3 Challenges
Women composers’ exclusion from the classical music canon has created a set of practical challenges for those who would like to promote greater gender diversity within programming.
Activity 2
Watch the following interview with Gabriella Di Laccio, founder and curator of Donne Women in Music [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , discussing what she regards as the biggest challenges which those wishing to programme more music by women face.
Transcript
LAURA HAMER
Thank you for joining me today, Gabriella. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Donne Women in Music?
GABRIELLA DI LACCIO
I am a professional classical singer, opera singer, and I am also the founder of the Donne Foundation or as [it] is well known as Donne Women in Music. Donne means women in Italian. I’m originally from Brazil and I moved here to study, and I must say that for many, many years I never questioned the presence of women in the history of music because I simply accepted that there were less women when I was at college and afterwards when I continued with my professional career as a performer. The story of the reason why I decided to create a foundation now that promotes and amplifies women’s music was almost like a coincidence that I found this I brought here today, this encyclopaedia which was called [it’s upside down] the International Encyclopedia of Women Composers in a second-hand shop in South Bank. As you can see, this is a kind of a heavy two volumes and in this encyclopaedia, Aaron Cohen listed 6,000 women composers from pre-medieval times to 1984. I felt extremely ignorant and then I went and researched a bit more because as a woman in music, I felt like, oh, I should know these women. So when I started to learn all this beautiful music that I never heard, the stories behind these women, I decided to start a small passion project in 2018. It was a small website. I called it Donne Women in Music. I listed the Big List of women composers at the time had 4,000 names, which I inputted myself and I pressed go and then the rest is actually history. Now the foundation is a registered charity here. The resources are used by performers, by universities, by organisations. It has so much in this website. I invite all of you to visit because it has the Big List of women composers. It has playlists. It has educational videos. We produce this very important data research every year, looking at the number of pieces by women performed around the world, which is a very important piece of data if you are interested in learning more about what’s the real numbers.
LAURA HAMER
Could you tell us, what do you regard as being the biggest challenges which those who’d like to programme more music by women face?
GABRIELLA DI LACCIO
The first challenge is the ignorance of the repertoire. When I’m trying to talk to people because people say, oh, but there are questions like, oh, if the music was good, it would have made it. Or we don’t think about gender, we only think about quality. Then you have to remember that opportunities never came equal for people. Now it’s our job to really try to do our job to find these pieces first. The second challenge, then they’ll say that we decided, okay, I want to include. I think we have to take a conscious decision, I guess, when you are wishing to programme that we were going to have to spend some time. If you want to be inclusive, you’re going to have to dig deeper and to search with a lot of intention to find these works because some of them are unpublished, or the scores are not easy to find. It will not appear easily in front of you sometimes like so many other pieces.
LAURA HAMER
Could I ask you, how significant do you think is the fact that the scores of women’s music can often be more difficult to access? How significant do you think that is as a barrier?
GABRIELLA DI LACCIO
For me, it’s a crucial, very, very significant barrier. People don’t realise sometimes that without scores or having the music properly edited, it doesn’t have to be published by a big publishing house. It just needs to have a score that is a PDF or is available online or published as well, that is easy to read. I do a lot of Baroque music. I’m more used to dealing with manuscripts because Baroque music has a lot of manuscripts, handwritten. When we study that, we learn how to read manuscripts. Many people that are in the music industry don’t have time to learn how to read a manuscript. If you’re doing a rehearsal with an orchestra, for example, and the music is very hard to read, it will not work. Not having these proper editions published or online published creates a lot of problems because then if you have a small orchestra or it doesn’t have even to be a professional orchestra, but they really want to play this music, but they can’t find a good score to play. They’re not going to be able to do it because they won’t have money to buy or somebody to transcribe professionally that music. What happens is that music is not played, it doesn’t get recorded. If it doesn’t get recorded, we don’t listen on the radio, we don’t listen on Spotify or any streaming. What happens is we don’t get any familiarity with that music. Then we live in this vicious cycle. So not having the scores is a huge problem.
LAURA HAMER
Another challenge people often talk about is audiences and audiences being reluctant to go to pieces that they might not know, pieces by women that they’re unfamiliar with. How big do you think this is as an issue that this might affect ticket sales? Is it being a real fear for people to program things?
GABRIELLA DI LACCIO
I think this fear is very common. I hear that a lot. I understand the problem. I understand selling tickets is important. I know how important it is. We all have to sell tickets. Now having said that, I think this fear is more of the person behind the stage than an audience fear.
What does she identify as the key challenges that those seeking to diversify repertoire face?
Discussion
You may have noted some of the following:
- ignorance of the repertoire (you may have found that Gabriella’s reflections on how women composers were absent from her own professional training and practice before she discovered Aaron’s Cohen’s International Encyclopedia of Women Composers resonated with your own responses in Activity 1)
- the need to invest time researching women’s music
- difficulties accessing scores of women’s music or not having a good quality performance edition available
- fear of programming unfamiliar music.
One of the biggest challenges that performers/organisations who want to perform works by women face is lack of availability of scores. Because women composers historically struggled to achieve public performances of their works, publishers were often reluctant to publish them, as they relied on musicians, ensembles and concert-organising organisations buying them in order to perform them for their revenue. They were very reluctant to publish works that people would be unlikely to perform and, therefore, unlikely to buy. This has become a cyclical problem, as the lack of availability of scores continues to make it difficult for women’s works to be performed today. Many pieces by women composers have never been published and still exist only in handwritten manuscript form.
Even when scores of women’s works do exist, performers/organisations can be reluctant to programme their music as audiences are often unfamiliar with it. This can lead to fears that programming unfamiliar works and composers will affect ticket sales and, therefore, the financial bottom line. At a time when the classical music industry is under huge financial pressure, it can take real courage to take what can sometimes appear a significant risk by programming women’s music. This fresh repertoire – and the associated potential to develop a new specialism – can, however, actually present real opportunities to build new audiences.