The Problem of Gender in Classical Western Music
Imagine you are attending a symphony concert. You arrive early, take your seat, and look through the program while waiting for the music to begin. The program is for the entire season and lists several different concert programs within it. These concerts feature the works of composers such as Brahms, Beethoven, Dvorak, Mahler, Copland, and several other men. As you look out onto the stage, you observe a sea of tuxedos and only a handful of women. There are a few women scattered throughout the string section, one flautist, and one harp player. As the conductor takes the stage, it is clear that orchestra is a man’s world.
While today it may seem obvious that women are perfectly capable of being composers, it has not always been so. In her essay on Amy Beach and synesthesia, Dr. Sabrina Clarke describes the backwards attitude towards female composers that prevailed until quite recently. A music professor at Hunter College named Henry T. Fleck wrote an essay entitled “Woman as a Composer” in which he “declares that women are incapable of independent creative musical thought, and can merely imitate or emulate men.” Clarke goes on to write, “in a paper delivered to the Royal Musical Association in 1920, J. Swinburne uses pseudoscience (namely myths on the structural inferiority of women’s brains) to explain that…
