Feminism

In the Diamond Jubilee concert at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, Lesley Garrett introduced the line-up of herself, violinist Nicola Benedetti, trumpeter Alison Balsom and conductor Sian Edwards as ‘classical girl power’. I found myself simultaneously cheered at this list of soloists and wistful that it should still be a matter of remark. ‘Girl Power’ is after all one of those odd phrases that encapsulates optimism and defeatism at the same time.

However, the concert was a very interesting case-study in different solutions to the presentational questions female musicians need to address in their roles as public figures. As I have written about before, there are competing imperatives between the ideologies of classical music that render the musician invisible to ‘let the music speak for itself’ and the general cultural expectation that the female body will be on display, subject to public gaze.

I’ve been thinking recently about the visual dimension of musical performances, and cultural attitudes about High Art and vulgarity. The immediate spur for these thoughts was the Sweet Adelines convention in Birmingham, but they’re also plugging into things I’ve been thinking about at least since my PhD days.

So, the concern with costume and make-up and general blingification is of course the aspect of barbershop that people affiliated with other genres sometimes take as evidence of triviality. It’s The Music that matters, they say, not all this frippery stuff. Diamante earrings and choreography are tricksy things in this view, at best distracting the audience from the Real Thing that is The Music, and at worst trying to disguise the fact that the music isn’t very good. It’s all style-over-substance, is the criticism.

In a post about ‘The ‘C’ Word’, Chris Rowbury opens up the thorny question of cultural stereotypes as they relate to choirs. He identifies a handful of stock images that leap to mind when people hear the word ‘choir’ and talks about he finds them limiting – both because they focus on a hackneyed subset of actual choirs, and because they carry somewhat negative connotations with them. He finds himself, not unreasonably, rather wearied with the assumptions people make about him as a choral practitioner, since they are both rather inaccurate and presuppose a rather less interesting musical life than the one he experiences.

The strategies he proposes for dealing with the limiting stereotypes of the word ‘choir’ are all sensible as far as they go.

It’s a loud voice,
And though it’s not exactly flat,
She’ll need a little more than that
To earn a living wage
Noel Coward, ‘Don’t Put You Daughter on the Stage’

There is sometimes some cultural discomfort with women singing loudly. It can be seen as over-assertive, sonically pushy, ballsy. In times past this was tangled up with questions about public versus private utterance. Early Romantic writers like ETA Hoffmann and Carl Maria von Weber wrote very rude vignettes of female amateurs who sang operatic repertoire in the home, and idealised instead the perfect femininity of an untrained voice that wouldn’t travel beyond an intimate setting.

Those stereotypes have – thankfully – loosened their stranglehold to the point that they seem almost entirely historical.

The posture of the conductor will set the example for the choir. Usually stay erect, with the body expanded. Women directors should stand with their feet only as far apart as is necessary to maintain good balance.

Paul Roe, Choral Music Education

ChoralReef has a fascinating post about gender and conducting, ranging from generic questions of gestural clarity, to different types of leadership style, to the question of ‘girly gestures’. Here it homes right in on the key issue that women face when they become conductors: if we do it the same as guys do, then we’re branded as inappropriately unfeminine, if we do it differently, we’re girly and not to be taken seriously. One of the commenters on the post replies with the opinion that female conductors should ‘leave their gender at the door’. This is just such one of those ‘well, yes, but….’ type suggestions that I wanted to spend a bit of time contemplating it.

The acappella blog has a regular feature of Dos & Don’ts which offers simple practical advice to performing groups. Occasionally, though, what looks on the surface like straightforward common sense turns out to have an interesting underside that is anything but straightforward. Mike Scalise's post on choosing gender-appropriate material for your group has had me thinking about it for the last two weeks.

At a practical level, the advice to choose music that fits the gender of your group is of course sensible. But two things interest me: the list of successful exceptions presented to nuance the argument, and the question of how we assign gender to songs in the first place.