All pants are off, but the music is on
July 17, 2013 10:30 PM   Subscribe

The woman composer is dead. Or is she?

A year ago, composer Amy Beth Kirsten started a fervent discussion on NewMusicBox, claiming that the gradual acceptance of earlier generations of female composers such as Joan Tower, Chen Yi, Kaija Saariaho, and Augusta Read Thomas has given the present generation of musicians "a healthy lack of self-awareness with regard to gender" and that the label "woman composer" has become "insulting...because it perpetuates the myth of a sub-group."

This week, composer Kristin Kuster counters Kirsten's position, reflecting on her own musical and professional career, her "denial" of her own identity as a woman composer, and the apparent under-representation of women composers in academia.
See also:
Sarah Hersch, "Competition Winners and Gender: What's Up With That?"
Lauren Redhead, "Female Composers and Participation in Contemporary Music."
posted by daisystomper (10 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
One of my favorite composers of any genre (Grażyna Bacewicz) happens to be a woman, and it has always seemed sad to me that libraries and music shops often have her music only in anthologies of work by women composers. The anthologized pieces are usually bland miniatures from before her style matured, giving no hint of her more challenging works.

However, that seems to have begun to change thanks to new recordings and appreciations of her music in the last few years.
posted by aws17576 at 12:47 AM on July 18, 2013


Just so long as we don't start talking about 'women's music' the way some people talk about 'women's writing'.
posted by Segundus at 1:08 AM on July 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


I don't care if Amy Beth Kirsten is a woman or a man or a poodle or a small package of tofu, carefully wrapped in small sheets of paper and squeeze-dried using obituaries saved during hurricane Katrina,

Women have been making Art for a long time.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:16 AM on July 18, 2013


Women have been making Art for a long time.

Quite a few apparently: List of female composers by birth year
posted by jim in austin at 4:27 AM on July 18, 2013


Maybe I'm just as much too old for post-feminism in music as I am for it in other areas of life. I fervently look forward to a day when women won't need extra encouragement or advocacy to write down their music any more than they'll need it to run and be elected for big political office or achieve leadership positions in big business. But I don't think we're there quite yet.

I often work with an organization devoted to researching, performing, and commissioning musical works by female composers, and while they've put together some amazing programs they've run into some real challenges, too.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:52 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Women have been making Art for a long time.

That really misses what's at stake here, doesn't it? Yes, women have been making art and composing (and doing philosophy and a lot of other things) for a long time. But problematically (I think), not nearly as many women as men do these things. Why is that? Is it structural discrimination or some other reason?

Take a look at the National Science Foundation's survey of earned doctorate results from 2011 [pdf] (the most recent data I could find). If you scroll down to the music category, you see mostly women at parity with men, except for theory and composition, where women earned only 16% of the PhDs granted in 2011. That's worse than physics, worse than philosophy, worse than mathematics, worse than computer science. If we are worried about gender equity in those disciplines -- and many people are -- then we should be worried about composition and music theory as well.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 7:30 AM on July 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


Women have been making Art for a long time.

PEOPLE have been creating art.

As far as gender equity in doctorates received, has anybody looked at exactly why it's so imbalanced?
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:25 AM on July 18, 2013


I've always been a big fan of Anonymous.
posted by straight at 9:50 AM on July 18, 2013


I've always been a big fan of Anonymous.

Track_1 by Unknown_Artist is especially good.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:13 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Sarah Hersch, "Competition Winners and Gender: What's Up With That?"

That link's pretty damning, in a quiet way. I wonder if it would be possible to institute a convention for blinded judging of these kinds of competitions, much in the way that many major orchestra auditions (as I understand it) are now conducted with the performer behind a screen to inhibit unconscious (or conscious) gender/race/whatever bias. I seem to recall reading somewhere that instituting blinded auditions tends to lead to a dramatic change in the gender breakdown of who does and doesn't get hired to the orchestra; one assumes something similar would happen in these composition competitions.

Or would it be the case that, at this level, the judges all have a pretty shrewd idea whose compositions are whose anyway, just from the style of the pieces?
posted by yoink at 10:14 AM on July 18, 2013


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