No Great Women Composers? (1)

I recently came across a provocative article from 2015 in The Spectator, called "There's a good reason why there are no great women composers," by Damian Thompson, who is described in Wikipedia as an English journalist, editor and author with a Ph.D in the sociology of religion from the London School of Economics. He writes a monthly column about classical music for The Spectator.

Not familiar with The Spectator? Here is an excerpt from its description in Wikipedia, which I've abridged slightly, indicated by the ellipses (…):

"The Spectator is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828... Its editorial outlook is generally supportive of the Conservative Party, although regular contributors include some outside that fold... The magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, and film and TV reviews."

If you align yourself ideologically as a liberal or progressive, you may be reluctant to pay much attention to a conservative journal, but I believe in making your own mind up about things on a case-by-case basis, and not simply based on the degree to which others are expressing views that align with your own – so let's examine what the article actually says.

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For starters, the article's title is misleading; at no point does it propose "a good reason why there are no great women composers;" it does not explore that question at all. In many publications, an article's title is not written by the article's author – there are others whose job it is to write headlines – so perhaps the author is not to blame for the misleading, "click-bait style" title.

Here's what the author writes:

"Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students?

"A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’"

Is this a legitimate question? It is, as the author acknowledges, a "delicate" one – simply asking the question might offend some – but is it fair game to ask questions such as this? Before answering, consider whether it is okay to ask other similar questions involving comparisons, such as the following:

• How good is British music of the 18th and 19th centuries, compared with that of German and Austrian composers?
• How good is French music of the 18th and 19th centuries, compared with that of German and Austrian composers?
• How good is American music of the 18th and 19th centuries, compared with that of German and Austrian composers?
• How good is Salieri's music, compared with Mozart's?

And so on…

We tend to assume that the canonical works of classical music history are the result of a Darwinian meritocracy – we perform and study Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc., because they represent the artistic pinnacle of human achievement within their periods in the art form that is classical music.

So, you might ask, why not ask questions such as those above?

I have no objection to any of these questions, but I wonder (a) where they get us, and (b) what the motivation is behind them?

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Where do these questions get us?

Let's propose for the sake of argument that the answer to all of the above questions, is "less good." That is, Salieri's music is less good than Mozart's; American, British, and French music of the 18th and 19th centuries is less good than that of German and Austrian composers; and women composers of these periods composed music that did not rise to the level of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, which I'll group as "A-List" composers.

So what?

Does that mean we jettison the music of "lesser" composers – Berlioz, Bizet,  Borodin, Bruckner,  Dvorak,  Elgar,  Grieg, Holst,  Liszt, Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn, Rossini,  Saint-Saëns,  Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sibelius, Smetana, etc. – from the repertoire?

Well, of course not! Each of the "lesser" composers listed above wrote wonderful music that has moved generations of classical music lovers, and the musical landscape would be considerably poorer without their contributions.

But wait, you might shout! The "lesser" composers above were still excellent composers!

I agree! They were indeed excellent composers, whose only misfortune was failing to achieve the exalted artistic heights of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.

So, let's make a list of composers whose level of artistic achievement does not come very close to the level of the "lesser" composers above; these are composers I have heard of, and in all cases, whose music I have actually heard, and I selected them from lists of classical composers found in Wikipedia (List of Classical-era composers).

For every name listed below, there were probably about 10 other names on the Wikipedia list I did not include because I was unfamiliar with them. These might be considered "C-List" composers because they are a level or two below the composers on my previous list (Liszt, Mendelssohn, Mahler, etc.), who themselves might be considered "B-List" composers, because they were a level (or so) below the all-time greats – Bach, Mozart, & Beethoven, at least in what I suspect is the opinion of many people, but I recognize that some would not agree with this assessment.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710–1784)

William Boyce (1711–1779)

Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713–1780)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788)

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787)

Johann Wenzel Anton Stamitz (1717–1757)

Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721–1783)

Antonio Soler (1729–1783)

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732–1795)

Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet Charpentier (1734–1794)

Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782)

Michael Arne (1740–1786)

Samuel Arnold (1740–1802)

Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816)

Carl Stamitz (1745–1801)

Joseph Quesnel (1746–1809)

Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801)

Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818)

Muzio Clementi (1752–1832)

Josef Reicha (1752–1795)

Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806)

Anton Stamitz (1754–1798 or 1809)

Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842)

Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1760–1812)

Ferdinando Carulli (1770–1841)

Anton Reicha (1770–1836)

Sophia Corri Dussek (1775–1847)

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837)

Fernando Sor (1778–1839)

Anton Diabelli (1781–1858)

Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829)

John Field (1782–1837)

Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)

Louis Spohr (1784–1859)

Friedrich Kuhlau (1786–1832)

Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)

Carl Czerny (1791–1857)

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864)

Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848)

Incidentally, those listed above all had active compositional careers, and they all wrote works that have been recorded and performed frequently by many performing artists. In the case of the guitar composers on the list (Carullil, Sor, Giuliani), I have played their music, and professional guitarists continue to play their music regularly.

