WOMEN COMPOSERS – UNIQUE, ECCENTRIC, UNACKNOWLEDGED

Largely sidelined, their musical compositions ignored in favour of male musicians. women composers were rarely acknowledged in their time.  They were expected to follow the traditional feminine and marital role of looking after their husbands and producing and bringing up children.

Sometimes women like Clara Schumann, an accomplished pianist and child prodigy, were recognized and launched according to their talent in performance, but with Clara, for instance, it was only in the l970’s that her work was brought to public and world attention.  Husband Robert believed her place was in the home and, perhaps, felt threatened to an extent by her musical talent as competing with his own.

Fanny Mendelssohn’s father insisted that, unlike her brother, Felix, music for her “can and must be only an ornament.” (refer Letter of 16 July by Hensel 1884, 1, p. 82) And the French musician, Cecile Chaminade, prevented by her father from entering the Paris Conservatoire, had to have private music lessons.  As a result, she remained an outsider in the accepted musical world of those who had graduated from the conservatory.

In Nadia Boulanger’s case, she came from a family in which men and women were celebrated over generations of musical geniuses.  Ironically, as a result of her father’s death, she had to take on a male role and provide for the family at the tender age of thirteen by teaching and performing.

In the Italian Baroque period, the remarkable singer and composer, Barbara Strozzi, was, surprisingly, recognized as a rare female composer of her time.  Subsequently, she was forgotten for many decades and only restored to her rightful place in the 21^st Century when her music was performed on instruments built in imitation of those of the era:  the baroque harp and the theorbo.

The following cameos of various musicians dramatize the bumpy road of some musically talented women.