The Australian, Australia
July 17 2006
BBC decrees no Proms queens
Richard Morrison
July 18, 2006
BY any standard it’s a spectacular own goal. The BBC, one of the
most politically correct, equality-focused employers in Britain,
has managed to devise a Proms season featuring not a single female
composer or conductor.
There are 73 concerts in the famous music festival at London’s Royal
Albert Hall, all of them directed by men. And 270-odd pieces of music
listed in the main concerts, all written by blokes.
Even if you believe that there weren’t many decent female composers
around until the 20th century (and that’s a claim likely to get
feminist hackles rising), you would still hope for a near-equal
representation of the sexes among living composers.
Not a bit of it: 27 living composers are featured in the main
concerts. All are male.
The sexual imbalance extends to soloists. Apart from singers (where
vocal ranges determine sex), there are more than 50 male but only 10
female soloists. On some instruments the ratio is even more askew.
What does the Proms have against female pianists that it invites only
two to participate, compared with 20 men?
So is this a cock-up or a conspiracy? The defence offered by Nicholas
Kenyon, the Proms controller, is pretty limp.
"We achieve balance over several seasons, not every season," he claims.
But that is utter nonsense. During the past seven seasons, the average
number of female composers included in the Proms has been three,
compared with more than 100 male composers each season, of whom at
least 20 are living.
Could the sexual imbalance at the Proms reflect a wider problem in
classical music?
That’s a complex question. Women play a bigger part in professional
music making now than ever before, and in some areas there is true
parity. Most British orchestras now appoint as many women as men to
vacant posts.
But what about conductors and composers? Here there is less progress.
Whenever female conductors are discussed we all tend to reach for
the same few examples: Marin Alsop, Jane Glover, Emmanuelle Haim,
Simone Young. That indicates how formidable the barriers still are.
In 1939 a journalist asked Nadia Boulanger what it was like to be
a woman conducting the Boston Symphony. "Having been a woman for 50
years," she replied, "I have recovered from my initial astonishment."
Nearly 70 years on, hacks still ask female conductors the same daft
questions.
Female composers have been around much longer. Everyone knows about
the 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen. Last year she even had an
opera written about her (by a man!). But I have a soft spot for an
8th-century Armenian mystic called Xosroviduxt. Crazy name, crazy
life: she was abducted and incarcerated for 20 years, during which
she composed a great lament for her murdered brother, a hymn still
sung in Armenian churches.
Clara Schumann is a classic example of a woman who sidelined her
own genius to support her (arguably no more talented) husband. Felix
Mendelssohn’s gifted sister, Fanny, was cruelly (but realistically)
told by her father that "perhaps for Felix music will become a
profession, but for you it will always remain an ornament". Even
20th-century pioneers such as Ethel Smyth were ridiculed for their
efforts.
And today? Judith Weir’s operas are some of the best things to have
come from a British composer in my lifetime. Judith Bingham, Sally
Beamish and Deirdre Gribbin all write fascinating music.
It’s dangerous to generalise, but I would say that female composers
are usually less hung up on mathematical systems than their male
counterparts. In the bad old days of doctrinaire serialism that would
have counted against them. Today, it must be considered an advantage.
Except, it seems, by the people who commission music for the Proms.
The Times