A few thoughts from the borderland of literature and music, marking today’s International Music Day.
When reading the novelised biography The Pianist: Clara Schumann and the Music of Love by Beate Rygiert, one cannot help but wonder: how many talents have been lost or forgotten simply because they belonged to women? Clara and her art are something of an exception, but even today, the name ‘Schumann’ is mainly associated with her husband, Robert. Clara herself, an outstanding pianist and gifted composer, is still too often remembered mostly as the wife of a famous composer, or as the unfulfilled love of Johannes Brahms.
Anyone who has studied even a little music history knows how few women’s names appear there. The reason is the same as why the Brontë sisters once published under the name ‘Bell’, or why Mary Ann Evans is remembered only under her male pseudonym George Eliot. George Sand, standing between literature and music, is another striking case: she became known for her bold themes and independent way of life, going beyond the customs of her time. But again — not without trousers, a cigar, and a man’s name.
Virginia Woolf wrote powerfully about the situation of women and their place in art in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. It is striking how many of the problems she described are still relevant today. Thinking about what English (and world) literature might have been like if Shakespeare had been born a woman, she concluded:
‘Yet something like genius must have existed in women (…). That genius was certainly not fully transferred to paper. When we read of the drowning of a witch, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise witch selling herbs, or of a mother of some extraordinary man, then, I think, we are on the trail of a silenced novelist or poetess, some mute Jane Austen of whom no one ever heard, or some Emily Brontë who smashed in her skull somewhere on a moor or wandered dazed and wretched along roads, driven mad by the genius to which she was condemned.’
I believe these words apply just as well to music. The Spanish musicologist Sakira Ventura has tried to help fill this historical gap. She has pushed aside old prejudices, social rules, and taboos that, for centuries, kept women in the shadows, and she has created an interactive online map featuring hundreds of women composers, past and present. Each entry includes a short biography and links for further reading.
“They don’t appear in musical history books, their works aren’t played at concerts and their music isn’t recorded,” she told The Guardian. “I had always talked about putting these composers on the map – so it occurred to me to do it literally.”
Music is a woman!