They may not have reached the lofty heights of Brahms and Beethoven, but they nevertheless accomplished much in their compositional careers.

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Making lists such as those above is a bit of a silly game, perhaps – if I have Brahms on my B-list, and you have him on your A-list, it doesn't matter much, does it? – but there are potentially interesting/instructive aspects of debating these questions, such as the following:

1. They might lead us to discover works with which we were previously unfamiliar, some of which we might enjoy hearing;
2. They might challenge us to reconsider composers whose music we had previously dismissed or not valued highly, with the potential benefit of discovering good music that we previously did not know, or not know well, or discovering that a piece we had previously dismissed is actually a pretty good composition;
3. They force us to examine the basis on which we evaluate music, and that seems like a beneficial exercise to consider, at least periodically. Why do I like what I do? Why do I think less of some pieces than others? Am I a musical snob? Am I truly open to new composers and new styles of music?

As composers, I believe the third aspect above is essential to improvement. If I can identify some of the attributes that make music great, then perhaps I can incorporate those aspects into my music.

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I wrote a post about five years ago on Form in Post-Tonal Music (the first in a series of three on this topic) in which I mentioned the guitar Sonata in C, op. 22, by Fernando Sor, a piece I used to play. I regard it as a pleasant piece, but not up to the level of repertoire by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven that we study in my musical form class.

Having played and heard a fair amount of his music, I think of Sor as a C-list composer, someone who made a career from composing and performing his own music, someone who knew what he was doing in terms of composition, but ultimately, someone who did not manage to reach compositional greatness.

What was interesting to me was that while I am quite clear about my views on Sor's music, it was surprisingly difficult to come up for reasons to support my opinion. Anyone can have an opinion, but articulating the reasons behind that opinion in an intelligent and considered way can be very challenging.

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Returning to The Spectator article cited above, the author asks the question: How good were women composers in comparison with their male counterparts? He then provides examples of works by several women composers – Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Amy Beach (1867–1944), Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994), and Thea Musgrave (born 1928) – to support his conclusion that – surprise! – women composers were not as good as their male counterparts, and therefore their music does not deserve inclusion in the list of composers to be studied by British A-level students.

To me, a more pertinent question is not whether women composers were capable of writing music that matched the quality of the greatest male composers, but whether the best women composers wrote any music that compared favourably with the music of any of the composers from the lists above.

Everyone can come to their own conclusion on this question, but if you were to suggest that Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn failed to match the artistic level of Paisiello, Stamitz, Carulli, et al, I would suggest otherwise, and yet the music of Paisiello, Stamitz, and Carulli, et al, continues to be performed and recorded without any extramusical justification (e.g., "we're performing music by composers based in Milan from 1750-1800 on tonight's programme!), whereas I suspect some people feel that the only reasons Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn get performed nowadays are (a) they shared the same last name as more famous composers, and (b) they were women, and if they were men we would have forgotten about their music long ago.

And I would suggest that while (a) might have some validity, (b) does not; had they been men, I don't think anyone would question why their music continues to be recorded and performed today, any more than people question why the music of many of the "C-List" composers above gets recorded and performed.

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What is the motivation behind these questions?

So, in the case of the article from The Spectator mentioned at the outset of today's post, the motivation seems pretty clear: To discredit women composers. They were not, the author argues, as good as the great male composers, so we should therefore stop all this political correctness nonsense and not include their music on the Edexcel exam board A-level music syllabus.

And yes, this is my own summary of the Spectator article, but you should read it yourself to see if am being unfair or overly harsh.

This motivation, if I have represented it fairly, is not in itself bad – if I were motivated to write an article about why the first movement of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata is considerably more sophisticated than the first movement of his first published sonata, op. 2 no. 1, I would like to think that the motivation is fine, as long as I were able to support my conclusion with clear and unbiased evidence.

Where this kind of motivation is problematic, however, is that the writer is starting with a conclusion that is largely dismissive of an entire group of composers, and then hand-picking evidence to support the conclusion. This is the level of discourse you see on phone-in sports shows on radio or television ("I think Mike Trout [major-league baseball player, considered by many to be the best of his generation] SUCKS! I watched a game the other night where he make an error and struck out TWICE! Hell, I could have done that!"), or in bar discussions by drunken folk (I still remember one such discussion from many years ago between two people I knew, about whether dogs were better than cats, or vice-versa. At first it was mildly amusing, but it became very stupid very quickly, and the opponents almost came to blows).

Ideally, we'd all find a way to look at evidence objectively and then write and/or talk intelligently about what we learned from the experience, but, as a society, we appear to be far from any kind of ideal when it comes to discourse on anything, especially on controversial matters.

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As so often happens in my blog posts, I have gone on much longer than planned… I was going to look at and listen to some of the works by women composers and see if the author of The Spectator article was being fair or not, but I will save that for another post.

In the mean time, here are a couple of recordings of music by Clara Schumann, with scrolling scores: