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Further abcd Discoveries

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In my previous post about the insights emerging from the Association of British Choral Directors Discovery Day on female composers, I promised to develop a wider point that emerges from a number of themes, but only after I’d discussed some more detailed thoughts shared by Louise Stewart of Multitude of Voyces.

If you’ve not come across this charity before, you should investigate their work, especially if you have any involvement in Christian liturgical music. They’re most famous for publishing collections of music by women for church use – some historical, some newly commissioned - although this is just the headline output of their more general charitable objects, which are about amplifying the voices of those who have been marginalised.

As part of this wider remit, they are working with the estates of certain deceased female composers to make their music available. And it was in talking through the practical challenges of this work that Louise shed some really interesting light on the processes by which music by women disappears after their death. I have commented before on the way that every generation of female composers feels like the first, because the previous generation simply falls out of the repertoire and history books; Louise helped me understand the logistics of how this happens.

She talked about the wealth of music just lying about untouched after its composer’s death. A lot of it had never been published, and that which had been published had gone out of print. She talked about how changes in fashion in the 1970s when a lot of composers of Elisabeth Poston’s generation died encouraged publishers to drop their music, though the resonance with the story of Florence Price, half a world away and a generation older makes me think that changing musical fashions makes a convenient excuse for publishers who just didn’t take the women they represented as seriously as they might. Either way, when a composer was no longer around to promote her own work, it was abandoned.

And part of the reason why the music was abandoned was that it was often not treated seriously as part of the composer’s estate. Women’s wills often did not specify what was to happen to their intellectual property in the way that men’s wills did. Which tells us in turn how their work was regarded (or, rather, disregarded) by the solicitors who would have been advising them and drawing up those wills. Married women in particular seem to have been regarded primarily as appendages to their husbands and families, and their musicianship not given the kind of professional recognition in defining their estates that a male composer who also happened to have a spouse and family would have received. Your musical legacy, that is, relies in very concrete ways on your legacy as defined in estate law.

Louise also made some interesting points about how access to institutions affects a composer’s career. If you are Director of Music in the collegiate/cathedral sector, you have ready access to a choir and many performance occasions. Your work doesn’t have to be much more than adequate to guaranteed to be sung, as you get to make the programming decisions. These kinds of posts have not often gone to women; indeed, it turns out that Sarah MacDonald (one of the fabulous Canadian composers whose work we explored during the day) is the first woman to hold a DoM post at a Cambridge College since records began.

So, the wider point that comes through the tales of both Tara Mack and Louise Stewart, as well as various other more fleeting exchanges during the day, is this: how important infrastructure is to becoming a successful composer. We often think of this in the context of historical female composers in terms of training opportunities, which is of course one significant factor. But the music of an excellently-trained musician without ready access to the institutions that promote and preserve music will remain very limited in its reach.

And the discourses of genius that shape our concepts of what a composer is actively hide this. It was back in 1980 that Hans Lenneberg wrote an article critiquing the myth of the composer ‘starving in an attic’, but the idea of composition as an essentially solitary, self-contained activity remains. And of course, the act of composition does involve a good deal of time by oneself generating ideas and notating them, but a career as a composer involves getting out there and interacting with the people, and the institutions they are embedded in, that connect that music with those who will pay for it.

All composers need their work to be championed if they are to succeed, both during their lifetimes, and after their deaths. The story of Mendelssohn spear-heading the revival of J.S. Bach’s music was wildly exaggerated in the version I heard as a child (which made it sound like Felix rescued the St Matthew Passion from being wrapped round his chips), but nonetheless represents an emblematic example. Likewise, Webern’s central role in the narrative of early-C20th century music, as told to music students at every stage of my education from O level onwards, relies not on his reputation during his lifetime, but the promotion of his music by influential composers and scholars after his death.

‘Great Music’ doesn’t ‘Stand the Test of Time’ via its spiritual or artistic qualities, it requires real human beings, with real power and influence, to get it out there and keep it out there. And the big take-away, for me, is that all musicians with creative products that will still exist after they die should consider how that work will be handled by their estates. We owe it to the next generation of musicians to try not to disappear immediately; we need to let them know we’ve been here so they don’t feel like they’re starting from scratch again.

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