Composition, like conducting, has historically been a man`s field, but when Ellen Taaffe Zwilich`s Symphony No. 1 won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1983, a woman had finally acquired a credential that could not be ignored.
Today, Zwilich is awash in prestigious performances and commissions-includi ng pieces for four of the Big Five orchestras (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra) in the next few years.
In addition, a handful of women, like Joan Tower, whose Flute Concerto received its premiere recently in Carnegie Hall in a performance by Carol Wincenc and the American Composers Orchestra, are beginning to get attention as composers.
To some, Zwilich`s prize indicated that women, spurred and aided by the feminist movement, had made their way into mainstream composition. To others, it seemed a belated, isolated recognition, not really indicative of anything more than a slight, grudging change of attitude in the concert music world.
”Consider the fact that no woman has won a major composition award since Ellen Zwilich did,” says Elinor Armer, chairman of the composition department at the San Francisco Conservatory.
Says Michael Steinberg, artistic adviser at the Minnesota Orchestra,
”People are still saying, `Show me the female Beethoven,` but they`re no longer saying, `Women can`t compose.` ”
That may be a small step forward, although searching for a female Beethoven in centuries of male-dominated composition is just as unfair a pursuit as ever. Some women composers during those centuries did manage to write whether or not their works were performed.
Fanny Mendelssohn`s composing, for example, was discouraged by her family as an inappropriate activity for a woman, although her work was good enough for her brother Felix to appropriate a few of her songs.
The eight-year-old Bay Area Women`s Philharmonic in California, which seeks out forgotten scores by women, has given her a better chance; that ensemble recently performed her 45-minute ”Oratorio.”
The orchestra also has come up with women composers from unlikely eras-like Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a highly regarded composer of cantatas and other large-scale works at the court of Louis XIV.
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) showed tremendous promise, but died early.
(The French Academy of Fine Arts bestowed the Grand Prix of Rome award on Lili Boulanger for her composition ”Faust and Helene” when she was 19. She was the first woman to be so honored. Her sister, the famed teacher and conductor Nadia Boulanger, who died a 92 in 1979, often performed Lili`s work.)
Historic American composers are coming back, too. The works of Amy Beach
(1867-1944), which were performed by such ensembles as the Boston Symphony during her lifetime, are being played again, and the composer Joseph Schwantner says of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), ”If she lived today, she would be a household name.”
Composers, male and female, agree that women are getting more important performances and positions than they were 20 years ago, although that`s not saying much.
Certainly there are many women active in the field. The American Music Center, an information resource organization, lists about 600 living American women composers (it also lists more than 4,000 living men). The Gazette section of Volume II of ”The Musical Woman,” a compendium of research and statistics about women in music, edited by the composer Judith Lang Zaimont, has 25 pages of performances of music by women.
Joan Tower and Libby Larsen, whose opera ”Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus” will bow at the Minnesota Opera in May, each held one of America`s current plum composition jobs-a Meet the Composer orchestra composer-in-residence position.
Tower`s was at the St. Louis Symphony and Larsen`s with the Minnesota Orchestra.
Renowned performers have adopted some women`s music as well. Leonard Slatkin, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, champions Tower`s work, often performing it when he guest-conducts, as well as at home, and a piece by Christine Berl is included on the recital of commissioned works that Peter Serkin is playing around the country this season.
Enough music by women is being played to indicate that little of it is gender-specific, although Larsen reports that some academic feminist critics describe music written by men as ”hierarchical” and that written by women as ”democratic.”
Schwantner points out that ”women are writing in all areas of the musical spectrum,” and Tower adds, ”For the grant panels of the National Endowment for the Arts, of which she was a member, we tried to tell if scores were written by men or women, and we couldn`t.”
Women composers, like men, claim Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Faure as models, and the words used to describe their work, such as ”thorny,” ”full of energy” or ”coloristic,” for example, describe the music of men as well. Even electronic music, which might be stereotyped as a male preserve, has its women adherents. Several university studios have been founded by women. The differences, then, are more societal than anything else, and in the already small number of contemporary pieces appearing on standard chamber music and orchestral series around the country, music by women is not heavily represented.
When it is played, it tends to be by the same handful of composers.
Zwilich, who jokes that she and her female colleagues are laboring under a triple-stroke handicap-”We`re alive, American and women”-is an exception: she gets more performances than most living male composers (her 1988 orchestral work ”Symbolon” has had 23 performances and was recorded by the New York Philharmonic).
Although women`s acceptance in the concert music field has been slow, there have been a few seminal decisions.
Behind-the-screen auditions for orchestra positions did a lot to get women fair treatment for those jobs.
The composer`s route to a career is seldom gender-blind, however.
The composer needs encouragement and help during student years, then formal or informal recommendations for prizes, fellowships, commissions, positions and performances later.
As Judith Shatin, president of American Women Composers, puts it, ”In the arts, there are many situations where personal contacts make things happen. Until women are included, nothing will change.”
But women also stress the difficulty of pointing the finger at any one cause: Were they passed over because they were women, or because they weren`t good?
For the woman composer, conditioning begins with a lack of role models and continues into the student years.
Larsen remembers her years of graduate study in the 1970s with dismay.
”The little kinds of support that men received from mentors were withheld from women because there was genuine doubt that women could think compositionally,” she says.
”I felt that I was benignly tolerated. It`s very undermining. I do lots of residencies, and even today I`m usually approached by the chairman of the department, who says that it would be very interesting for the women in the department to be around a woman composer.
”He doesn`t mention the men. You`re dealing with a generation that is 20 or 30 years older, but I even get some of that from people in their 20s. I remember a student at Cal Arts who felt that I was a freak of nature.”
Women are still underrepresented on composition faculties. Of tenure-track jobs, in 1986-87 only 8.6 percent were held by women, according to the College Music Society`s report ”Women`s Studies/Women`s Status.”
Even at the San Francisco Conservatory, where Elinor Armer is the chairman of the composition department, only 4 of the 14 composition students are women.
That is still a better percentage than that at the Eastman School, where Schwantner teaches. He reports that of the 25 or so composition students, only ”three or four” are women-in a school where 50 percent of the students are women.
Deborah Drattell, who was composer-in-residence at the Denver Symphony before it went out of business last year, tells of even more insidious behavior.
”There are a lot of male chauvinist pigs out there,” she says.
”I was told that one conductor said that if I`d sleep with him maybe he`d perform my music.”
Drattell says that some composers like Schwantner (who also brought Tower to Slatkin`s attention), Christopher Rouse and John Harbison have helped her with encouragement and recommendations, but that an old-boy network is still responsible for much of the choosing of who will get the prizes and fellowships that result in commissions and performances.
”Women are less likely to be in those positions of power,” Drattell says. Without performances, she adds, women cannot hear their work and improve.
