Music Matters : Jenni Murray's Women Composers.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Quite - and in state education the cutting of musical education (other than the most basic kind where it survives) has once again become a class factor in encouraging and developing working class professional musicians (other than on scholarships, in limited supply) - something I have mentioned in regard to much of today's younger generation of college-educated jazz musicians changing the character of the music (rather as happened in the case of Progrock in the late 60s and 70s - but those were consensually more culturally enlightened times). I really should check up how much students pay, if at all, to join Gary Crosby's Tomorrows Warriors jazz group - effectively a course in the essentials which has helped many a young working class black musician - and also non-black, it should be added.

Some of those jazz piano courses in Hackney struck me as good value but still way beyond a young persons means. I went to a weeks residential course on jazz as a fifteen year old where I learnt the basis of blues piano . Of course the really talented don’t need a blues course …but they do need instruments. Max Roach put the rise of Rap down to Reagan cuts in music education and the loss of instrumental tuition. . Going back to the 70’s Jobseekers Allowance kept quite a few bands up and starting. I’ve even heard it said that the axing of the EMA scheme by Cameron had a discernible impact on the London music scene. But it’s all anecdotes there’s little hard data.
Its far from all negative in our state sector . Some heads are tremendously supportive - encouraging everything from bands to one to one tuition. Again London seems to particularly flush with funds and support.

[french frank]

Hmmm.... George Eliot; Currer Bell; Ellis Bell; Acton Bell; George Sand - bit of a theme there!

So what's your point here, Sir V? These chaps succeeded because they were gifted.

That said, I think tens of thousands of years of women/females being sold/given away by their fathers, subjugated by their husbands, then overshadowed by their brothers has taken a while to overcome. This is the point where 'we are where we are'. The good news may be that women don't seem to have developed the same instincts to kill, dominate and fight as men have done so perhaps we can hope to enter a new age where true equality prevails?

[Barbirollians]

How is diversity training - which is about informing people about what obstacles people with protected characteristics face and how to avoid and reduce discrimination - brainwashing ? That’s Trumpian nonsense IMO . I am out of this thread .

[Ein Heldenleben]

How is diversity training - which is about informing people about what obstacles people with protected characteristics face and how to avoid and reduce discrimination - brainwashing ? That’s Trumpian nonsense IMO . I am out of this thread .

Believe me the ones I’ve been on were precisely that and I’m to the left on most issues. IMaybe I just hit the high water mark of it all and things have changed . I’m talking about 15 years ago. Not just brainwashing but scarcely veiled threats of retribution if not listened to without challenge. The BBC is full of pretty liberal people who resented being treated like errant schoolchildren . Trump has got nothing to do with it.
Free speech means the right to take issue with some of the fundamental tenets of the diversity industry - suppressing that either within a media organisation or in its output is wrong. I’m not talking about giving racists airtime but challenging assumptions that affirmative action, positive discrimination, quotas, and targets actually works.

[smittims]

Well, at least it got me listening to Radio 3 on a Satiurday, usually a no-go area for me. And to be fair , Erollyn Wallen didn't say only girls suffer from the lack of state music education. But many male composers did face similar obstacles to those mentioned for women, and I don't suppose Radio 3 plans a programme on neglected male composers and the struggles they faced.

I wonder if this is more a feminist ramp than we think. I wonder how many women in the world today care very much that all the famous composers were men. The feminists do of course, as they do in other areas : engineeering ,for instance. I wonder too if it occurs to them that a lot of women just don't want to be composers (or engineers) . This possiblility doesn't get mentioned.


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[french frank]

I wonder how many women in the world today care very much that all the famous composers were men.

The vast majority of people, men and women, don't care very much because they don't know or care very much about 'famous composers' anyway. In wondering about women only, you're not comparing like with like, are you?

Similarly, comparing individual male composers - the neglect of, say, B van Dieren, for example - with the obstacles confronting women in general over hundreds of years is not comparing like with like. But there are reasons for most things, like why some issues bother a set of people but don't bother a particular individual.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Well, at least it got me listening to Radio 3 on a Satiurday, usually a no-go area for me. And to be fair , Erollyn Wallen didn't say only girls suffer from the lack of state music education. But many male composers did face similar obstacles to those mentioned for women, and I don't suppose Radio 3 plans a programme on neglected male composers and the struggles they faced.

I wonder if this is more a feminist ramp than we think. I wonder how many women in the world today care very much that all the famous composers were men. The feminists do of course, as they do in other areas : engineeering ,for instance. I wonder too if it occurs to them that a lot of women just don't want to be composers (or engineers) . This possiblility doesn't get mentioned.


.

I wonder whether women find academic composition intimidating? I did even though I had a pretty sympathetic teacher and I’m male - all that red ink on your Bach chorales .I wasn’t very good at it to be honest. It was very rules based and abstract rather like chess, coding or maths. It’s also very lonely and unlike novel writing has no social fantasy substitute element - like Austen imagining other people’s courtships. I much preferred the freedom of jazz improvising and went onto to do a Eng Lit degree where , nowadays , women are in the majority. An acquaintance doing a music degree at a Russell group Uni ten years ago told me there were no female students doing the composition option on his course.

[oddoneout]

I wonder whether women find academic composition intimidating? I did even though I had a pretty sympathetic teacher and I’m male - all that red ink on your Bach chorales .I wasn’t very good at it to be honest. It was very rules based and abstract rather like chess, coding or maths. It’s also very lonely and unlike novel writing has no social fantasy substitute element - like Austen imagining other people’s courtships. I much preferred the freedom of jazz improvising and went onto to do a Eng Lit degree where , nowadays , women are in the majority. An acquaintance doing a music degree at a Russell group Uni ten years ago told me there were no female students doing the composition option on his course.

