Notable Women: Contemporary Music Series Focuses on Female Composers

June 1, 2007
From Music’s Persistent Gender Gap, a Festival Arises
By ANNE MIDGETTE

The composer Joan Tower, 69, her voice lowered a semitone by a cold, poured herself a beer in a Midtown bar and half-championed, half-defended her next project.

“I don’t think it necessarily has to be a retreat,” she said. “I view it as another kind of festival. Like a festival of Indian music, a festival of electronic music. It has a theme.”

“It” is Notable Women, Ms. Tower’s latest and most ambitious venture as curator of the contemporary chamber series of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Rather than presenting three concerts over the course of a season, Ms. Tower has grouped hers together over three consecutive weekends to create a small festival celebrating, yes, female composers. (The festival begins tomorrow and continues through June 17.)

If she sounds a little defensive, it is because many women feel that such events are no longer necessary — in Ms. Tower’s own words, that they are “ghettoizing” or “demeaning.” Concerts of music written by women may have been trailblazing in the 1970s, but they are hardly uncommon today. Women have won the Pulitzer Prize in music (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, Melinda Wagner); held composers’ chairs with the New York Philharmonic (Tania León) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Augusta Read Thomas); received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (Ms. Tower); taught at the Curtis Institute (Jennifer Higdon).

Yet evidently music by women still needs champions; women remain strikingly underrepresented in the ranks of composers. According the American Symphony Orchestra League, 1 percent of the music American orchestras played in 2004-5 was written by women. That figure jumped to 2 percent in 2005-6, thanks to Ms. Tower, who was the most-played living composer over that season because of the project “Made in America,” a commissioned work played by 65 orchestras around the country.

This statistic also reflects, of course, that most orchestral music performed today comes from a core repertory of works written by a pantheon of men; 19th-century female composers are unlikely ever to become more than an interesting footnote. Yet even among living composers, women represent a distinct minority. While officials of the two leading performing-rights organizations, Frances Richard of Ascap and Ralph Jackson of BMI, did not have statistics on the male-female breakdown of their membership, they estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the applicants for their respective annual young-composer awards were women.

The issue came to the fore in the early 2000s when for three years there was not a single woman among the winners of BMI’s Student Composer Awards. BMI, sensitive to the bad publicity, last year inaugurated a new competition for women only. The prize: a commission for a new work to be played at the Notable Women festival. “By the River Near Savathi” for clarinet and string trio, by Asha Srinivasan, an Indian-American who is getting her doctorate from the University of Maryland, will have its first performance tomorrow.

Ms. Srinivasan, 27, certainly does not feel hampered by being a woman. In addition to her acoustic work, she is also active in electronic music, a field even more male-dominated than orchestral composition.

“It’s becoming more and more not a big deal to be a female composer,” she said.

Many, however, are still concerned with how to level the playing field. BMI’s is not the only composition award for women. The International Alliance for Women in Music sponsors a composing prize, and this year the Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced Stacy Garrop as the winner of its first Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award for female composers, financed by an anonymous donor and named for a local composer.

Ms. Tower cites some possible reasons for the lingering gender gap. “One problem is in academia,” she said. “For a long time there were no women teaching in academia.”

“Then there’s the whole thing of your family,” she added. “Do you have a husband that’s supportive, and is he going to take care of the kids? A lot of these women that we are featuring on the festival, the pioneers, they died by the wayside because they didn’t get any encouragement at certain points in their lives.”

Ms. Richard of Ascap said: “The question is: Who chooses what to play, and how enlightened are they? I thought things would get better when we had women in higher management. Some of the conductors have great loyalty to their teachers. It’s important that women teach. These are things we have to catch up on.”

Certainly this festival appears to be the first time some of the female players with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s have ever really confronted the issue of female composers.

“I didn’t really think about” the issue of women in music, said Daire FitzGerald, a principal cellist and co-director of chamber music at St. Luke’s, who will perform in the festival. “I went to Juilliard. They expected you to learn the Elgar and Dvorak concertos. I had five or six different chamber music groups I worked with. I always tried to fight the concerto thing, but I didn’t do much new music.”

Ms. Richard said, “In the classical music world, we have to fight for pieces that are more recent regardless of what sex they are.”

Ms. Tower said she hoped that Notable Women might be a starting point for a larger festival. The first of its three programs focuses on overlooked women of the past (Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, Ruth Crawford Seeger). The second presents major figures of the present (Ms. Higdon, Libby Larsen, Ms. Tower); the third, of the avant-garde (Joan La Barbara, Eve Beglarian, Pamela Z, Julia Wolfe). Each program also includes a new work commissioned from a young composer: in addition to Ms. Srinivasan these are Kati Agócs (“I and Thou”) and Erin Watson (“Lullaby for Cy Twombly”).

The range of styles is broad; no one involved with the festival is trying to make any qualitative about “women’s music.”

“I have never done a blind taste test,” said Elizabeth Ostrow, the director of artistic planning for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I suspect those who say there is a difference, if they did a blind taste test, would be impressed.” But the final program touches on one area in which female composers have flourished: as mavericks like Meredith Monk, forging career paths on their own terms.

In contrast the terms of the conventional classical composer’s career tend to be dictated by the traditionally male-dominated orchestra — in which “sounding like a man” remains, in the experience of many women, a stated benchmark, even a goal.

“I don’t think of music in terms of gender,” said Elizabeth Mann, the principal flutist of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I realized: I’m Jewish, and I feel a sense of being Jewish. I’m a woman, and I feel a sense of being a woman. I feel quite moved to be a part of the series. It’s a missing piece of my own personal heritage.”