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

issue 07 May 2016

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.

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