local community through advocacy, programming thoughtfully, and exposing musicians and concertgoers to composers they might not have encountered before. We hope that this can have a quick and significant effect as other groups take note (we hope) of the demand for diversity. Our name was inspired by Sappho, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets of her time; she was often called the “Tenth Muse,” and she was a symbol for feminine creativity. She remains a reminder that women have always pursued the creative arts, even if sometimes history forgets.
Our inaugural concert, held on International Women’s Day 2020, was a sell-out and featured a range of art and contemporary musicians from Barbara Strozzi to an a cappella composition by local Perth composer Julia Nicholls. In partnership with the UWA Conservatorium of Music, we donated all the profits to a local charity that helps women in Perth find financial stability. Unfortunately, IWD 2020 was held just a week before the Covid lockdowns began in WA, so we were unable to meaningfully build much momentum.
We re-emerged in July 2021 with a concert celebrating Pauline Viardot’s 200th Anniversary. Our concert, “Ugly Beauty,” featured works by Viardot, programmed alongside some of her contemporaries: Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel, Clemence de Grandval, Josephine Lang, and Viardot’s sister, Maria Malibran. We came across the phrase “Ugly Beauty” a few times in different articles about Viardot. When her appearance is mentioned, she’s often described as having an “ugly beauty,” or a captivating presence and not appearance. This struck us as an excellent place to begin a discussion about how, why, and for what women are remembered, especially women in music. Heinrich Heine wrote in an 1844 article on the Parisian musical season: “There is nobody to replace [Pauline Viardot], and nobody can replace her. This is no nightingale, who has only the talent of her species and admirably sobs and trills her regular spring routine; nor is she a rose—she is ugly, yet ugly in a way that is noble—beautiful I might almost say.”[1] Heine describes a talented, popular, arresting musician, whom he admires and is attempting to compliment. While doing this, he dismisses all the women singing professionally at the time, and reduces Viardot to being ugly, but in a “noble” way. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote: “[Viardot’s] voice was enormously powerful, had a prodigious range and was equal to every technical difficulty but, marvellous as it was, it did not please everybody. It was not a velvet or crystalline voice, but rather rough, compared by someone to the taste of a bitter orange.”[2] So, even in describing her voice, we found these odd, back-handed compliments. To us, this really summed up the contradictory and often problematic ways women in the arts are discussed, remembered, and valued.
The concert featured Australian star soprano Lisa Harper-Brown and West Australian Opera Young Artist Chelsea Kluga, along with emerging singers and instrumentalists. Harper-Brown said: “The significance of this concert in this time of ‘awakening’ cannot be overstated; to awaken our minds to the endeavours of a forgotten few, a previously overlooked minority of inspirational composers who worked in private because they lacked the vital credentials of being male. I am thrilled to be participating in such a worthwhile and ground-breaking initiative.”[3]
The concert also included a song, My Love He Stands Upon the Quay, by the little-known composer Charlotte Sainton-Dolby (1821-1885), who shares the 200th birthday celebrations with Viardot. The work was most likely an Australian premiere; in fact, many of the works performed in this concert were probably WA premieres, if not Australian premieres. The concert was very well received and was worth the risk of exposing an audience to an entire program of unfamiliar music by unfamiliar composers.
We have planned a few future concerts, although we are running into problems regarding the availability of scores and musicians. With state borders still closed to much of the world (and much of the rest of Australia), the musicians here are very busy. The beauty of Perth is that it is a place where you can experiment in the arts. We have many small start-up groups and organizations that operate in their own niches, which means that the musicians are stretched across multiple projects.
In addition to our concerts, we have started preparing repertoire guides and Spotify playlists, which we hope will influence the UWA conservatorium students and convince them to broaden their repertoire for their recitals. The only way we are going to see real change is to keep having that conversation with new cohorts of students and teachers and eventually try to influence the programmers of the major ensembles. For now, we are doing advocacy on a small scale. When the amazing book 24 Songs and Arias by Women Composers was published (Hildegard Publishing with A Modern Reveal), we purchased multiple copies and gifted them to voice teachers in Perth. We plan to improve the accessibility of scores in Perth by gaining funding to purchase scores from Europe and the US. It will be a slow process, but we believe it will be worth the effort.
Our plans for the future include commissioning new works, funding a prize for the “Best Performance of a Work by an Underrepresented Composer” to encourage students and teachers to enrich their repertoires, and recordings works by West Australian composers, whose works are in special collections gathering dust. To find out more about Tenth Muse Initiative, please visit: www.tenthmuseinitiative.com.au
[1] Heinrich Heine writing about the Paris season 1844: “Sie ist nicht ersetzt, und niemand kann sie ersetzen. Diese ist keine Nachtigall, die bloß ein Gattungstalent hat und das Frühlingsgenre vortrefflich schluchzt und trillert; – sie ist auch keine Rose, denn sie ist häßlich, aber von einer Art Häßlichkeit, die edel, ich möchte fast sagen schön ist...!” - Heine in Manfred Windfuhr, Heinrich Heine Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed.Volkmar Hansen (Hamburg : Hoffman und Campe, 1990), 14(1):140.
[2] Camille Saint-Saëns, “Ecole buissonni`ere, Pierre Lafitte” (1913): 217 - 223 translated in Roger Nichols, Camille Saint-Saëns on Music and Musicians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 167.
[3] Lisa Harper-Brown, Recommendation letter for Bryant Stokes Matilda Award to author, May 31, 2021.
