Katy Hamilton

Alright, nobody panic. Yes, this post involves the ‘W’ word, and yes, it’s quite likely that inequalities of some nature will be mentioned. But let’s all take a deep breath, leave the soapbox in the corner for a minute, and take a moment to enjoy a little speech by the truly wonderful Ethel Smyth:

One afternoon while Adam was asleep, Eve, anticipating the Great God Pan, bored some holes in a hollow reed and began to do what is called ‘pick out a tune’. Thereupon Adam spoke: ‘Stop that horrible noise,’ he roared, adding, after a pause, ‘besides, if anyone’s going to make it, it’s not you but me.’

Smyth wrote this little biblical reinterpretation in 1933, in the opening essay of a collection entitled Female Pipings in Eden. She was supremely strong-willed, an ardent supporter of the Suffrage movement (for which she was briefly imprisoned in 1912), a close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst, and a well-known composer, conductor and writer. This was the woman who in 1878, having spent a year studying at the Leipzig Conservatory – where her classmates included Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and Grieg – decided that the overall standards were too low and went off to seek private tuition. She composed six operas, a number of substantial orchestral works and a wide range of chamber and vocal pieces. She held honorary doctorates from Durham (1910) and Oxford (1926) and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1922.

Despite such an impressive string of accolades, Smyth was not impressed with the overall attitude of the musical establishment to female composers and performers. Female Pipings in Eden is, in a sense, her own take on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which had appeared four years earlier in 1929 (and Smyth counted Woolf among her close friends). The bottom line of Woolf’s book is the importance of the social circumstances surrounding an author if he or she is going to write – if they have no money, no space in which they can work privately, and no access to literature and learning, they cannot hope to embark upon a successful career as a novelist.

Smyth uncovered a situation even more infuriating: women might study music, might become highly proficient as performers… but the professional opportunities were not forthcoming. The London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hallé only included women as harpists from time to time, but they were banned from the rest of the ensemble. The BBC would allow women to play high strings (not cellos, of course – that would be unseemly), but they were always put on the inside desks, away from the audience. Smyth observed rather wryly, ‘It always amuses me to note that in the BBC band, with one exception the male strings now occupy the outside chairs where they can be seen by the public as a matter of course. But perhaps the idea is not to distract the audience’s attention from the music, as some of these girls are very pretty. That must be the reason.’

Now of course, that was 1933, and things are in a rather better state now than they were 80 years ago. Well. Except for that slightly awkward incident with Vassily Petrenko last September, when he was ‘misquoted’ and ‘mistranslated’ into voicing the opinion that a ‘cute girl on a podium’ is distracting to orchestral musicians. Or the slew of extraordinary comments that popped up on social media when the BBC announced their Ten Pieces scheme back in June, and Anna Meredith’s presence on the list was put down to the necessity of including a woman because, you know, all the great music is by men, obviously, right?

I’m not going to rant and rave here, because there is one emotion that I feel more strongly even than anger when I read stories like this. I feel… bored. This is boring. It’s boring that we have to keep rehearsing this argument, over and over again. It’s boring that male composers are referred to in biographies by their surnames, but we are instantly put on first name terms with Clara [Schumann] and Fanny [Mendelssohn]. It’s boring that in far too many historical studies, women are defined in the first instance by the men to whom they were related, by birth or by marriage. It’s boring that every woman who makes it in the industry, from Nicola Benedetti to Alison Balsom, has to sit through interviews in which the very fact that they are, gracious! women actually makes up a legitimate line of questioning. It’s boring because it’s inherent and lazy and we should have got past all of this by now.

Woolf’s great lesson for future generations of female writers was that overcoming their sex was a crucial part of their creative growth. She didn’t expect them to repress any aspect of their personalities; rather, she sensed the frustration and anger in the writing of those earlier pioneers who had to claw and scrape their way to publication, and wished for a generation who could write without the need to acknowledge or express a sense of that prejudice. Smyth, too, was adamant that however lustily Adam might play the hollow reed, Eve would be able to come up with something just as good and just as utterly personal as he ever could – but personal to her, rather than to him.

Here in 2014, we have some wonderful musicians working to cast out all those boring rehashed arguments, and just get on with being really great performers and composers. Judith Weir is taking up the reins as the new Master of the Queen’s Music, and as a fine composer and an energetic and thoughtful advocate for the arts, I can think of none beter for the post. The final word, however, has to go to last year’s great heroine of the Proms, Marin Alsop. It seems that she might just have made it to fulfilling Woolf’s dream. She recalls that, following one of her early conducting projects, one brass player who had initially been sceptical at having a woman at the helm, went to speak to her about her performance. ‘You’re really good,’ he told her. ‘I never really noticed you were a girl.’