1 Considering your own musical practice
You will start this week by reflecting on your own musical practice.
Activity 1
Reflect on the following questions and write your answers in the text box below.
- How many works by women composers do you regularly perform/does your organisation regularly perform?
- How aware are you of women composers? How many can you name? How many of their compositions do you know/regularly listen to?
Discussion
There are no right or wrong answers here, and your responses will be very personal to you. You might already have an extensive knowledge of women composers and regularly champion their works, or you might be further towards the beginning of your journey to diversify your repertoire.
If you don’t currently perform many works by women – or haven’t done so in the past – why is this? Has the historical study of women composers formed a large or a small part of your musical education? Did you study/perform any works by women when you were training? If you have been put off performing works by women, what were the reasons? Was it difficult to find scores of their works? Were you worried that audiences would be put off by hearing works that they might not be familiar with and that this might affect ticket sales? Did you have any concerns about how you might be perceived? For example, did you have any worries about being viewed as tokenistic or trying to be politically correct?
In what follows, you will consider the historical barriers that have excluded women composers from the classical music canon, the challenges to performing their works which still exist, and potential solutions to moving towards diversifying the repertoire which you perform.