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What Does it Take for Women to Sing Together?
by Mary Lycan
4/11/02
Presentation to the Williams
School, New London, Connecticut
I last addressed an audience of
Williams students and faculty at my graduation in 1964.
Back then, when the earth’s crust
was still cooling, and the dinosaurs roamed free, all the students were girls
and almost all the faculty were women.
We wore skirts to school every day.
We even wore skirts to gym.
We played half-court basketball,
skidding to a halt at the center line--those were the rules of the game
then. I suppose if we had run up and
down the whole length of the gym we might have injured our delicate female
tissues. The worst substance abuse
problem I ever heard about was smoking cigarettes--tobacco ones--in the parking
lot during a school dance. There was one black student, two Asian
students. Our academic instruction was
narrowly focused, but superb.
The school choir was a
girls’ choir---sopranos and altos only, not tenors or basses. It was pre-civil rights, pre-birth control
pill, pre-Vietnam, pre-second wave feminism, pre-Watergate, pre-gay rights, and
pre-AIDS--the last days of a civilization now as extinct as that of the
Egyptian pharaohs.
Twenty-seven years after I hung up
my blue Williams choir robe for the last time, I found myself in an all-female
choir once again. It was in California, in 1991, when I joined the
Peninsula Women’s Chorus for one season.
I had worked and made music with men on an equal basis for years, and
was completely unprepared for what I found there: a lovely sound of adult
sopranos and altos only, musically satisfying and complete. A full repertoire of new classical music I
had never heard of, composed just for
women’s choirs. Fifty-nine new
friends. And a society governed by
women, where the conductor was a woman, the treasurer was a woman, women moved the choral risers, and everyone
seemed to take all that for granted.
I couldn’t tell whether I had dug up
a time capsule from my days at Williams, or whether I had stumbled onto a whole
new phenomenon. One thing was the same,
though. All the composers were men.
We knew then what a composer looks
like, and so do you: before 1800, a composer was a German guy in a powdered
wig. After 1800, a composer was a German
guy with bad hair. The ability to
compose was apparently attached to the Y chromosome, and that was that.
But
singing with the Peninsula Women’s Chorus for that one season turned me into an
anthropologist. We were so female, so
feminist, and yet: to whose music did we
give voice? Did women ever
composer for women’s voices? I decided to find out.
Within
two years I had a database of over a thousand pieces composed between 1890 and
1970. That’s 1,000 pieces by women for
women. Many of these pieces were so
well-crafted, so intelligent, and so moving that I wanted to conduct them right
away.
These
pieces were, almost without exception, out of print and long forgotten. Many of them were dedicated to choirs I had
never heard of. It wasn’t just the composers
who had been lost. It was the choirs,
too.
So
I founded a community-based women’s chorus in 1993, Women’s Voices Chorus, and
from the beginning half our repertoire has been by women composers. Discovering our musical roots has been a
source of tremendous empowerment and joy.
As I have immersed myself in this music I have learned about what it
takes for musicians in the western European art tradition to make choral music
together, and to compose it.
I
think it takes four things:
We
have be able to get together with other musicians. We have to get training. We need lots of time. And we need social
support.
Women
musicians have not had widespread and continuous access to all of these
necessities. What amazes me is that in
the times and places all four factors have been present, women have popped
right up and made wonderful music.
1.
Getting together with other musicians.
It’s hard to make sophisticated music out on a farm. If you think about the “Little House” books
by Laura Ingalls Wilder, you will recall that Pa played fiddle tunes, and the
family sang songs together in the evening, and that was about it. If Laura had wanted to sing in a choir or
become a composer, or even have a garage band, she would have been out of
luck. (But I wish Pa had taught her to
play that violin.)
Women have been able to make music
in groups when they lived or worked together in convents, orphanages, women’s
colleges, and places like the Williams School. This rough sketch is the only pictorial
evidence we have of the active musical life of a convent in 17th century Milan, Italy, where the nuns performed
sophisticated choral music with instrumental accompaniment. One of them, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani,
composed sacred music which was published during her lifetime, and so was
performed by musicians outside her convent as well.
In nineteenth-century Europe, with the rise of the
educated middle class women who lived in cities, even if they lived separately
in family homes, could get to rehearsals easily. This is precisely the era that gave rise to
the amateur choral societies, for all voicings, including the women’s choir
Brahms conducted in Hamburg. Right now, my own chorus owes a lot to the
internal combustion engine, since my singers come from up to 30 miles away.
2.
