2.1 Women and the canon

One of the earliest pioneers within feminist musicology was the American academic Sophie Drinker (1888–1967). She wrote one of the first books dedicated to women in music, Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music (1948). Despite Drinker’s ground-breaking work, the conservative and positivistic turn which musicology took after the Second World War, together with its strong focus on the white, male composers included within the Western canon, discouraged further research on women in music until the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Figure 2 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Young Girls at the Piano, 1892, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Show description|Hide description

An oil painting of two young girls – one is sat playing the piano, the other is leaning on her shoulder looking at the music.

Figure 2 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Young Girls at the Piano, 1892, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Photo: ...

Among the many scholars who began towards the end of the twentieth century to research the women who had been left out of traditional narratives of Western music history was Marcia J. Citron. She developed her article ‘Gender, professionalism and the musical canon’ from a paper that she initially presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore in November 1988. The timing of this places it at the centre of the New Musicology trends of questioning the canon and asking different types of questions in music scholarship which were beginning to develop. The article was first published in the American music journal The Journal of Musicology in 1990. It has since become a foundational piece of scholarship within feminist musicology.

In the first section of the article, Citron contends that for any work to stand a chance of being included in the canon it has to be written, published, and circulated, reach public consciousness through a first performance, remain there through repeat performances, and receive a positive review early on. Before any of this can happen, anyone wishing to become a composer has to be able to receive an adequate musical education and training. She goes on to argue that the main reasons for women’s exclusion from the canon include:

• systematic exclusion from access to the full range of compositional training
• lacking publication opportunities
• lacking performance opportunities
• systemic barriers which have tended to exclude them from the musical establishment
• gender-linked evaluation by critics
• not being hired as conductors
• tending to focus on smaller-scale forms, which were deemed as having less worth.