Foreword

This historical anthology of music by women makes an important contribution to the growing literature about women composers. While many of the composers whose works it presents have been discussed in a variety of recent studies, and recordings of a number of the works already exist, without the scores presented here our understanding of these composers would remain limited. Teachers and students who wish to focus primarily on women’s history as composers will find this anthology indispensable, but all teachers of traditional music history and literature courses should avail themselves of it and include examples from it in the courses they teach. Performers and students of performance wishing to broaden their repertoire will also find it valuable.

The anthology is especially useful since it presents works from all the traditional periods of Western music history, although because of the loss of many early works by women as well as women’s slow entrance in significant numbers into musical composition, the earlier periods are less richly represented. But more than merely offering a chronology of women’s works in the Western tradition, this anthology illustrates the development of the varied spheres in which women were active as composers—first convent and court, then home and private concert, then opera stage, public concert, ballet theater, and church. It also traces women’s increasing embrace- ment of wider genres of musical composition, moving from solo song to multivoiced vocal works, to solo instrumental and chamber music, and from there to symphony, opera, ballet, and, finally, experimental composition. Since this widening compositional realm was made possible by the expansion of music education opportunities for women and was accompanied by a shift from largely amateur to largely professional status, the anthology also illustrates these matters. Let me explain my claims.

The opening compositions by the nuns Kassia and Hildegard call attention to the earliest sphere we know that provided women with the kinds of musical training necessary for learning to compose—the convent. The work of Anne Boleyn represents the other early sphere in which we know women composed—the court. There, aristocratic women had access to private music training and, if especially gifted, learned to write words and music. Of course, neither nuns nor noblewomen were professional musicians.

With Maddalena Casulana a new level of women’s participation in music was reached. Although she remains a shadowy figure, Casulana must have had access to a rather extensive musical education in order to master the composition of multi-voiced madrigals, and she was also the first woman, in 1566, to seek the publication of her works. With the early seventeenth-century Francesca Caccini, we witness another step forward: just shortly before she was born, women began to achieve professional singing careers in northern Italian courts, and Caccini’s appointment as a singer to the Florentine court gave her the opportunity not only to perform her own music but also to put forward works of larger scope. Just slightly later, Isabella Leonarda exemplifies the effect expanded opportunities for performing polyphony in Italian convents had on nun composers— at least in those places where nuns’ music making was not interfered with by bishops and before convents themselves were suppressed.

Although the influence of the court was still strong at the turn of the eighteenth century, the city was soon to offer women new opportunities for music making because of the growth of private concerts. In early eighteenth-century Paris, harpsichordist Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre became famous for concerts in her own home, thus becoming the first woman to achieve widespread distinction as an instrumentalist. Active over many years as a composer of most of the leading genres of her day, La Guerre was one of the first women to publish instrumental works and the first to write a complete opera. Her range as a composer exceeded that of any woman before her. Clearly a professional musician in every sense, she nevertheless did not hold an institutional position, as many of her male contemporaries did.

Other eighteenth-century women represented in the anthology illustrate the continued importance to women’s musical creativity of belonging to a privileged class. Among them, Marianne von Martinez, considered very fine as both a singer and a keyboard player and the composer of numerous large and small works, described herself as a “dilettante at Vienna,” thus distinguishing herself from those who worked in music professionally at a time when being a dilettante was still a mark of distinction.

The musical activities of her younger Viennese contemporary, Maria Theresia von Paradis, however, as well as those of the later figures Maria Szymanowska, Clara Schumann, and Cecile Chaminade, signal an important new influence on the development of women’s music making—the public concert. With the rise of public concerts, women could and did promote themselves as vocalists and soloists on a variety of instruments—although it is revealing that all four of these women were pianists. At the same time, the domestic sphere became increasingly important for women’s music making, and songs for voice and piano, such as those in this anthology by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Schumann, Josephine Lang, and Pauline Viardot-Garcia, were one of the chief genres cultivated there. The work of Viardot-Garcia, however, also represents the continuing relationship between performing and composing, for she was an outstanding opera singer.

With Louise Farrenc, another new stage in the development of the woman musician arrived. Not only was Farrenc the first woman to hold a permanent professorship of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but also she produced a steady stream of compositions throughout much of her life, feeling none of the uncertainties about her powers as a composer that Clara Schumann did, for example. Then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amy Marcy Beach and Ethel Smyth focused their musical energies primarily on composition. It was with their generation that women finally “came of age” as composers, even though Beach was entirely self taught in composition.

With the remaining women represented in the anthology, a variety of approaches to career and composition can be observed. Many of these women were trained in conservatories or universities, and a number of them also held or hold significant professional positions. Their work demonstrates the wide range of work women in this century have considered themselves capable of undertaking as well as the greater number of opportunities they have had. This is not to say, of course, that some of them have not been affected by their biology in ways men have not been and that marriage and motherhood have not brought about peculiarly female deflections of life courses and careers.

Still, this anthology reflects women’s slow progress toward full participation in all spheres of musical life, along with offering some remarkable examples of their work. While I cannot begin to mention all the compositions I am moved by or find wonderful, I want to call particular attention to the magnificent first movement of Amy Beach’s Symphony and to the scene from Ethel Smyth’s finest opera, The Wreckers. But users of the collection should explore and sample a variety of works on their own, and in that way get to know many voices of women, not just one or two.

University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

JANE BOWERS