2.3 New directions in feminist musicology

More recent feminist musicology aims at greater inclusivity, considers the intersectionality of exclusion based on gender alongside other factors of marginalisation – including race, ethnicity, sexuality, faith, class, disability and/or neurodiversity – and also seeks to get away from binary constructions of gender. Another key difference is the new willingness of musicologists to engage with practising musicians and others involved in music education and the music industries. Many feminist musicologists today see both wider advocacy work beyond academia and actively working alongside practising musicians and other professionals within the music industries as key parts of their work and how real change can be made.

Over recent years, many organisations, groups and collectives that aim to promote women’s music and to support women musicians have emerged – both in the UK and internationally. The F-List Directory of UK Female+ Musicians [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (founded by women-in-music activist Vick Bain in 2019), for example, has developed a large directory of female-identifying and gender-expansive musicians based in the UK (hence ‘Female+’). This initiative aims to assist the individuals listed in promoting themselves and also serves as a comprehensive resource for performance hirers seeking female and gender-expansive musicians. Another notable example is the Ireland-based collective, Sounding the Feminists, which actively promotes and publicises the work of female musicians across the island of Ireland. These are just examples among many.

Activity 4 Donne Women in Music Foundation

Timing: Timing: Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.

Watch this video interview that OU Music academic Dr Laura Hamer filmed with soprano and women-in-music activist Gabriella Di Laccio, curator and founder of the Donne Women in Music Foundation in March 2023.

What motivated Gabriella to found Donne?

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1

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Transcript: Video 1

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

LAURA HAMER:

Hello, everybody. I'm Dr. Laura Hamer. I'm a senior lecturer in music here at The Open University, and one of the authors of The MA in Music. I'm joined today, in the studio, by my friend and colleague, the soprano Gabriella Di Laccio, who is also the founder and curator of the Donne, Women in Music Foundation. And we're going to be talking today about Gabriella's work as a singer and also her work with Donne. So Gabriella, could you tell us about your musical background and career before you founded Donne?

GABRIELLA DI LACCIO:

Yes. So my life now is before Donne and after Donne now. So, my musical education started back in Brazil, where I grew up and started the beginning of my studies there. And then I got a scholarship to move to the UK, and I studied at the Royal College of Music, and I did specialised in Baroque music, early music, and also, of course, in opera and performance.

But before that, it was a mixture of not only classical music in Brazil, but all the richness of Brazilian music and all the culture that Brazil has. And all that, I guess, influenced me as a singer, and as an artist, and a performer as well, which was quite fun when I moved here, and things were a bit different.

LAURA HAMER:

And how aware of music composed by women were you when you were studying yourself and training to become a singer?

GABRIELLA DI LACCIO:

Absolutely almost nothing, to be very honest. I think, because I studied Baroque music and I was used to researching a bit more and learning a bit more, and we started knowing about Barbara Strozzi, who was a famous Baroque composer in 17th century, Hildegard von Bingen. You just hear those stories if you are in that period of music.

And then you hear Clara Schumann because she was married to Schumann, or Fanny Mendelssohn. And that was it because-- but they would never stand on themselves, by themselves. So they're always the wife of such or the sister of such. And we knew Mozart had that sister. So it was very, very, very vague and almost non-existent, I would say.

And also not only on the music I was studying, but also when I started my more professional career, and all the music I was singing, I don't remember performing music by women until not that long ago, actually.

LAURA HAMER:

So you didn't perform any music by women as part of your own studies.

GABRIELLA DI LACCIO:

I, honestly, just remember performing Barbara Strozzi at the college. Trying to remember others, and it's really, really awful, very embarrassed. And back in Brazil, the same. We knew one Brazilian composer, Chiquinha Gonzaga, who was quite an amazing woman in the history of Brazil.

But even at university levels, people wouldn't consider her as good as the male representatives composer of Brazil. So we never really performed anything by her. And she left a legacy of more than 77 operettas and endless piano songs. So no, not much.

LAURA HAMER:

And what was the thing, was there one specific thing that made you aware of how underrepresented women are as composers, within the music industry?

GABRIELLA DI LACCIO:

So it was almost, almost by chance because I was performing in 2015, a lot of recitals with music with poems by Shakespeare that were taken to music. And I found out three cycles, one by Amy Beach, American composer, one by British composer Madeleine Dring, and another British composer, Rebecca Clarke, and they were beautiful.

