Music and Gender

I have so many thoughts when it comes to the intersection of music and gender; almost like a spiderweb, where each thought connects to a network of other thoughts and one vibrations reverberates through the whole web. 

My first thought may seem like a non sequitur, but stick with me for a moment: I think about the relationship between women and arts at large and how it is viewed by society. It is common for the visual arts that are traditionally associated with women (sewing, quilting, embroidery, knitting, crochet, etc) to be placed under the category of “craft” whereas other forms of art, those that are more traditionally acceptable for any gender, are placed under the category of art. I wonder if the difference is that some of these crafts come from necessary everyday tasks (making and mending clothes, etc) that were made beautiful by those who were doing them. Maybe because there was an expectation that these things would get done, and that they would be done well, then they were not looked upon with appreciation of the skill and artistry necessary to do them. Whereas a different art, like sculpture, is something out of the everyday. It requires focused time and energy that is not put into the running of a household and requires support from people around the artist to sustain them.  

My next thought is about the number of women from the midcentury that I know who took piano and voice lessons and who were the first introduction that the children around them had to music. I think I could name half a dozen women just from the little church in rural Indiana that I attended in childhood who played piano and brought music into their homes on a daily basis before things things like in-home stereo systems, let alone Spotify, were readily available. The everyday-ness of their musicking makes it easy to overlook. And when we consider cultural expectations of women, like getting married, and having babies, and homemaking we can see how these expectations shaped how women have made music. Like crafts, though, this music making is so easy to overlook as an expectation and not give it the weight of importance that it deserves. 

The next string in my mental spiderweb goes to women composers and how gender expectations shaped the type of music they made. There are, first of all, fewer works written by women available because fewer women published their works. It was common for women to be educated in music, learn an instrument, etc, but they were largely discouraged from doing anything professionally, like publishing their works. Second, the works that they composed were often smaller in scale, thing songs or simple piano pieces, rather than large scale works like symphonies. This was often for a practical reason: the music that women were encouraged to make was largely for a domestic audience inside their own homes. 

I hope at this point we can begin to see how the strands of this mental spiderweb are connected. 

Now I’d like to turn our attention to one composer.whose life and works I think exemplifies the balance between art and expectation: Fanny Mendelssohn. Fanny Mendelssohn was the older sister of well-known Romantic Era composer Felix Mendelssohn. From a young age, both Fanny and Felix were provided with a musical education and both showed a lot of talent and promise. Fanny, though, was actively discouraged by her father from pursuing music in any serious capacity because she would need to shift her focus to domestic matters after marriage. He also directly compared her musical education with her brother’s saying that Felix would be able to pursue music professionally, while she should not be concerned with that. Fanny ended up composing throughout her short life, published some of her works with her brother’s help, and hosted private salons at which she would perform her works, but she was never empowered by her family or by society at large to pursue her skill at higher levels. Even so, she wrote some of my personal favorite pieces like her string quartet: 

The topic of gender is not uncommon, at least among my peers, in music school. Many of us have pointed out the lack of diversity among studied composers, who are largely affluent white men. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart are all composers who are well known even outside of classical music circles, and their renown is not undeserved. Their music is hugely influential and, to a certain extent, that canon of musical composers that we study is reflective of their larger impact on the development of music. At the same time, I think that the music of women, primarily happening in domestic and not public spaces, is overlooked and underestimated. 

We feel these effects in the present as well. When I think of prominent bands and artists of the 20th century a large number are male artists or bands: the Beatles, Queen, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, and more. At the larger, more prominent scale, there are dozens of examples of men making music. On the smaller scale, everyday scale, we see women singing in their homes or playing the piano at their churches or volunteering for school music programs. 

I do think these divides are changing and becoming less stark. There are many women artists or bands, both within and outside the classical world. The ability to self-publish music has created a more egalitarian landscape for artists. I personally love that one of my friends from high school was able to release some of her original music this year, like this song inspired by the unconditional love of her mother who passed away recently: 

And some of her original piano music: 

The thing that I think most about, though, is not about how we are seeing more representation of music by women in public. (I do think about that, of course, but it’s not that main thing) What I think about most is the dismissal of the music of the everyday that has been associated with the women in our lives, when it is the everyday music that ends up having significant influence over us. 

Sources:

Christian, Angela Mace. "Hensel [née Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy)], Fanny Cäcilie." Grove Music Online. 28 Nov. 2018; Accessed 14 Sep. 2022. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-3000000159.

 Hosegood, Betsy. 2009. “Whip Your Hobby Into Shape: Knitting, Feminism, and Construction of Gender.” Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 7 (2): 148-63. doi: 10.2752/17583509X460065.

Porter, Cecelia Hopkins. Five Lives in Music : Women Performers, Composers, and Impresarios from the Baroque to the Present. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Accessed October 9, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.