Alexandra Coghlan

Women and song

Anna Beer’s account of female musicians from the ninth century to the present finds them often vilified as loose women or even witches

Just a few weeks ago, Germany’s VAN magazine published an interview with the composer Olga Neuwirth. In it she describes her early career in the 1980s and ’90s — a ‘lone’ female voice in the ‘wilderness’ of classical music. So far, so sadly, so frustratingly predictable. But then she turns to the current situation and things become rather more startling. ‘I think it has become nastier,’ she says:

A more ‘elegant’ chauvinism prevails… When a woman calls attention to injustices today her objections are often dismissed as hysteria… She is kicked out and declared an adversary without further explanation or discussion.

We’re used to the idea that — in the arts at least — the feminist fight is all but over. Women take their place alongside men as authors, artists, choreographers and filmmakers, and it seems out of step with this shiny new equality to suggest that all might not be quite so entirely right on. But Neuwirth’s experiences as a ‘woman composer’ are by no means isolated.

Anna Beer’s Sounds and Sweet Airs offers vivid, colourful context on a situation that is echoed back through the centuries. Beer profiles eight ‘forgotten’ female composers, each a prism for the ideology, philosophy and fashions of her age. But whether we are in corsets or Converse, Medici Florence or 20th-century Paris, Louis XIV’s Versailles or 21st-century London, the stories are the same. Even in ninth century Constantinople we encounter Kassia — the earliest female composer whose music survives today — so disgraced by her wise and witty responses to Emperor Theophilus (auditioning for a bride) that she retires to a convent to compose a penitential hymn to Mary Magdalene.

Again and again, female genius confounds those who encounter it. Talented female composers must either be ‘angels’ or ‘sorceresses’ to possess such gifts, and that’s just the lucky ones.

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