And I just added them to the concerts. But I was really, really shocked that I never heard of these women before. This was 2015. And then I said, this is really strange. And then suddenly, it started to get into the back of my mind, and then I started to look a bit more when I could. But it wasn't-- I wasn't looking because I wanted-- I just paid attention.

And then in 2017 or beginning of '17, I was in the Southbank in Southbank. And you know that bridge that has the books underneath, secondhand books. And I was just walking past and then suddenly I see this stand and it have this two volumes of the International Encyclopedia of Women Composers. Two big volumes done by Aaron Cohen in America in the '80s.

So I'm talking massive compilation. And in this publication he listed 6,000 women composers. OK. So I took it home and I remember feeling super ignorant. And I felt, what happened? I missed a lesson or something at the Royal College, when they were teaching us the subject of women composers?

And then, the next step-- the next step was, oh, I bet this is just a big list, right? And then, I think, that thought really shocked me because that just made me think that how much unconscious bias I, myself, had as a woman, as a great respect for this career and women in music, I thought I had, at least.

And that made me really try to do my homework and then start to search a bit more. So much easier today, with the internet, with Spotify, with YouTube. And what happened was, I was shocked with the amount of beauty, not only of the music, because the thing that really pushed me to do something about it was more the discovery of the stories.

Because I go back to my childhood in Brazil. And when you grow up in Brazil, you are very isolated from the rest of the world. And I was this kid with a family with very limited financial capacity to even dream of helping me to pursue a dream of being a classical singer.

But I had a mother who was a very big, is a very big influence in my life because she never limited what we could dream. And the way that she did that was telling me stories of men, stories of men who achieved amazing things because Beethoven, but Beethoven was deaf. Of course, you can be a classical singer. Einstein was dyslexic, so of course, you can do that.

So I hang myself-- I kind of-- I held myself into these stories through all my-- can you imagine, for a Brazilian to come here without money, and all the fights that we have to fight, and how hard it was. Every step of the way, I remember those stories.

And I think, when I discovered this encyclopedia, and the stories of these women, and the music, I just got really angry that I couldn't have-- I wanted to have heard those stories. And I got angry because we are still not hearing these stories and the music.

And I think all this together, just-- plus the fact that one day my husband said to me, look, very nice. You're telling me stories of women at breakfast for a year now. And very nice. I love the [INAUDIBLE]. But anyway, are you going to do something about it? And I guess I just decided I should do something about it. I never imagined it was going to become what it became, but that's when it kind of pushed me to actually do something.

LAURA HAMER:

And is this what motivated you then to found Donne?

GABRIELLA DI LACCIO:

Absolutely. So I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew that when you look into this, you know that people have been trying to do this since the '70s. I'm not new. I knew I wasn't the first. But what I noticed was there was a lot of academics, studies, and deep in-depth studies about one woman or two.

And I'm not in academia. I'm a performer. And I decided that I wanted to do something that would be a bit more superficial in terms of-- and would tell and reach out to a different audience. Not only classical musicians, but any person who ever wanted to be something out of the norm, and they could inspire themselves with these stories, and also learn about this amazing music.

So I created a website, which-- I like computers, so I knew a little bit of Adobe Dreamweaver, and I just put the big list of women composers there. And I think, at the time, there were 4,000 women that had links. I connected with living composers. I started interviewing them.

I met Rachel Portman, who was the first woman to win an Oscar, who really nicely received me in her house. And because I wanted to understand what was happening for them, I got small funding to record five CDs with music by Wayman. And that was it.

And I pressed that button on International Women's Day 2018, and I thought, that's it. I've done my part. Fine. What I didn't imagine was going to happen afterwards because just a few months later, I started to receive messages from women from all over the world, composers, and saying, thank you so much, I'm a composer, giving you a one woman standing ovation in Australia. Can you add my name to your list? And little by little, this lovely movement started to happen around the Donne. By the way, Donne means women, in Italian. And then it became this community on social media, and now is much bigger.

End transcript: Video 1

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Discussion

Gabriella shares how she first started to become aware of music by women in 2015 when she was performing recitals of music set to poetry by Shakespeare and came across three cycles composed by the women Amy Beach, Madeleine Dring and Rebecca Clarke, which she added to her repertoire. Then in 2017 she bought a second-hand copy of Aaron I. Cohen’s International Encyclopedia of Women Composers. This inspired her to found Donne in order to tell these women’s stories widely to people outside of academia.