Training. I’m sure many of you have spent time alone
with a guitar and a chord chart, and you can teach yourself a lot. But your garage band won’t get very far if
you can’t learn from other bands and individual musicians. In the days before recordings and radio, you
got every bit of that training face to face.
Laura Ingalls did have one
opportunity to sing with a trained musician, and that was when Almanzo Wilder
courted her by taking her to a series of evenings at a singing school in “These
Happy Golden Years”. I love the account
of how the young people learned their “do-re-mi’s” from the traveling singing
master, and how they sang rounds. But
face it, eight nights in a schoolhouse, especially when you have to leave early
because the horse is frisky, is no substitute for years of regular
participation in a serious choir.
Historically, composers of choral music, like Palestrina, Bach, and
Purcell, have learned through apprenticeship in church or cathedral choirs,
with daily rehearsal, performance, and instruction in music theory and
instrumental study
.There’s been a problem with that for
women. The church and cathedral choirs
in Palestrina’s Catholic Rome, Bach’s Lutheran Leipzig, and Purcell’s Anglican
London were for boys and men only.
Period. No girls allowed. If Palestrina, Bach, and Purcell had had
equally talented sisters, those girls
could not have had the training which made their brothers great.
A very few places provided that kind
of environment for women. One was
18th-century Venice, where four girls’
orphanages called the ospedali had
evolved into residential conservatories.
Their music masters were people like Antonio Vivaldi and other
choirmasters at St. Mark’s cathedral.
They performed public concerts to raise money for their orphanages and
for their own dowries. They were a
must-see for tourists to Venice, and they wowed travel
writers like Charles Burney.
For American women, the flowering of
women’s schools and colleges in the 1890’s provided the first setting in which
young women could sing in women’s choruses, and find training in music theory
and composition.
3.
Time.
How
do you get to Carnegie Hall from here?
Practice! Rehearsals take a lot
of time.
Nowadays, at the choral conventions I attend, the
most amazing performances come from arts magnet high school choirs with daily
practice and theory lessons, and from community organizations like the Seattle
Girls’ Choir, which is an after-school conservatory program. Again, for American women, this kind of
rehearsal time first became available with the rise of girls’ schools and
women’s colleges.
Among adult amateurs, time for
musical accomplishments has come from leisure.
Singers have banded together to hire professional conductors, and have
rehearsed weekly--or even more often than that--to perform at high levels.
In the United States, a high point of leisure music was the
heyday of the American women’s club, from about 1900 to 1960. As the first large waves of women college and
university students graduated, many of them found themselves constrained by
social expectations to stay out of the workplace--condemned to leisure. They filled this leisure with women’s club
activities of astonishing variety and depth, including hundreds of musical
clubs with choruses which rehearsed on weekday mornings.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, the Euterpe Club held
lecture and recital series for their membership, and the club chorus gave two
big sold-out evening concerts a year.
They created the demand for opera in North Carolina, and then financed it, and
then made it happen. In Philadelphia, five women’s club choruses
sponsored a competition for new compositions for women’s chorus. Many choruses commissioned pieces by women
composers. Composers were able to hear
women’s choirs often enough to understand how best to write for them. My choir loves music from this era, because
it really suits the adult women’s choral sound.
This next excerpt is from Frances
McCollin’s original setting of Christina Rossetti’s “In the bleak
midwinter.” My chorus performs.
4. Social support.
It’s
hard to sing while you’re fighting your way uphill. The little worlds of historic music-making I
have told you about throve because there was a tear in the social fabric which
has discouraged women’s accomplishment outside the home. Those nuns in Milan stopped singing with
instruments, then finally sang only Gregorian chant, when counter-reformation
strictures upon musical practice were passed and enforced upon the
convents. Those Venetian orphans were
able to sing publicly only because Venice was not subject to the
Roman prohibition of women singing in church; their programs folded when
economic support for the orphanages fell away.
Sometimes
we ourselves have ripped up the social supports for our own culture. Women’s college choirs stopped singing as
women’s choirs when these colleges admitted men, and their choral libraries put
into dumpsters. Women’s musical clubs
died out around 1970, when feminism meant going for all the goodies men had on
the men’s own turf, and large numbers of women entered previous male bastions
of the work force.
Everything
women need in order to be able to sing together, they need doubly if they are
going to compose. Because girls couldn’t
get training in cathedral choirs, the story of how each woman composer has
gotten training, her time, and social support is unique to her. There is no one way to be a woman composer. Many of their stories involve struggles to
get conservatory training, or to make up for not having it.