Are musically gifted girls made aware of composition as something they might want to consider, or is all the focus on performance? I know of one school locally that seems to encourage a rounded approach to music that includes composition - but then it is a private girls school.

[Serial_Apologist]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

[Ein Heldenleben]

Are musically gifted girls made aware of composition as something they might want to consider, or is all the focus on performance? I know of one school locally that seems to encourage a rounded approach to music that includes composition - but then it is a private girls school.

I think the focus is more on performance across the board. Only a tiny number of people study music composition at University at all. You can get an A level music I’m told with very basic compositional skills. Something I think you can hear in the work of a lot of Proms commissions . Little counterpoint , a lot of ”soundwash “ , very basic harmonic progressions . Of course you don’t need to go university to be a composer or a conservatoire/ academy but it does offer performance opportunities and the chance of being talent spotted.
The number of people who make money from classical music composition is so small it’s difficult to make any meaningful argument about “discrimination” . I’ve heard a dark rumour that one very big publishing house is closing its list with a view to running it down,

[Serial_Apologist]

I think the focus is more on performance across the board. Only a tiny number of people study music composition at University at all. You can get an A level music I’m told with very basic compositional skills. Something I think you can hear in the work of a lot of Proms commissions . Little counterpoint , a lot of ”soundwash “ , very basic harmonic progressions . Of course you don’t need to go university to be a composer or a conservatoire/ academy but it does offer performance opportunities and the chance of being talent spotted.
The number of people who make money from classical music composition is so small it’s difficult to make any meaningful argument about “discrimination” . I’ve heard a dark rumour that one very big publishing house is closing its list with a view to running it down,

It's depressing to now be exposed to "new" music that takes so much cue from latter day techno pop, barely advanced beyond surface gloss since the 70s: stunted of memorable melody, its one salvation, reduced to mincemeat through the values of cultural disposability to which so many sacrifice creative options to sellability. The older Mozart progressed further in terms of sophistication in thirty years back in the 18th century, a time Robert Simpson exemplified as not yet obsessed with innovation or generics but designed to appeal to then-progressive values of the new rising bourgeoisie, owners of the means to produce new instruments, new pathways amenable to further expansion.

[Bella Kemp]

However things may have been in the past, it must be pretty tough to be a composer of either sex nowadays. I'm not sure how anyone could make a living - but then I suppose few composers ever did. I remember as a child being so astounded by the fact that Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven weren't multi millionaires but had to scrape a living!
I googled Oxford music online for female composers and found a fascinating list. There seem to be so many female composers that I have never even heard of, and it would be so good to hear their work. And by the way, I'm old enough to remember when if an orchestra had a female member at all it was likely to be Sidonie Goosens on her harp! Classical music was a bloke's world.

[oddoneout]

However things may have been in the past, it must be pretty tough to be a composer of either sex nowadays. I'm not sure how anyone could make a living - but then I suppose few composers ever did. I remember as a child being so astounded by the fact that Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven weren't multi millionaires but had to scrape a living!
I googled Oxford music online for female composers and found a fascinating list. There seem to be so many female composers that I have never even heard of, and it would be so good to hear their work. And by the way, I'm old enough to remember when if an orchestra had a female member at all it was likely to be Sidonie Goosens on her harp! Classical music was a bloke's world.

It won't signify in these parts but I believe women composers are significant in the world of gaming music.

[smittims]

Yes, there are many female composers one's never heard, but also many more male composers who are equally neglected.

I was criticising the emphasis of Jenni Murray's programme. Over the last few years there have been several programmes of this type on radio and Tv ,amd all done in a faux-naif or disingenuous implication that they are the first to expose this problem . We were challenged to name ten women composers: ha! any regular radio 3 listener could hardly be unaware of Florence Price, Hildegard of Bingen, Louise Farrenc, Judith Weir, Anna Clyne, etc. etc. yet Radio 3 ignores dozens of male composers who merit broadcast. They even ignore two notable women composers: Elisabeth Lutyens and Priaulx Rainier, and there's never any explaantion for this. Maybe Sam Jackson doesn't like atonal music.

Financial success doesn't depend on one's sex, but on writing music that people want. . Last week's composer, Meyerbeer, earned a fortune from composition. Debbie Wiseman and Rachel Portman have done well. Errolyn Wallen said she hasn't been without a commission for 30 years and her music is broadcast somewhere around the world every day. Havergal Brian wrote ten symphonies and was in his seventies before one of them was played. None of this had anythng to do with the composer's sex.

[teamsaint]

Quite - and in state education the cutting of musical education (other than the most basic kind where it survives) has once again become a class factor in encouraging and developing working class professional musicians (other than on scholarships, in limited supply) - something I have mentioned in regard to much of today's younger generation of college-educated jazz musicians changing the character of the music (rather as happened in the case of Progrock in the late 60s and 70s - but those were consensually more culturally enlightened times). I really should check up how much students pay, if at all, to join Gary Crosby's Tomorrows Warriors jazz group - effectively a course in the essentials which has helped many a young working class black musician - and also non-black, it should be added.

I’d be inclined to try to interpret the issues around women composers as much through the lens of class as through that of sexism.
Both of those factors matter, but, especially, in more recent times, life chances are determined ( I think, happy to be proved wrong) more by class than gender.
But the media have a strong tendency to focus on gender and not on class.