Feminism

HU2018 Female Faculty: most of us - one or two missed the pic

In my reflections on the Inclusiveness session at HU 2018, I got to the point of noticing how it is at the grassroots, the behaviours between individuals, as much as the lead taken from the front, that defines an experience as feeling inclusive or exclusionary. So I’m going to start this post with a pile of anecdotes, some of my own experiences, some collected from friends during and after the week, to give a flavour of where the culture change in the Barbershop Harmony Society is going well, and where it has a way to go yet.

Halo on the Saturday Night showI told you that this theme would recur in my reflections on Harmony University. Not sure as I start to write this one whether I’ve got one or two more posts-worth of notes, but we’ll find out as we go.

One major event that you can’t write about Inclusivity at HU2018 without discussing was the Monday evening elective convened by Chris Rimple. The combined training material he has developed to help barbershop chapters become more inclusive with a panel discussion (and, ultimately, a whole-room discussion) on the kinds of behaviour people have experienced in both their barbershop careers and outside lives that have left them feeling excluded (and/or enraged – some examples were shocking).

Harmony University 2018 faculty

I am just back from a week teaching at the Barbershop Harmony Society’s Harmony University, and I am sure nobody will be surprised to know I come home with a full notebook. Indeed, I had collected a goodly collection of notes before the event had even started, as they had me travel out early to take advantage of cheaper airfares, and so I arrived as the previous event on the campus, a leadership summit, was finishing. I thus had the chance to chat with the organisation’s staff and administrative leaders to get a picture of how life is on the ground at the moment in the Barbershop Harmony Society.

I won’t be posting during December, so I’ll leave you with a longer piece to be getting on with. This was my keynote address at the Musique et Genre conference in Paris in December 2015.

Wishing you all a vibrantly feminist holiday season, and see you in the New Year

Individuals construct their sense of self through autobiography. We each maintain an internal narrative, using the discourses our culture provides, to make sense of our experiences and thus understand who we are, what we have done, and what we might yet do. We also do this in groups, where shared stories bind people together into cohorts. We tell the stories to newcomers to make them ‘one of us’. We re-tell the stories amongst ourselves to re-live shared experience, and update our understanding of what that experience means. In academia, we call this process ‘literature review’. We create our identities as scholars through the search terms we choose to build our bibliographies.

Here are notes on the last tranche of playlist items. The exercise has reset my listening habits in all kinds of useful ways. It’s been an excellent discipline to make myself listen to lots of music I didn’t previously know – one of those things that is as enriching as you’d anticipate, but you don’t necessarily do unless you make the effort.

I have a few notes still to bring together about what it’s taught me about how women’s history is written, so that’s to follow up in the new year. I am minded to continue the process of seeking out women’s music for regular listening – having expanded my boundaries I feel I would miss it if I let go of this outward engagement too readily. I may not blog about every item next year, though, and I will certainly allow myself to go back and explore more than one work by a single composer.

The next instalment of thoughts on my listening project for 2017. 87 items in, and I’ve not yet repeated a composer. Well, by this stage I’m not going to, am I? The full list and links to previous commentaries can be found here. Happy listening!

• Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Concerto Romantico for viola and chamber orchestra (1956). Another interesting exercise in confronting my own prejudices: I have a hunch I came across some pieces for children by Peggy Glanville-Hicks in a pile of music being discarded from Southampton University Music Department from which students were invited to help themselves. I thus had her implicitly stereotyped as (a) a writer of simple things and (b) not worth keeping. Would I have assumed that music for children by a man represented the sum of his ambition? Not that I articulated this thought consciously, you realise, I just notice it when coming across major works and thinking, ‘Oh I didn’t know she wrote this stuff!’
• Claudia Rusca, 'Jubilate Deo Omnis Terra' from I Sacri Concerti (1630). Ensemble Frottola have recorded quite a few of Rusca’s Sacri Concerti, so it’s worth a listen around.

And another catch-up on my Playlist project for 2017. Quite a long post this time, as I’ve been romping through lots of music during August while I had plenty of time for listening. I’m expecting to be adding to the list rather more slowly in September as I’ll be out and about coaching a lot.

• Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Sinfonia to Talestri, Regina delle Amazzoni(1760). The tale of a successful female ruler was apparently an appealing topic for aristocratic women of the C18th.
• Valborg Aulin, Piano Sonata in F-minor, Op.14 "Grande Sonate sérieuse" (1885). I feel I’m getting a bit repetitious when I keep remarking on composers who defy the stereotype of C19th female composers having access to the market for domestic music, but generally being locked out of more substantial genres. But it’s interesting that people keep peddling that stereotype even when listing the substantial output in more public genres such as Aulin’s.

As you know, one of my projects for 2017 is making sure I’m listening to a lot more music by women by compiling a youtube playlist. One of the obvious points that keeps coming out in my commentaries on the pieces is how splendid so much of them are, and how boggling it is that I didn’t previously know it.

A possibly less obvious, and certainly less polite, point is that it makes me wonder how some of the repertoire by men that I do know seems to be taken seriously. I’m not saying that, say, Schumann wasn’t a ‘genius’ (though I am putting in scare quotes to distance myself from that rather loaded label), but I am saying that the label unhelpfully keeps some of his more irritating efforts in the repertoire (Symphony No 4, I am looking at you) when there are clearly better examples of the genre that get ignored because they are by people to whom the ‘genius’ label has been withheld – i.e. women.