I’ll give you three examples, all
from the same generation as Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Cécile Chaminade, born in Paris in 1857, was the daughter
of the manager of an insurance firm. Her
mother was her first piano teacher, and she began composing as a child. When she was ten, professors at the Paris
Conservatory recommended that she be enrolled for full time study. Her father forbade it but allowed her to
study composition in private lessons instead.
She made her professional piano début in 1877 at the Salle de Pleyel in Paris
and for the next ten years
gave concerts, and composed in the larger genres: symphony, concerto, and opera.
Then her father died in 1887. The family was suddenly poor, and she had to
compose in forms that would sell, like solo songs and piano music. She toured widely (at least once in the United States), giving concerts of her
own music. Her works gained a widespread
popular following. More than one hundred
American music clubs were named for her.
Chaminade’s
compositions posses a buoyant charm which disguises their effortless technical
skill.
Ethel Smyth overcame the constraints of
her prosperous English military background by open rebellion. She was taught piano and theory as ladylike
accomplishments, then horrified her family by demanding to be sent to Leipzig to study at the
Conservatorium.
In General Smyth’s circle no
respectable woman traveled or lived un-chaperoned abroad, and he told Ethel he
would rather see her dead than send her to Leipzig. Daily scenes ensued, and seventeen-year-old
Ethel went on a two-year progressive domestic strike, finally confining herself
to her room and refusing to go to church, sing at dinner parties, go riding, or
speak to anyone.
The embattled General Smyth conceded
defeat and sent Ethel to Leipzig in 1877. She met, and was encouraged by, Brahms,
Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák, and developed a Brahmsian idiom in her own
compositions.
In 1910, Smyth met Emmeline Pankhurst,
the founder of the British women’s suffrage movement and head of the militant
and extremely well organized Women’s Social and Political Union. Struck by
Mrs. Pankhurst’s mesmerizing public speeches, Smyth pledged to give up
music for two years and devote herself to the cause of votes for women. In 1911, her “March of the Women” was
premiered at a suffrage rally in the Albert Hall. It became the battle anthem for the women’s
suffrage movement in England. Its most famous performance took place in Holloway
Gaol, where Ethel Smyth was serving time for smashing the windows of an
anti-suffrage Member of Parliament. She
conducted an impromptu chorus of her fellow inmates, waving her toothbrush.
Amy Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire, the same year as Laura
Ingalls Wilder: 1867. Before age two,
she sang harmonically correct alto parts to her mother’s lullabies. Her parents
recognized her musical genius, and when she was eight moved to Boston so she could participate in
the rich musical culture there. But they limited her formal music training to
some tutoring in harmony, refusing to send her to Europe for conservatory
training.
Beach, a child piano prodigy, was
always grateful she was never exploited like the child Mozart. But her isolation increased after age 18,
when she married--or was married off to-- H.H.A. Beach, a middle-aged Boston doctor and musical
amateur. He preferred she not perform in
public after their marriage.
So from age 18 until her childless
widowhood at age 43, Amy Beach worked mostly alone in main salon of her
husband’s Commonwealth Avenue townhouse. They fitted it up with a grand piano,
and with curtained music cabinets which folded shut to convert the studio into
a parlor. Servants took care of the
house.
Amy Beach taught herself
orchestration by translating Berlioz’s treatise and then studying it, and also
by score study, attending symphony concerts, and making encyclopedic notes of
what she heard. Few composers of any era
have possessed her raw musical ability, her intelligence, and her iron
determination and self-discipline through years of solitary study, with very
little feedback from other professional musicians.
While the circumstances of her
marriage seem both confining and repulsive to us now, Beach’s husband gave her
a place, huge blocks of time, and sympathetic support for composing. These are jewels beyond price to harassed,
double-shift women composers who support themselves by studio teaching,
especially when they combine it with
“the pram in the hall.”
Beach composed in all major
classical genres, including symphony, concerto, and Mass, and wrote many choral
works, including 30 for women’s voices.
After her husband’s death in 1910, she resumed touring as a piano soloist,
spending her winters on the concert circuit and her summers often at the
MacDowell Colony, composing.
Let’s look back at that picture of the Williams
choir in 1964, the one that was about to become extinct. Does it look different to you now? It’s still twenty-five girls with funny hair
in funny choir robes. But to me they
were not a half-choir engaged in the musical equivalent of half-court
basketball, waiting for tenors and basses to make them into a real choir. They were the inheritors and practitioners of
a vigorous musical culture. I am so
proud I was one of them.
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